Origin Story: AD 0595-2018
Here we are, at the start of something ancient. If you’re patient for a little reading, let me share with you the tale of our deep history…
Not Anglos, but Angels
THERE ARE MANY places we could start the story of our little church community, Reconciliation Anglican Church, here in Bellingham, Washington, the upperleftermost corner of these United States.
One of my favorite a quo moments comes from 6th C Rome. It is said that one day when Pope Gregory the Great was in the market, he encountered a most remarkable thing: some young boys being sold as slaves, with especially pale skin, blue eyes, light hair. It was an unusual sight in the late antique Mediterranean, where complexions were generally darker.
Stained glass depicts Gregory the Great (haloed) encountering the English children at market.
“Where did these children come from?” exclaimed the astonished Pope. “What is their tribe?”
“They are from the far land of Britannia,” responded his attendant, “From the tribe of the Anglos.”
“No,” replied the Pope, “Non Angli, sed Angeli — they are not Anglos, but Angels!”
The Pope promptly dispatched to this far northwestern corner of the known world a reluctant missionary named Augustine (not to be confused with Augustine of Hippo). Along with his monastic retinue, Augustine made way across the continent to the British Isles where, upon the latticework of local tribal governments and the ruins of the old Roman infrastructure, he laid the foundations for the great minster at Canterbury, and with it, the whole long, broad history of Christianity in England and the broader English-speaking world.
Of course, the Christians already living in the British Isles when Augustine arrived would have been somewhat surprised and amused to find, in retrospect, that the beginnings of their conversion traced to this late-arriving Latin missionary. The Gospel was preached to these island tribes long before medieval Popes dared to peek to the border of this erstwhile Roman frontier. Monks and missionaries traveled along the routes of the tin trade that connected the British coast to the shores of Asia Minor and the Middle East, investing the Christianity of the Celtic tribes with a decidedly and enduringly Eastern feel. And though the legend be rather far fetched that Joseph of Arimathea was himself a part of that trade, came personally to the island, and brought with him the boy Jesus (and later the grail from the Last Supper), there is enough truth in the tale to whet the imagination, to draw forth the refrain, “And did those feet in ancient times…?”
And the story of the people of God goes even deeper still, of course. “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world,” as the author of the letter to the Hebrews says (Heb. 1:1-2). Regardless the commissions of popes, the streams of independent missionary zeal, even the lands that the feet of Jesus himself touched, we find that God’s footprints and fingerprints throughout history, working to define a people for himself, and through them minister healing and reconciliation to the nations, are more varied and widespread than we could ever dare imagine.
The High Cross at Monasterboice represents the independent and distinctive aesthetic culture of Christianity in the British Isles. Although a erected in the 9th-10th C, the monastic settlement dates to the early 6th C — nearly a full century before Augustine landed on the English shores.
But the interest of the story is not an absolute origin: after the big bang of bereshit, every story begins in media res, after all. And irrespective of what archeological and philological material might be summoned up to reconstruct a timeline nearer to what actually happened, the true stories (and especially their emotional impact and lived import) of are fully lost in the mists of antiquity. What is interesting in that little episode is what a historian like Bede could do with it: how from there, he would begin to craft an identity and destiny from the otherwise disparate collection of tribes who happened to that land: an English people, who would speak an English language, and — in time — practice the Christian faith with a distinctly Anglican accent. And with that, the direct ancestors of the faith we still hold and practice some fifteen hundred years later and forty-five hundred miles away here in Bellingham, Washington, at Reconciliation Anglican Church.
Not Angels, but Anglicans
Bede’s intentions notwithstanding, relations between the nascent English Church and the distant See of Elder Rome would wax and wane over the centuries. There is no need to recount all the famous intrigues, and how they were variously received among the English churchmen: all of that can legitimately be left a blur for our purposes. All of it … except for one notable incident: that, of course, of King Henry VIII, storied Defender of the Faith and Supreme Governor of the Church of England, who indeed — in pursuing his … personal interests — secured these titles for himself and his successors.
Henry’s self-dealing Caesaropapism didn’t come out of nowhere. Besides the independent, nationalistic streak of indigenous Christianity in the Isles, he had the Eastern Churches to appeal to as examples of a non-Papal Catholicism organized around Bishops and Princes rather than Popes. And although Henry himself had little personal interest in the doctrines of the Reformation fomenting on the Continent during his rule, the religious upset was enough to crack the door for the influence of those conversations on the development of the English Church. In time, the ecclesiastical space created and moderated by the independence of the Church in England necessarily came to host a broad-based conversation as radicals and traditionalists, Lutherans and Calvinists all tried to share the framework of the established church. It was a tense and slow moving conversation — to be sure — but the fruit of the struggle was worthwhile: the theological habits formed within the Anglican mind were principled yet generous, clear but flexible; reformed, but yet ancient.
From Thomas Cranmer’s Insta ca 1550 — painting of G. Flicke at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was sporting wicked beard when Queen Mary martyred him in Oxford in 1556. You can see it just coming in in this shot.
Without question, however, the crown jewel of this emerging tradition was the Book of Common Prayer. Among the Reformers, Luther had the genius of translating the Scriptures and inventing a deep and gracious piety through his theology and hymnody. Calvin had the genius of intense and rigorous theological systemization: the tireless pursuit of clarity, and its application to the whole of life. Ignatius Loyola had the genius of personal, imaginative spirituality, creating space for a resilient and highly adaptive missionary fervor and the development of extraordinary institutions of learning. The Church of England was blessed with a more modest and subtle genius: a program of public prayer and piety that would hold together the diversity of the national church through a common ritual and voice of supplication, rather than shared doctrine or ethics.
The remarkable and seminal work of compiling this vernacular treasury of prayer fell to the inimitable Thomas Cranmer, 69th Archbishop of Canterbury. While thoroughly Reformed in its Scriptural and theological orientations, the Prayerbook was nonetheless a work of synthetic genius, carefully rooted in a simplified version of the Benedictine monastic prayer tradition that had become so strong in England after Augustine. Under the Book of Common Prayer, the offices were no longer an unwieldy mess of tradition, but a container and an opportunity to read through the whole of the Bible, in public, in an orderly fashion. Indeed, in directing the shape of public prayer, the Book of Common Prayer has implied within it a whole vision for Christian proficiency and maturity — not the only way to be a Christian, to be sure — but a reliable way: a way rooted in those things passed down through the ages, from ancient Christianity, through the Reformation. It’s a way of prayer and a way of life that, once you learn, you can take with you wherever you go…which is how, in part, it ended up all over the world.
…Still not Angels
The thing you have to understand about England is, for a while, it was pretty much everywhere. A colony over here, a little military victory there, a trade company over in that other place — and BAM! — all of a sudden, the sun never sets on the British Empire. And everywhere the British Empire went, there went Church of England clergy, chaplaincies, and churches also. We need not ignore the fact that this means the tradition has been complicit in and party to some fairly egregious acts of white supremacy and exploitation: our robust understanding of the brokenness of human nature makes this reality comprehensible … though, of course, it is still terrible, and the enduring legacy of this sin still needs to be identified and repented of: Lord have mercy, there is much, much healing left to do.
A prime specimen of Indo-Gothic architecture, the Cathedral Church of the Resurrection in Lahore, Pakistan stands a typical monument to the ambiguity of Anglican colonialism: on the one hand, a beautiful work of cultural fusion: on the other, an ostentatious display of power and wealth misbegotten by imperial enterprise.
But in spite of all that, something remarkable happened: the British Empire receded, but the Anglican Church did not. In fact, quite the opposite: as the administration of the old British church infrastructure passed over into the hands of indigenous Christians in the early- to mid-20th C, it experienced unexpected and explosive growth in many corners. Even as the church structures in the Western world began to age and diminish, a new vitality was springing up in the former colonies. The countries that once sent missionaries to Africa and Asia, now found that Africa and Asia were now sending missionaries back to them.
This is an important part of our story at Reconciliation Anglican Church. Our mothering Diocese, the Anglican Diocese of the Rocky Mountains, traces its roots and spiritual lineage to the East African Revival, particularly, the Church of Rwanda, which spilled over into the United States via a loose missionary movement — the Anglican Mission in America — in the early 2000s. Our Diocese maintains a number of deep connections and partnerships there to this day as one of our key “global relationships.” How could we not be moved by the sacrifice and determination of these African voices who have the Gospel, and nothing else! The inspiring voice of Archbishop Kolini, who refused to bow to pressure to shut down the mission in interest of preserving good order in global communion, saying, “In 1994, there was genocide in Rwanda, and the world was silent. Today, I see a spiritual genocide happening in the West, and I will not be silent.”
Yet our mental map — still very much drawn and determined by the old colonial imagination — has not yet quite caught up with this new reality. A part of this, perhaps, is a latent guilt — very legitimate! — for the oppressive and patronizing way in which religion was sometimes imposed as a part of the imperial project. But now, as we hear the voices of those our fathers once wronged crying out with joy in the Gospel, and proclaiming that even we can be forgiven in the midst of our sins, it should give us pause. To correct and nuance their “simplistic” theology in view of the new enlightened postcolonial framework we've developed and adopted would be simply to repeat the patronizing sins of which we are now trying to repent. But do we have the patience and the humility to listen, to learn, to receive from these preachers, these evangelists, these missionaries, speaking to us from the margins?
The Spirit of God is at work in the human family, breaking down the walls of division and hatred that divide us, flattening the hierarchies that lift some to unthinkable heights of power and wealth and authority, while leaving others locked in poverty and helplessly consigned to oppression. The mission of God is not just from the West to the rest, bringing Christianity, capitalism, and right (white) civilization, but “from everywhere, to everywhere,” as the sometime Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali says. Because we all need the Gospel, the transforming, reconciling love of God revealed in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, to transform our lives, relationships, and systems together. And to be reconciled implies and requires that we engage over our differences of culture and language as members of one holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
Not ANY Anglicans, but THESE Anglicans
In these United States, The Episcopal Church (TEC) holds most of the pride and privilege of establishment a the “official” branch of the Anglican Communion in this country. (It is called “Episcopal” after the form of government; the term “Anglican” having been dropped at the time of the unpleasantness of the colonial rebellion against its erstwhile motherland.) That is not our tribe, although they are certainly a part of the same family tree: we wish them well, recognize and embrace them as sinners redeemed by the same Savior, and enjoy many of the points of contact we have with TEC people and clergy. May opportunities to build relationships and learn from one another be multiplied: this too is a work of reconciliation that waits to be accomplished!
Bishop Azad Marshall the Bishop of Raiwind and President of the National Council of Churches in Pakistan — sometime Bishop of Iran and the Persian Gulf — worships with Archbishop Foley Beach, Primate of the Anglican Church in North America and Chair of the GAFCON Primates Council.
Our lineage, however, is with the scrappy and chaotic wing of missionary Anglicanism from the Global South: the Global Anglican Futures Movement, under the vibrant leadership and direction of the collective voice of Global South primates, rather than the soft but withered hand of Canterbury. Many in our community chafe at the hard lines drawn doctrinally by the Jerusalem Declaration, but we observe them as engaging and expressing the voice of global and historic church in ways that Anglican leadership in the US and UK have been reluctant to acknowledge and pursue.
What’s most important for us, however, is not where the lines are drawn so much as who is carrying the fire. Is the future of the Anglican Communion locked up in within the the spacious walls of empty cathedrals and crumbling institutions? Or is it in the joyous, exploding zeal of young Asian and African churches who can’t seem to hold back their missionaries? I hope that, at the end of the day, the answer is “both/and:” that the fires of these missionary movements will one day find their way back to the hearts and hearths of the old institutions and warm these cold stones, where there are but flickering embers left. My heart certainly treasures the beauty of holiness and great riches of the tradition: I ache for that unity and depth, for “steadfast love and faithfulness to meet; righteousness and peace to kiss each other” (Ps 85:10). But if I’m forced to choose between them — or rather, AS I am forced to choose between them — I will gladly throw in my lot with the zealous but poor and weak, rather than the decedent, well-heeled, well-established. “Better a little that the righteous has than the great riches of the wicked,” as quoth Solomon (Prov 16:8). But pray for the peace and unity of the Church: for repentance and for reconciliation; for growth in hope and in holiness in these strange and challenging times. Is anything impossible for God? These bones yet may live: God isn’t done with us yet!
