I grew up in a larger parish in Brantford, Ontario, and there had a wonderful experience of growing up as a part of a Christian community and learning what it meant to be a follower of Christ and allow him to form my entire being. I especially enjoyed being able to participate in worship, through experiences such as being a part of the Junior Choir (wearing, of course, the requisite red cassocks) and being a server. More recently, since going to university, I have continued to grow within the church. and have been engaged by it in a manner that meets what I have learned in school. For example, I have been able to assist in leading the weekly Evensong service, which has repeatedly challenged me to draw closer to God. It seems too often that churches do not attempt to challenge young adults at the same level as they are in the rest of their lives, and as a result they think Christianity intellectually shallow. This, of course, is not the case; indeed, I have increasingly found that faith provides a basis for knowledge. This is well expressed in a phrase of St Anselm of Canterbury, “credo ut intelligam” (I believe in order that I may understand).
Since coming to university and meeting different sorts of Christians, especially though the campus Inter-Varsity group, I have come to better appreciate what it means to be Anglican. Growing up Anglican instilled me with a sense of belonging to the “one holy catholic and apostolic Church”. Furthermore, it taught me that Christianity isn’t just about what happened during biblical times and the last twenty years or so, but is truly universal in terms of both time and space. While the Bible is obviously our ultimate textual authority, I learned that there are also authors such as St Augustine, Dante, Cranmer, and C. S. Lewis that express the same faith we do, but in terms that reflect a very different mode of thinking from ours, leading modern readers to challenge their own assumptions. This has been very instructive in my growth both as a Christian and a member of society. Finally, I see in Anglicanism a special call to the creation and preservation of beauty: in the reading of the Scriptures, the words of the liturgy, music, art, architecture, and most of all in the people themselves who form the Body of Christ.
I don’t particularly feel the need to articulate a new statement of the mission of the Church, as my vision of it is already expressed rather well in the Solemn Declaration of 1893: it is of a church that endeavours to “hold the One Faith revealed in Holy Writ, and defined in the Creeds as maintained by the undivided primitive Church in the undisputed Ecumenical Councils; receive the same Canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as containing all things necessary to salvation; teach the same Word of God; partake of the same Divinely ordained Sacraments, through the ministry of the same Apostolic Orders; and worship One God and Father through the same Lord Jesus Christ, by the same Holy and Divine Spirit who is given to them that believe to guide them into all truth.” This, to me, could describe the church at any point in history.
The challenge, then, is not so much to figure out what we should be doing as to determine how this can best be enacted within the changing contexts of the world. The message of Christ itself does not change from one year to another, but we must find the best way to communicate it within our present situation, and trust that God will give us the means to do this. As Psalm 119:89-90 declares, “O Lord, your word is everlasting; it ever stands firm in the heavens. Your faithfulness also remains from one generation to another; you have established the earth and it abides.” Too often, we confuse a need to renew our means of communication with a supposed need to revise our beliefs. Sometimes, we assume that our established faith is either too antiquated or too offensive to persevere with, and as a result attempt to chase new trends and ideas in ministry and doctrine. Instead, I challenge our church to look towards our historical principles, based in Scripture, and bring them to our own world.
As a history student, I often find that we think we have discovered some new problem or insight that was previously unknown, only to find that it was already conceived of and answered centuries ago. Thus, we would do well to seriously listen not only to one another, but to those who have spoken in the past. This must be done with charity: we must engage one another’s arguments not in their weakest points, but in their strongest. By doing this, and most of all by accepting God’s authority over us, we may yet come closer to some notion of the truth. In setting out our vision, let us genuinely believe the statement that we repeat in some form every week at the end of our services (Ephesians 3:20-21): “Now to him who by the power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, for ever and ever. Amen.”
Sincerely,
Andrew D.
Brantford, Ontario
