At the Garden Gate

The so-called Anglican “renaissance” movement, recently announced on The North American Anglican, sets off alarm bells in my mind.

First, it relies on one man’s interpretation of Anglican Church history, doctrine and practice.

Second, it takes a dismissive attitude toward laypersons, one that has characterized the Anglican Church in North America from the very outset, an attitude historically associated with the Catholic Revival, clericalism, sacerdotalism, and sacramentalism.

Third, its embrace of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer is reminiscent of how the ACNA has embraced that prayer book, principally as window dressing, a facade staged to create a favorable impression.

As the 19th century Oxford movement’s embrace of the 1662 Prayer Book also revealed, the 1662 Prayer Book is open to more than one interpretation, and that movement’s adherents were able to ascribe to the book doctrinal views agreeable to their own. This prompted efforts in the Church of England and the Church of Ireland to revise the book.

The author’s seemingly favorable view of the 1928 Prayer Book, an early 20th century Anglo-Catholic-Broad Church compromise, and the 2019 Proposed ACNA Prayer Book with its decided unreformed Catholic slant in doctrine and liturgical practice do not inspire confidence in the direction that this so-called Anglican “renaissance” will take.

Fourth, the Anglican “renaissance” movement seeks to promote monasticism, the formation of religious societies whose members attempt to live by a rule that requires works that go beyond those of either the clergy or the laity. The English Reformers rejected this form of spiritual elitism. 

In the 1549 and 1552 Prayer Books Thomas Cranmer took the medieval monastic daily offices and conflated them into two services of public worship—Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. Clergy were directed to ring the church bell to summon the people to join them in the celebration of these two daily offices. Cranmer restored what had been the practice of the early Church before the rise of monasticism, the gathering of the whole community, clergy and laity together, for praise and prayer at dawn and dusk. To the praise and prayer Cranmer added the reading of the Old and New Testaments, not just to edify those listening but also to transform them. 

The revival of monasticism in the Church of England and her daughter churches had its impetus in the 19th century Oxford movement and Victorian medievalism and is associated with the Catholic Revival.

Add to this picture what largely passes as “traditional Anglicanism” in North America has been strongly influenced by the Catholic Revival, that the two “leaders” of this fledgling movement are self-appointed, and that the North American Anglican Church in its various iterations has a history of social media influencers and others leading the unsuspecting and unwitting down the garden path, of intentionally guiding them in the wrong direction, I would think twice about embracing this so-called Anglican “renaissance” movement and investigate it thoroughly with open eyes!