Archive for February, 2022
From Anglo-Catholicism to Evangelicalism
Jack Lindsay’s recent article describing the joy and satisfaction he found in Anglo-Catholicism after a start in Anglican Evangelicalism led me to reflect on my own journey – discovering Anglican Evangelicalism after a High Church upbringing.
Firstly, I am not confident to draw the fuzzy but existent line between High Church and Anglo-Catholic. Nevertheless, there are things in Jack’s article which he seems to identify as Anglo-Catholic, which in fact can be shown to be Anglican from the sixteenth century Anglican formularies and others which belong in the realm of High Church and not exclusively within nineteenth century Anglo-Catholicism.
Secondly, my most substantial experience of Australian Anglican Evangelicalism, although almost entirely outside of Sydney and of Australia, is of Sydney Anglicans, whose ministry I have been privileged to receive.
Briefly, my committed Anglican upbringing, first in the diocese of Adelaide and then, because of redistribution, in the diocese of Willochra, was so thoroughly High Church that only well into adulthood did I discover that alternatives existed. As a young teacher, living within the Diocese of the Murray, I came to the personal knowledge of Jesus Christ in a church which was ritually High Church, Evangelical in its preaching with a Charismatic flavour. Here I was encouraged to study the Sydney Preliminary Certificate in Theology (PTC). Later, from there, I went to the Bible College of South Australia for too little time and then off to work with the Anglican Church of Chile (SAMS, now CMS). This was my first sustained experience of a culturally Evangelical Anglican Church. Chile then was completely low church, strongly Gospel centred, with a strong dose of charismatic ministry, which is still broadly true, although now with a more formally evangelical flavour. I love the church’s vitality, its commitment over many years to ordered Bible teaching and the centrality that our clergy try to give to Jesus, the Word made flesh, through his word, the Bible.
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