Evening Prayer at St. Mary's
Embryo Parson Posted on Thursday, May 23, 2013 at 09:44PM First, an update. While my readers are well aware that I have made my way out of the Anglican Catholic Church, I haven't mentioned where we ended up. Turns out that there was a little traditional Realignment parish of in our neck kof the woods I didn't know about until fairly recently. Well, long story short, we visited and immediately fell in love the with people there. The service is MOTR, and there are only a couple of "contemporary" flourishes thrown in (e.g., "Our God Is An Awesome God"). But for the most part it is a basic Anglican liturgy.
I don't know at this point if we'll return to the Continuum or stay in the Realignment. Praying for God's guidance on this. I consider myself more of a classical Anglican Continuer than anything else, but perhaps God is showing me something new. I take it a day at a time.
But last night I went back to Evening Prayer at St. Mary's. I did so because I had come to miss it, and the two gentlemen with whom I pray, one a postulant and the other an aspirant, missed me. It was good to see them again, and to pray there with them in St. Mary's beautiful little sanctuary:
I intend to pray Evening Prayer on Wednesdays as often as I can. For some reason, I can't give this up.
And it got me to thinking last night. When Kevin, Matt and I were there praying, we weren't two Anglo-Catholics and one Ango-Protestant. We were simply three brothers in Christ, praying the matchless prose of Cranmer's prayerbook. But it wasn't that prose which united us. It was simply the flame of prayer. The flame of the Holy Spirit.
I wondered last night if maybe Anglican unity, if it is to be achieved, will happen not because of the ecclesial machinations of bishops and other "movers and shakers", but because we all start recognizing Christ in the other. If lay people can reach across "party" boundaries to find fellowship with the other -- something not unknown in Anglican history -- maybe the bishops and the "movers and shakers" will follow.
Reader Comments (2)
Why did you leave St. Mary's?
Our departure from St. Mary's more to do with the direction we were headed and the direction the Anglican Catholic Church as a province is headed than it has to do with St. Mary's per se. St. Mary's has long been an outpost of Anglo-Catholicism in the ACC. We were more interested in simply being traditional Anglicans, which for us entails a devotion to traditional Anglican comprehensiveness. We had been Orthodox for a number of years (13 in my case), but had come to the realization that we really were Evangelical Catholics. For us that meant a move to Lutheranism or low-to-broad church Anglicanism. Our love of the BCP, inter alia, propelled us in the latter direction. We knew we would very likely be moving from the Colorado at some point in the near future, and we anticipated that, if I were to be ordained, I would be able to function as an Evangelical-to-broad church clergyman, as both Frs. Robert Hart and Luke Wells do. (I assume there are more.)
Some time after my wife and I were received, however, we learned that the ACC's leadership seems bent on not only taking the church in a hardline Anglo-Catholic direction, but on drumming the English Reformation out of both the ACC and Continuing Anglicanism altogether. I concluded from this that I might very well not be able to function as an Evangelical-to-broad church clergyman, assuming they'd even ordain me.
So it was this issue, combined with the fact that we got a little tired of anti-Evangelical comments we'd hear from time to time at St. Mary's and that the drive to church was laborious (about 40 miles one way), we started looking for somewhere to attend closer to where we live. At this point, assuming I do seek ordination, I'm not sure if it will be in a Continuing Church or a Realignment church. I still have some homework to do.
Hope that answers your question.