About twelve years ago or so a young woman wanted to do a comparative study on a “conservative” and a “liberal” church. She ended up approaching two Anglican churches. We were the “conservative” church – at the time we were still in the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa and would have been considered the most “conservative” Anglican Church in the Diocese because of, among other things, our biblically based stand on a social issue. The leading “liberal” church was also approached. As a part of her study, she would visit both churches on a Sunday morning, and then later interview people from each church. She approached me and I agreed that Messiah (at the time called St. Alban’s) would participate.
She had a very nominal Christian background. If memory serves me, I think she attended a United Church a few times as a child. She visited the “liberal” church first. When she left, she was worried. In the “liberal” church, it was very formal. Priests and servers and choir were all in robes. The music was all organ driven and the choir dominated the service. The hymns were old – or at least seemed old. Everything was slow and solemn and serious.
She said to herself, if this is what the “liberal” church is like, the “conservative” church will be even slower, more solemn – you get the idea. A week or so later she came to our church. She was shocked and confused. No robes? A band? Modern music? Not stuffy? (I learned all of this later when she came to interview me). She was shocked at the difference and frankly could not get her mind around the disconnect between us being “conservative” and the average age and views and worship of our church. Read More
The Jackson Purchase, which is the westernmost region of Kentucky, has five Episcopal churches. The two Episcopal churches that are most liberal have the most Anglo-Catholic style of worship. I visited both churches as a part of a survey of Episcopal churches in the region, which I did when I first moved to western Kentucky. The Diocese of Kentucky is one of the most liberal dioceses in the Episcopal Church. Before liberalism gained ascendancy in the diocese, it was also one of the more Anglo-Catholic dioceses. Its first bishop, Benjamin Bosworth Smith, however, was an evangelical, and he appointed another evangelical, George David Cummins, assistant bishop of Kentucky in 1866. Smith became the ninth presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in 1868. However, the Ritualists, which is what the proponents of the Anglo-Catholic movement were called at the time, had made significant inroads in the diocese, particular in Louisville and Lexington where most of its churches were concentrated. The Ritualists would not allow Smith to move to New York and take up his duties as presiding bishop until he stripped Cummins of his episcopal authority as assistant bishop. This was one of a number of events that led to Cummins breaking with the Episcopal Church and forming the Reformed Episcopal Church. Within a few years the Episcopal Church's evangelical wing would disappear
The Tractarian movement may have been opposed to liberalism but the Anglo-Catholic movement to which it gave birth provided the ladder rungs by which liberalism was able to gain ascendancy not only in the Diocese of Kentucky but elsewhere in the Episcopal Church. Liberalism retained the trappings of Anglo-Catholic churchmanship while conforming more and more to the culture. For this reason it often went unnoticed. It also took advantage of the passivity that the Anglo-Catholic movement had fostered in the laity, encouraging the laity to unquestioningly accept the teaching of the clergy. The Anglo-Catholic movement had also given considerable weight to the Church as the interpreter of the Bible and with its doctrine of "reserve" discouraged the laity from studying and interpreting the Bible for themselves. Having become accustomed to the clergy interpreting the Bible for them and accepting whatever the clergy claimed the Bible said, the Episcopal laity did not question the increasingly liberal interpretation of Scripture.
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