You keep hearing, mostly from the right, some version of "our church is leaving us" or "our church is being taken away." I have always had a problem with this line of thinking, but I couldn't quite articulate it. Here are two essays that deal with some version of this, from different perspectives. Let me know what you think.
Anglicans Online has this:
We found ourselves pondering the (to us) strange concept that a church can be 'taken away'. And then 'our church' struck us as even stranger. The church is not ours, but God's. Its Anglican forms throughout the world are a multicoloured mosaic, shaped by local cultures and practises, holding to the framework of Catholic liturgy that has been the genius of the Ecclesia Anglicana for more than 500 years.
What church has been 'taken away'...? The Episcopal Church of the 1950s? That church which forbade women deputies to General Convention? Or an earlier Episcopal Church, where divorce was all but forbidden, except in cases of adultery? Where remarriage was impossible, even for the innocent party? Perhaps the church that was taken away was the atmosphere and ethos of the mid-19th-century Church of England, where marriage to a deceased wife's sister was forbidden and punishable by law? Or the mid-19th century American church that turned a blind eye to the practice of slavery?
That abbreviated litany of 'churches that have been taken away' could be extended nearly indefinitely. Every age has brought change to the church, beginning as innovation, often proclaimed as heresy, and eventually becoming tradition. And it is no less true that each change brings unsettlement and pain. Yet 'the Gospel in the Church' cannot be stagnant, for the Holy Spirit has been pledged to lead us into all truth.And John-Julian Swanson writes
another essay, posted at
Father Jake Stops the World:
What has been eroding in the Church for the last two generations has been the denial of its central and primal mystical dimensions. We keep seeing Jesus as some historical personage, delimited by time and space. We keep seeing “church” as institutional. We keep seeing the Word as a collection of black scribbles on a page. We keep seeing the core of our ecclesial nature as either canonical or biblical or organizational. We keep refusing the ineffable, immeasurable, and unimaginable dimensions of our Christ, and the universal utter Presence of the Holy Spirit....Whatever words you may use, you, oh eye, simply cannot cancel me who am a foot. You may curse me or despise me or refuse me a place at table, but you cannot evade the fact that whether you like it or not, we are and will always be one – inside the mystical Christ. And since we are one, you simply cannot live the Christ life without me, no matter how much you may wish it. The Blood of Christ flows out copiously and floods and drowns and washes all of us, forgiving all our sins, enfolding all of us in divine grace. And we are already one, just as the Christ and the Father are one. And may whatever bogus falsehood gives the lie to that cosmic truth shrivel and die.The notion that we must all agree within the Anglican Communion is the real innovation. Christians have always been united in the Mystical Body of Christ, and Christians have always disagreed, sometimes violently. Let us pray for unity, and let us pray for the grace to believe that the Holy Spirit is still at work in our church, doing wonderful and surprising things.
