A Reader is "Gloriously Scared" About the Prospect of Becoming an Anglican

Received this email from a Baptist pastor.  Published here with his permission, identifying information removed:

Subject: Gloriously Scared
Message: Brother,

There is so much in your blog that resounds with me.  I am a pastor/teacher in a conservative Baptist church.  Week-in and week-out, I deliver a 50-60 minute exposition of Scripture.  Yet, I feel something is missing.  I feel that we have missed meeting with Christ together as a body.  What is missing?  After much prayer, it seems the Lord is revealing to me that it is sacrament and liturgy (two words that are anathema in the Baptist world). 

As I have been studying, researching, and praying over the past months, the more and more I become attracted to Anglicanism.  It is on paper and MP3/4 at this point, as all of the Anglican churches in my area . . . are very liberal.  This has robbed me of the ability to, on my next Sunday out of the pulpit, visit an Anglican church and drink in the beauty of Word, Sacrament, and Liturgy. 

The reason for the term "scared" in my subject line is that I feel as though I am on the verge of a major theological-tectonic shift, and when the ground quakes, the ground you are used to standing on, it does get a bit frightening.  Because of this, as I am sure you were, I want to be cautious, patient, and prayerful. 

I write this just so that you are encouraged.  God will always use His work in people's lives as a ministry to others.  He has used your story as a ministry to me.

Thank you, Pastor, for your word of encouragement.  I do indeed identify with what it feels like to be "gloriously scared" because faced with the prospect of conversion to a more historic and liturgical form of Christianity.  In fact, I was a Baptist seminarian when I first felt my own theological-tectonic shift taking place in this regard.  In my case, it caused a rift with my academic mentor, who was both a thoroughgoing Baptist and a dispensational premillennialist. 

I say keep on being cautious, patient, and prayerful.  That is key. And above all, please - please - keep rose-colored glasses off your face.  So many converts, myself included, failed to do this and ultimately ended up experiencing some degree of disillusionment when it became apparent that our new ecclesial home had its own set of dysfunctions.  You've alluded to liberal-left Anglicanism, which gleefully continues its fatal swirl around the drain of apostasy.  That is only one dysfunction of several in the Anglican world.  So, if you come to our fold, come with eyes wide open.  There are no grounds for triumphalism here.

That being said, I am happy as a clam in the Anglican Way.  A large part of that happiness stems from the fact that authentic Anglicanism (as opposed to revisionist Anglicanism) is unapologetically Evangelical.  Read the English Reformers, the Anglican formularies, Anglicanism's missiological history, the Evangelical Anglican movement of the 19th century, and modern Anglicans such as Packer, Stott and Beckwith, and you cannot come away with any other conclusion.  I assume that is important to you, and so I say that you will accordingly find in Anglicanism what you can't find in either Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy, which is a lived commitment to the biblical Gospel of sola gratia, sola fide.  Yes, you will find Anglicans who have something else at their center, but as I've said, they are revisionists, not originalists.

You are not the only Baptist who feels that something very important is missing in your worship.  Perhaps you caught this article about a Baptist congregation in Virginia that has gone liturgical.  If you are ultimately not able to make peace with the practice of infant baptism, this might be an alternative for you to consider.  I'm not trying to talk you out of considering Anglicanism, mind you, only that I know how thorny the baptism issue is and that this might be a way for you to proceed while retaining an important Baptist distinctive.  If that turns out not to be an option for you, most Evangelical Anglicans find a covenantal understanding of baptism to harmonize well with the Reformed ordo(s) salutis, which accounts for the common phenomenon of conversion later in life that Baptists recognize as fundamental to the Evangelical life.

Allow me to recommend a couple of books.  I am required to read these as part of my preparation for ordination to the diaconate.  They are: Fr. Leander Hardings' In the Breaking of the Bread: A User's Guide to a Service of Holy Communion in the Anglican Tradition, and Simon Chan's Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshipping Community.   Interestingly, Chan is a theologian who belongs to the Assemblies of God but who has obviously come under the influence of Orthodox liturgical theologians.  The mix of Orthodox liturgical theology and Evangelicalism in Chan's work is one that I think will appeal to you.  Chan speaks to the necessity of Evangelicals having an ontology of the church, and it would appear that has become something of a vexing question to you, if the first paragraph of your email is any indication.

Anyway, may God richly bless you on your journey, wherever you end up.  If you end up an Anglican, you will have done well, and if you don't, you will also have done well, so long as you continue to lean on the bosom of our Lord.

Comments

[Michael Frost]

Yes, Chan's book is outstanding. Another great book in a similar vein is Bryan Chapell's Christ-Centered Worship: Letting the Gospel Shape Our Practice (Baker Academic, 2009). Back cover says Chapell "is the president of Covenant Theological Seminary" and a forrmer pastor. Where Chan is a bit more academic, Chapell is more practical. Chapell focuses on the 16th century liturgies of Rome, Luther, Calvin, and the 17th century Westminster, along with Robert Rayburn's modern liturgy. Chapell does a good job comparing and contrasting, but tries to focus on the similarities. How the basic structure is the same. What he chooses to call the two parts of "Liturgy of the Word" and "Liturgy of the Upper Room".

Though anyone wanting a more indepth overall study of the history and structure of the Christian liturgy would do wise to consult Dom Gregory Dix's The Shape of Liturgy (1945), Luther Reed's The Lutheran Liturgy (2nd. ed., 1959, which compares the 1958 joint Lutheran liturgy to the 1928 BCP, Tridentine Roman, and Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom), and Frank Senn's Christian Liturgy (1997). Swedish Archbishop Brilioth's Eucharist Faith and Practice: Evangelical and Catholic (1930) is also quite good.

[Embryo Parson]

As is Fortescue's The Mass. Dix's work is magisterial, but if I'm not mistaken some contemporary liturgical scholars find his criticisms of Cranmer misplaced.