How we became Reconciliation Anglican Church

This post is a sequel to our Origin Story.

Some of you will remember the good old days when Fr. Nathaniel — with his stubborn penchant for the obscure — insisted on calling our project “Paraskevi Fellowship.” Passing over the rich significance of the name and reasons for which it might be commended, we ultimately concluded in retrospect that it was a problem that most people had a hard time remembering, pronouncing, or spelling “Paraskevi,” and these persisted despite the fact that we in marketing concurrently used the English equivalent, “Holy Preparation.”

Most of problematic of all, however, was that “Paraskevi” and even “Preparation” foregrounded our weirdness, rather than drawing attention to the Gospel. In the Gospel, we have the freedom to be weird, and we delight in that (especially Fr. Nathaniel!) But the great treasure that we have to steward is not us and our weirdness, but that tremendous message of grace, where by we all — whether we are weird or not — can be reconciled to God. “What we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with us as your servants for Christ’s sake,” as the Apostle Paul says (2Cor 4:5).

What we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, with us as your servants for Christ’s sake.

Art by contemporary Ukrainian artist, Alexander Antonyuk

The events of the summer of 2020 were fresh in our minds and heavy on our hearts, and we were eager to let them form us and shape our congregational identity and mission. For such work, “Reconciliation” emerged as an early front-runner. At the same time, however, we were a little cautious about some of the potential connotations of “reconciliation:” might it overcommunicate, say something inaccurate about who we are and what we are about?

The year 2020 was for us crucible and a womb: the Spirit as work in our hearts, churning over the experiences of our first fledgling attempts to worship together, along with this new grist from the pandemic and social unrest. These things we took before the Lord in prayer … and in a prolonged brainstorming session as part of our September retreat. It was there we began a process of clarifying — not only our name, but more importantly, those core values that undergird and sustain our culture.

Reconciliation Anglican Church emerged from that process as the clear favorite, for reasons going beyond the ephemeral concerns of our tense times.

Fr. Nathaniel leads the brainstorming session that identified Reconciliation Anglican Church as a top contender for our name moving forward.

At the heart of the Gospel is the reconciliation that we have with God through Christ, and the reconciliation with one another that knowing our shared dependence on Jesus’s atoning death makes possible. God through Christ has “reconciled us to himself and given us the ministry of reconciliation,” as St. Paul says (2Cor 5:18). This indeed is and has been from the beginning one of the hallmarks of our liturgy, the final pronouncement of blessing:

As you go from this place, always remember the Gospel: that God in Christ Jesus was reconciling the world to himself, not counting our sins against us. God loves you. God has forgiven you. God is not angry with you, and God will never leave you nor forsake you.

Now, having been reconciled through his death, how much more shall we be saved by his life (Rom 5:8)? Or rather, the life of Christ that now dwells within us, through our common participation in Baptism, and feeding from the heavenly food he gives us from the Table of his Communion. Reconciliation as a theme runs deeper in our history, with the stories we bear from the Church in Rwanda and the Church in South Africa, the stories of a global Church coming to terms with its colonial past and imagining a post-colonial future. Reconciliation is what we need as we contemplate our implication in the deep, systemic sins that have critically degraded our planet, and dehumanized our Black and Indigenous brothers and sisters. Reconciliation, the ontological state imparted to us by God’s free act in Jesus, and then living it out in mutual forgiveness, being kind and tenderhearted to one another, forgiving one another as God has forgiven us (Eph 4:32).

We were “Holy Preparation” for a season: and now we have prepared. God has given us a name and a mission as Reconciliation Anglican Church: and it is work we can continue under the patronage of Agia Paraskevi and all the saints of ages past, who, having shown us the way by the good example of their ages, now stand as that great cloud of witnesses, cheering on the Church — and our little church — as we seek to do what they did: engage the challenges of our day with the power of the Gospel.