Anglicanism is . . . 10. Committed to Belonging and to Being the Church as the Body of Christ

More so than some more Protestant church bodies, Anglicanism understands the divine-human drama to be centered not on the individual but on the community of the Church. While not strictly a matter of either/or, it does matter where we put the emphasis. By the Holy Spirit, God calls us into community where we learn to love one another as God loves us and empowers us to bear that love in the world. In, with and under that community, the Holy Spirit moves like an electric current empowering the Church to make our “life together a sign of Christ’s love to this sinful and broken world, that unity may overcome estrangement, forgiveness heal guilt, and joy conquer despair” (Book of Common Prayer). 

The Holy Spirit not limited tot he Church, of course. It blows where it will. But, wherever else it blows, we can count on it blowing through the baptized community that is the Church.

As the body of Christ the Church is, in a mystical sense, an extension of the Incarnation.

“The Spirit of Christ will be wanting in the heart that is shut up in selfishness”
– Henry Martyn (1781-1812), Journal and Letters of the Rev. Henry Martyn 

“‘Individualism’ has no place in Christianity, and Christianity verily means its extinction.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Gospel and the Catholic Faith

“Of course every person is an individual; but his individuality is what marks him off from others; it is a principle of division; whereas personality is social, and only in his social relationship can a man be a person. Indeed, for the completeness of personality, there is needed the relationship to both God and neighbours. The richer his personal relationships, the more fully personal he will be.”

– William Temple (1881-1944), Christianity and Social Order

“We realize the fullness of our own being only when we are conjoined in love to other beings, and gain our best hints of unity and completeness of life in sacred flashes when hearts and minds, retaining their separateness, through their very separation realize the mystery and miracle of fusion. Such flashes are rare and fugitive; it is possible that many people are never visited by them. But they are real, they do happen; and a suggestion is in them of the Divine interweavings wherein the full richness of Infinitude must abide.”

– Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954), Social Teachings of the Christian Year

“The Holy Catholic Church is both logically and chronologically prior to its individual members with their individual experience. Christian doctrine knows nothing of an atomistic individualism. Though an intensely personal matter, faith is never a purely private matter.”
– J. S. Whale (1896-1997), Christian Doctrine

“Thus it must ever be with the working of the separatist principle in the Church. That principle tends inevitably to disintegration. One sect begets another, until gradually the original idea of a company of believers knit together in one organic body dies away, and nothing is left but the barren individualism, whose motto is ‘Every man for himself’.”
– William Reed Huntington (1838-1909), The Church-idea

“Men speak as if Christians came first and the Church after: as if the origin of the Church was in the wills of the individuals who composed it. But, on the contrary, throughout the teaching of the Apostles, we see it is the Church that comes first and the members of it afterwards ... In the New Testament ... the Kingdom of Heaven is already in existence, and men are invited into it. The Church takes its origin, not in the will of man, but in the will of the Lord Jesus Christ ... Everywhere men are called in: they do not come in and make the Church by coming. They are called into that which already exists: they are recognised as members when they are within; but their membership depends on their admission, and not upon their constituting themselves into a body in the sight of the Lord.”
– Frederick Temple (1821-1902), Catholicity and Individualism, quoted in Catholicity, A Study in the Conflict of Christian Traditions in the West Being a Report presented to His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury by a group of scholars including Dom Gregory Dix, T. S. Eliot, Austin Farrer, and Michael Ramsey
 
“Christ did not order or provide for any book to be circulated. He forbade our following any one person. ‘Call no man master.’ He endowed His Church with the Holy Spirit, making the Church thereby a living organism, through which He acts, gathering souls into His saving light and life. In the Church are to be found the Holy Scriptures and the sacraments. By the Church the Scriptures are preserved and interpreted to our enlightenment, and the sacraments are administered for our reception of life. We hear the voice of Christ speaking to us through the Church as guided by the Holy Spirit, it interprets the written word, and makes the truth known within us by our union with it.”
– Charles Grafton (1830-1912), Christian and Catholic
 
“For this primarily the Church exists: to be the Spirit-bearing body, and that is to be the bearer of Christ, the great ‘Christopher,’ perpetuating, in a new, but not less real way, the presence of the Son of man in the world.”
– Charles Gore (1853-1932), The Incarnation of the Son of God

“Christianity has always maintained that God incarnate, Jesus the Christ, inaugurated Christian community. Some maintain that he established it directly. Others hold, more plausibly, that he founded it indirectly. For them, church is the continuation of the mission that Jesus preached and enacted. This corporate activity, empowered by the Holy Spirit, makes Christ present in and as that community.”

– Scott MacDougall, Who Needs Church?, The Other Journal, Issue 37: Church , Spring 2024

“The commission given to the Church is that it carry out the purpose of God. That is what is meant by the description of it as ‘the Body of Christ’. It is to be the instrument or organ of His will, as His fleshly Body was in the days of His earthly ministry. That Body has many functions to fulfil, and one of them is suffering. The members of the Church do not, or should not, belong to it for what they can get in this world or in any other world; they – we – should belong to it in order to take our share in the great work, the fulfilment of God’s purpose in the world and beyond it.”

– William Temple (1881-1944), Christianity and Social Order

“The Church is the only institution that exists primarily for the benefit of those who are not its members.”

– William Temple (1881-1944), Attributed

 
“While the New Testament emphasises the Catholic truth that the church is the extension of the Incarnation, it stresses also the vital importance of that Faith which is associated with the word Evangelical; for the Indwelling of Christ, which makes possible the Church, is linked to Faith in Him ‘Who loved me and gave Himself for me.’”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Body of Christ - An Appeal to Anglo-Catholics in The English Catholic: the Quarterly Gazette of the Anglican Society (Summer 1928)
 
“The meaning of the Christian Church becomes most clear when it is studied in terms of the Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), The Gospel and the Catholic Church
 
“The Christian community (the church militant) has been put here on earth not for self-nurture or nourishment but to exercise the painful, glorious work of reconciliation across the terrifying barriers erected all across our communal existences in this world.”
– Hans Frei (1922-1988), On the Thirty-Nine Articles in Unpublished Pieces: Transcripts from the Yale Divinity School archive edited by Mike Higton

“The church is the community of those who have been immersed in Jesus’ life, overwhelmed by it.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), Tokens of Trust
 
“The Church is saying to the world, ‘he form of human community that's ultimately in accord with God’s purpose and God’s nature is one in which these principles apply: the principle of mutual enrichment when we receive the gifts of others, and see and meet the one another's needs, and the converse, the mutual impoverishment that happens when we forget or ignore the gift or the suffering of others.’ The Church says to the world, ‘this is the kind of community that makes God known; one that shows God's own nature and purpose. God’s nature as one who is beyond all partisanship, all self-interest, whose whole being is selflessness: that mystery which the doctrine of the Holy Trinity supremely reveals for us.
 
What that leads to is that every action in which that becomes real is, to use the language of a later generation, a kind of sacrament: an effective supernatural realization of God's nature and purpose within history. While we speak of the sacramental acts of the Church gathered for worship, I think that the Bible encourages us to believe that every action in which God's justice becomes manifest is also sacramental in the sense that it shows God's future. For us to be aware of that, to work and pray with it, is where the sacraments in the narrower sense become important. The community gathered around the Lord's Table is a sign of God's future.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), No One Can Be Forgotten in God's Kingdom, a speech at the TEAM Conference in South Africa Friday 9th March 2007
 
“The Christian community, desiring to share ever more fully in Christ’s dying and rising again, develops a new understanding of humanity’s contemplative calling―so that a continual conversion of contemplative consciousness collaborates in Christ’s re-harmonizing of creation with God’s knowing and loving of each creature.”
– Mark McIntosh (1960-2021), The Divine Ideas Tradition
 
“In the Church, the mystical body of Christ, we have a yet further extension of the idea for which the lover of humanity cries. For the Church, both normally and ideally, includes the entire human race; even now, in a world invaded by sin and failure, it is the representative of all, the earnest of the society to be. It not only claims our service, but commands our reverence; for, made up as it is of faulty and distorted people, it yet reaches up into a higher region, and witnesses to perfection, through its organic and sacramental union with a Head in whom are centered holiness, wisdom, authority.”
– Vida Dutton Scudder (1861-1954), The Witness of Denial
 
The Church is essential, But Anglicans have no illusions of it being anything other than a treasure-bearing clay jar (2 Corinthians 4:7).
 
“Before Christians can say things about what the church ought to be, their first need is to say what the Church is, here and now amid its own failures and the questionings of the bewildered. Looking at it now, with its inconsistencies and perversions and its want of perfection, we must ask what is the real meaning of it just as it is. As the eye gazes upon it, it sees the Passion of Jesus Christ; but the eye of faith sees further: it sees the power of Almighty God.”
– Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), Glory Descending: Michael Ramsey and His Writings, ed. Douglas Dales
 
“Living in the Christian institution isn’t particularly easy. It is, generally, today, an anxious inefficient, pompous, evasive body. If you hold office on it, you become more and more conscious of what it’s doing to your soul. Think of what Coca-Cola does to your teeth. Why bother?

Well, because of the unwelcome conviction that it somehow tells the welcome truth about God, above all in its worship and sacraments. I don’t think I could put up with it for five minutes if I didn’t believe this.”
– Rowan Williams (1950 - ), No life, here – no joy, terror or tears, Church Times 17 July 1998
 
“We would like to imagine the Church striding through history like a hero or a saint. But, if we are honest, we must admit that the Church has ever staggered through history like the Whiskey Priest – all too often drunk on (worldly) power and sin, cowardly, less than faithful, self-interested, etc. But, while it has never been more than a Whiskey Priest, it has, by the grace of God, never been less. In spite of all its shortcomings, it has borne Word and Sacrament to the world. And it has also raised up exemplary saints – known and unknown. As with Graham Greene’s priest [in The Power and the Glory], we know that in spite of its shortcomings, the Spirit does not abandon the Church and God’s power and glory are present in and through it. But only and always by God’s grace, not its own heroic or saintly purity.

And there’s the rub. The compulsion and presumption to create a pure Church, whether that be pure in holiness or pure in teaching or pure in justice – however and by whomever any of those is defined – is rooted in either pride or impatience (or both). If we continually expect and demand that the Church stride through history like a hero-saint we will continually be frustrated by its actual plodding through history like a Whiskey Priest. But we will also miss the opportunity to learn what it means to live by God’s power and glory rather than our own. We will miss the fact of God’s sheer grace. I wonder if the refusal to accept and love the Church as a ‘corpus permixtum’ – a mixed body of sinners and saints – is not rooted in our own unwillingness to see ourselves as ‘simul justus et peccator – simultaneously righteous and sinful. We only ever live under the Mercy.”
– Matthew Gunter (1957 - ), Whiskey Priest Church, An Odd Work of Grace blog, July 4, 2015
 
“It is almost too obvious that the church reflects both the very best and the very worst of us, for, – whatever else it is – it is composed of human beings. And human beings are sometimes hopeful, sometimes seek after petty forms of power, and sometimes are mobilized into the most remarkable sacrificial acts. . . as furious as I get, the church – in all its hypocrisy, human cravenous, and prejudice – remains a place of grace. And remains a place of grace because God is bizarrely and wonderfully passionate about the freaks, the half-mad, the second-rate, and yet glorious bunch that we – the church – are. And if God can still value the loons within it (including me), then so can I.”
– Rachel Mann (1970 - ), Dazzling Darkness
 
“In spite of the various faults which at any time disfigure the Church, we also see from time to time what might be called ‘gleams of glory,’ moments when the ideal nature of the Church, its true nature, shines out.”
– John Macquarrie (1919-2007), Starting from Scratch

Anglicanism is international

Anglicans belong to the Anglican Communion, comprised of 42 autonomous provincial churches and over 80 million members across 160+ countries. It is united by shared historic Anglican tradition and worship, mutual recognition and fellowship rather than a central authority. The Archbishop of Canterbury serves as spiritual leader and focus of communion. The Anglican Communion is a reminder that to be a Christian is not an individual affair. It is to be a member of the body of Christ, the Church. It is to be bound to allegiances that transcend national boundaries as well as other loyalties. Members of the Anglican Communion are fundamentally united to other members of the Communion around the globe by a common heritage of faith, by bonds of affection, and by the water of baptism which is thicker than blood. We belong to one another.

“The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, otherwise known as The Episcopal Church (which name is hereby recognized as also designating the Church), is a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, a Fellowship within the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, of those duly constituted Dioceses, Provinces, and regional Churches in communion with the See of Canterbury, upholding and propagating the historic Faith and Order as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.”

– Preamble of the Constitution of the The Episcopal Church

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9. Incarnational

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11. Committed to the Coinherence of all Humanity and All Creation