What Is
Anglican Worship?
Anglicans are the world’s third largest Christian group (behind Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox) and we are growing every day, especially in countries south of the Equator. The Anglican Church in North America, founded in 2009 to preserve and perpetuate the Apostolic Faith here, has already grown to more than 100,000 members in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. We are in full communion with other Anglican churches representing 80 million Anglican believers worldwide.
We know ourselves to be a part of God’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church that the Apostles and their followers built at Jesus’ command. We like to say that Anglicanism is where you would arrive should you travel all the way back to the Early Church, and if you yourself were to believe what the Church has always believed, at all times, and in all places, down through the millennia. People nowadays yearn for a sense of connection with the Early Church---a footbridge that Anglicans richly provide. It is why Billy Graham saw “spiritual beauty in Anglican order,” and told his final biographer that if he were starting all over again, “I would be an evangelical Anglican.”
Anglicanism is Biblical, generous, and beautiful. Not that Anglicans can believe anything they want to believe, because God seeks people to worship him in spirit and in truth. For Anglicans, that truth is the Bible as the final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life. It has been well said that our Book of Common Prayer, and its liturgy, is simply the Bible arranged for worship. Anglicanism generously embraces three historic worship traditions. The Evangelical movement, consistent from the time of the Great Reformation of the 16th century, stresses the primacy of the Bible to be read, marked, learned and inwardly digested. The Anglo-Catholic movement of the 17th and 19th centuries renewed the Church’s commitment to the sacramental life of worship. The Charismatic renewal of the 20th century centered on life in the Holy Spirit as a present day experience. Common to all is worship that exalts the supremacy of Scripture.
To consider Anglican order one need look no further than to begin with Christendom’s liturgical seasons of the year. Everyone knows Christmas and Easter. The others are Advent, Lent, Epiphany, Eastertide, Pentecost, and Trinity, each centering on a particular chapter in the story of God and his people. By our own retelling of the story of Jesus and his love, arranged in this way, we ourselves become not hearers only but participants with Jesus. Because the Book of Common Prayer is in worldwide use, when we worship and pray we’re engaging in real time with millions of other Anglican believers whose collective praise never ceases in a global family on which the sun never sets.
Please do ask about our services in this congregation.
Anglican House Media Ministry, Inc. 2022