In A Divided Age, Will Anglicans Ultimately Save Evangelicalism?
(ANALYSIS) An article by Sarah Carter at the website Juicy Ecumenism caught my attention this week. That story, “Wheaton-to-Anglican Pipeline: Why Are Young People Turning Anglican,” describes a phenomenon I have noted here at MinistryWatch and elsewhere.
She describes how Anglicanism’s biblical fidelity, coupled with beautiful and historical forms of worship, is attractive to people who have grown weary of the “expressive individualism” and ad-hoc theology of the evangelical church. I commend her article to you.
I am not young, but I too have turned to Anglicanism. In fact, I did so many years ago. For me, it was a much longer journey than it has been for many of the young people Sarah Carter describes. It is a journey that, with your permission, I will describe here.
I have made a career of working for evangelical organizations and writing about evangelical Christianity, so the subject of church membership comes up often. “Where do you go to church?” is usually among the four or five questions I get when I meet someone for the first time.
My answer — that I am an Anglican — generates one of several responses. The most common is the blank stare, followed by the awkward silence. That is why I rarely respond with a one-word answer: “Anglican.” I usually say, “I go to a theologically conservative, evangelical Anglican church.”
Because some of the more than 1,000 Anglican churches in the U.S. have been in the news for breaking away from the Episcopal Church, I now sometimes hear: “Oh. Are you part of that renegade group that split from the Episcopal Church?”
It is hard to know how to answer that question. Those breakaway churches are indeed a part of the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA), the body of which my congregation is a part. But the breakaway congregations do not represent anything close to a majority of the congregations affiliated with ACNA.
Most of the congregations in ACNA are like my own small congregation: a start-up church, a “church plant” in the evangelical vernacular. We typically have about 100 people in worship on Sunday mornings, and the overwhelming majority of the people in my church are not former Episcopalians.
Many, by God’s grace, are new converts. Some are former Southern Baptists and nondenominational evangelicals. Some, like me, migrated from the Presbyterian Church in America, seeking to augment the rich Reformed theology of that church with a liturgy — including the Eucharist — that we believe more fully incarnates that theology.
But it is precisely here that the conversation heads into the tall grass. What do you mean by “Reformed theology”? Liturgy? Eucharist? What is this new expression of Anglicanism taking root here in the United States, this new church body that now claims more than 120,000 people in services on a typical Sunday morning, and is growing perhaps more rapidly than any Protestant denomination in America?
To help answer these questions, and others, I will begin by telling a story — and that story is my own.
The Southern Baptist denomination I grew up in during the 1960s and ‘70s was then and remains today the largest Protestant denomination in the country. The church I attended was Roswell Street Baptist Church, in Marietta, Georgia. Roswell Street was, in the 1970s and ’80s, one of the largest Protestant churches in that denomination. In fact, Elmer Towns, an expert in church growth who spent many years on the faculty of Liberty University, wrote that in the early 1970s, there were only a few dozen Protestant megachurches in the country. He defined a megachurch as one with more than 2,000 in Sunday attendance.
By 1976, Roswell Street, under the leadership of Dr. Nelson Price, had more than 5,000 members, making it therefore not only one of the largest churches in the denomination but one of the largest churches in the country.
In short, I grew up in one of the epicenters of the post-World War II evangelical boom. Before Willow Creek or Saddleback, before Watermark or Mars Hill, Roswell Street was among the first of what many others aspired to be: large, evangelical, full-service, growing and exciting.
In many ways, I thrived there. I made a profession of faith in Christ at age 14, as a result of a revival service there that featured then well-known evangelist Richard Hogue. I was a budding musician, so I got involved in the church’s nearly 200-voice youth choir. I played in the church’s 20-piece orchestra.
Because of the size of the church, many of the evangelical world’s leading lights spoke there. In addition to Richard Hogue, I remember hearing Nicky Cruz (“The Cross and the Switchblade” and “Run, Nicky, Run”), Bruce Wilkinson (“Walk Through the Bible,” “The Prayer of Jabez”) and Kay Arthur (Precept Ministries). Word Records’ first recording artist, Frank Boggs, attended the church. (I briefly dated one of his daughters, but that is another story.) Contemporary Christian music pioneer Pat Terry was a member at Roswell Street, and he regularly performed both at church and in the region. Pat became the center of a circle of influential musicians that included Mark Heard.
These experiences, these people, were positive influences in my life, as was the day-to-day life of the church. I learned the importance of Bible study and prayer. I remember several of my high school Sunday school teachers with fondness and gratitude and — 40 years later — still stay in touch with several of them, including a few who have remained active and faithful over a long career of full-time Christian ministry.
I share that to let you know that my story is not one of rejection of or disillusionment with that church or those people. They loved and encouraged me when — I can now say in retrospect — they had little cause to do so. And I continue to love and respect many of them today. My departure from Roswell Street and the Southern Baptist Convention was in no way a “de-conversion” or a “deconstruction” of my faith.
That said, and even though many at Roswell Street Baptist Church were loving and generous, I also grew up alongside some who were legalistic both in their theology and their personal ideologies. In the 1960s and ’70s in the South, it was still distressingly easy to find strong strains of both racism and religious bigotry in the evangelical church. Because the Southern Baptist Church was ubiquitous in the south, it became natural and easy to distrust anything not Southern Baptist.
I do not believe this bigotry is peculiar to the South or to Southern Baptists. I have seen it among Mormons in Utah and Catholics in Boston. Anytime your faith group (or political ideology, or skin color) is dominant, there is a temptation to “fear the other” and to believe that all reasonable people believe what you believe and behave the way you behave.
The net result: Many discussions of other denominations either ended or began with a sentence that sounded like this: “I’m sure there are Christians in that denomination, but why not be safe and stick with the Southern Baptists?”
Special skepticism, spilling over into disdain, was reserved for the Catholic Church. Many people in the Southern Baptist church of my youth believed the pope was the anti-Christ and the Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon mentioned in the Book of Revelation.
This disdain was not the sole province of Southern Baptists, of course. Hal Lindsay’s 1970 book “The Late, Great Planet Earth” sold 30 million copies and was hugely influential in evangelical churches, not just Southern Baptist churches. It capitalized on apocalyptic, end times prophesies then much in vogue because of the 30th and then the 40th anniversary of the birth of modern Israel, since some sects of Protestantism believed that Jesus would return within a generation of Israel becoming a nation, which happened in 1948.
The Catholic Church was often the villain in these end times narratives. The Episcopal Church, the most visible manifestation of Anglicanism in the U.S., was also suspect. For one thing, viewed from a Southern Baptist perspective, it was hard to differentiate an Episcopal Church from a Catholic Church. In form and structure, they looked about the same. And if the Catholic Church was the Whore of Babylon, the Episcopal Church was too close for comfort.
Also, the Episcopal Church was, by the 1970s, a church deeply infiltrated by heterodoxy and apostasy. In 1974, the Episcopal Church ordained 11 women — the so-called “Philadelphia Eleven.” This act caused a huge departure of evangelicals from the Episcopal Church.
Though these evangelicals left for good reasons and as a matter of conscience, one of the unintended consequences of this mass departure was to make the liberals who remained even more powerful in Episcopal seminaries and denominational committees. Soon, the Episcopal Church was openly ordaining gay people, and by the 1980s, women and gay people had become bishops in the church, further departing from biblical norms and further alienating the few traditionalists who remained.
These controversies sent even more theologically orthodox congregants running for the exits. Numerically, the Episcopal Church went from a high of more than 4 million in the early 1960s to less than 3 million by the mid-1970s. (The population of the U.S. in 1960 was less than 180 million, a little more than half of today’s 330 million.) In 2021, though the church officially reported about 1.6 million members, actual attendance is far less. The church itself reported in 2018 that only about 560,000 on any given Sunday. Today, that number is less than a half-million.
All of this is to say, for a young man raised in a Bible-believing and evangelical Southern Baptist Church in the 1960s and ’70s, especially one committed to deepening his relationship with Christ, neither the Roman Catholic nor the Episcopal Church had much to offer.
But when I got to college at the University of Georgia, my theological horizons broadened, though initially only slightly. I immediately became involved in Christian ministry, including Campus Crusade for Christ, and on Sundays I attended Prince Avenue Baptist Church, another large and fast-growing Southern Baptist Church. In many ways, these groups were “of a piece” with my upbringing, though the fact that I was choosing for myself to participate — and not simply following my family’s lead — was a significant step forward in my spiritual development.
Another key step in my spiritual development came as I started reading the Christian books popular at that time. “Mere Christianity,” of course. Lewis was essential reading for the young Christians in my growing circle in those days, and not just “Mere Christianity.” I first read “The Chronicles of Narnia” as a college freshman, and by the end of my sophomore year I had read Lewis’ “Space Trilogy” and the novel that many consider to be his magnum opus: “Till We Have Faces.” I consider a defining moment in my life to be when I read his collection of essays and sermons called “The Weight of Glory,” especially the title essay.
Other key books for me were John Stott’s “Basic Christianity” (1971) and J.I. Packer’s “Knowing God” (1973). I include the publication dates to make the point that these books, which we now consider classics, all came out about the same time, and — by the time I began college in the fall of 1976 — dog-eared copies of these books were being passed around among my friends, or available at little cost at the used bookstore in downtown Athens. Reading and being able to discuss these books became the “admission ticket” into the circle of young Christian leaders to which I gravitated on the University of Georgia campus.
At some point it also dawned on me that all these writers — Lewis, Stott, Packer and many more — had this in common: They were Anglican.
Now, these books and this realization did not make me want to abandon my Southern Baptist roots — at least not yet. But they did lay a sharp axe to the root of a few long-held biases. I began to realize that these men, though Anglican, loved Jesus as much as I did. Perhaps more. I also began to realize that these men had much to teach me about God, and it was beginning to dawn on me that their deep love, and their deep insights, might be intimately related to their Anglican understanding of God, Jesus, the gospel and the nature of man.
In short, maybe Southern Baptists did not have all the answers.
Another step along my path toward Anglicanism came near the end of my junior year in college, in 1979. I did an internship in the press office of Georgia Gov. George Busbee. Gov. Busbee’s press secretary, the man for whom I directly worked, was an old newspaper man named Duane Riner.
Duane was a tall man, though he walked with a shuffle and sat with a slouch, and he had a way of making even expensive suits look disheveled. He was beloved in the state capitol. During Jimmy Carter’s term as governor, Duane was assistant press secretary, reporting to Carter’s press secretary, the “boy wonder” Jody Powell. But Duane Riner played the vital role of keeping Carter’s state-level press function running while Powell and Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, plotted the Georgia governor’s run for the White House.
Both Powell and Jordan were then in their 20s and hard charging to a fault. Time Magazine put them on its cover. Rolling Stone — in another cover story — called them Carter’s “whiz kids,” and most presidential historians acknowledge that Carter would never have become president without them. But there were lots of folks “under the Gold Dome” (the Georgia State Capitol is covered in a thin veneer of gold foil) who were glad to see them go, and they considered Duane’s decision not to follow them to Washington, but instead to stay in Atlanta to become Gov. Busbee’s press secretary, a sign of Duane’s integrity.
Duane had a grumpy and irreverent exterior. He used every profanity known to the English-speaking world, though often to comic effect. He chain-smoked in those days, later giving up smoking in favor of Copenhagen, which he dipped at the rate of a can a day. He could be on his second Scotch before I had taken a sip of my first Diet Coke. But he was also a careful writer and an editor of the kind that — if God is particularly gracious to you — you will get once in your lifetime. He was also devoutly Christian, and a cradle Episcopalian.
Life in the governor’s press office was extraordinarily busy. The governor had a weekly press conference (which I was responsible for setting up), and reporters were in and out of our office all the time. But this was before the days of the internet and the 24/7 news cycle, so when the 5 p.m. filing deadline passed, and the civil service workers who clocked out religiously on time went home, the press office became quiet — except for Duane’s office.
Duane could not go home until the governor left the building, so from 5 p.m. until 6 or 6:30 or 7 or even later, Duane would hold court in a fog of cigarette smoke, usually with two or three or four of the younger reporters who did not have families to go home to. And me.
Photo by Bryan Sherwood
The conversation found its way to religion more often than you might think. That was because of Duane’s subtle influence. Those late afternoon conversations had two tangible results: Duane gave me a Book of Common Prayer and encouraged me to read it, and he challenged me to attend an Evensong Service at the Episcopal Cathedral Church in Atlanta, St. Phillips.
Evensong is the Evening Prayer service of the Anglican Communion. (The Anglican Communion is what many Anglicans call the churches, including the Episcopal Church, that make up Anglicanism.) Evensong has ancient roots, combining elements of the Roman Catholic Church’s Vespers and Compline. It includes Scripture readings, prayers (including a confession of sin) and a recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, among other elements. It typically does not include a sermon or the Eucharist. Much of the service is sung, and at a large church such as St. Phillips, that means it is sung by an outstanding choir accompanied by a magnificent pipe organ.
I now know Duane picked that service strategically: He knew it was what I needed at this stage in my life, whether I became an Anglican or not. Evensong had a beauty and grandeur that fed a hunger in me. It was a hunger the ad-hoc and pop-culture liturgies of the evangelical church could not satisfy.
So, for several months during my internship, on Sunday morning I would attend one of several large Southern Baptist megachurches in Atlanta. Occasionally, I would attend my childhood church home, Roswell Street, but more often I attended First Baptist-Atlanta, where Dr. Charles Stanley was pastor. But then, in the late afternoon, I would slide into one of the back rows at St. Philips Cathedral for the evensong service. I began to marvel at and be nourished by this rich, beautiful tradition, and also to wonder why we evangelicals had become so complacent about it.
Fast-forward five years and I am back in Athens, back at the University of Georgia, this time working on a master’s degree in English. Specifically, I sought a degree in creative writing, and the head of the creative writing department was a committed Anglican named Marion Montgomery.
It is hard to imagine a man less evangelical in the conventional understanding of that word than Montgomery. I took every class he taught during my two years in graduate school, and he would often tell me, “If you can not write, then don’t.” In other words, you should write only if your calling is so profound, so unavoidable, that you cannot do anything else.
He may have picked up that idea from Flannery O’Connor. He was especially fond of an anecdote O’Connor documents in her letters, “The Habit of Being.” At a lecture on a college campus, someone asked O’Connor if creative writing programs don’t, in fact, discourage many young writers. O’Connor replied, “If you ask me, they don’t discourage them enough.”
That O’Connor and Montgomery were like-minded was no accident. Montgomery was born in 1925, the same year as Flannery O’Connor. They both attended the legendary Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and they were friends during the last five years of O’Connor’s life. They exchanged many letters and face-to-face visits during those five years. O’Connor once wrote to Montgomery: “The Southern writer can out-write anybody in the country because he has the Bible and a little history.” That sentence has become one of the most famous — and truest — definitions of southern literature.
I was married by the time I started graduate school in the fall of 1983. My wife Missy was raised in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a church that takes both liturgy and Reformed theology seriously. But a year on the staff of the Christian ministry Young Life had altered her sensibilities, as well. Finding a church in Athens that suited us both would not be easy. However, we both knew we would not be in Athens long after I received my master’s degree, so we decided to experiment by attending the Anglican Church Marion Montgomery attended: St. Stephens Anglican Church.
At this point it makes sense to pause and say a few words (as few words as possible) about the Anglican Church in the United States.
As I have already said, for centuries the Episcopal Church has been the primary expression of Anglicanism in the United States. It was also in many ways the dominant religion, if not in numbers at least in influence. Twelve American presidents were Episcopalian. Of the first 10 presidents, five were Episcopalians. John Jay, the first chief justice of the Supreme Court and one of the founders (and later president) of the American Bible Society, was an Episcopalian.
The church was then and remains today a part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, a voluntary association of Anglican churches around the world. From its earliest days in this country, the Anglican Church was called the Episcopal Church, in part to draw a line of cultural separation from England (the American Revolution, and all that) and in part to more accurately name the kind of church it was: a church that defined itself not by its culture of origin (Anglo) but by the episcopate, or by bishops, as opposed to the two other primary forms of church governance, Presbyterian and congregational.
When the Church of England formed, many parishes simply changed the name on the door from Catholic to Church of England. In fact, the official Anglican Church history cites St. Augustine of Canterbury as the church’s founder, and the founding date as 597 A.D. The official separation from the Roman church came in 1534, and even faithful Anglicans admit this break was initially driven as much by national and political causes as theological causes.
That said, this new Church of England, or Anglican Church, while preserving much of what was true and great in the Catholic tradition, felt the need to highlight more boldly some of the doctrines of the Protestant Reformation.
This need produced various efforts by the Anglican Church to clarify its beliefs and practices. I am leaving out much instructive and interesting history when I cite only two of those efforts.
First, under the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, the church produced a Book of Common Prayer in 1549, which it revised in 1552. The Book of Common Prayer — an ancestor of the same book Duane Riner gave me — used most of the liturgical forms of the Roman Catholic Church, but the language and theology were Reformed — highlighting the sovereignty and grace of God and diminishing the importance of human works.
Secondly, over a period of several decades, Cranmer and others created a document that eventually became “The 39 Articles of Religion,” finally ratified by the church in 1563. The document defined the beliefs of the church in language that some have come to call a via media, or “middle way” between the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church and the Calvinistic churches that were sweeping the mainland of Europe, spreading outward from Geneva. In the words of the church itself, the Anglican Church is both “Catholic” and “Reformed.”
These words became more important to me as I grew older. The Southern Baptist church I grew up in is fond of saying that “The Church” is the Body of Christ — and not any earthly institution. The Baptists I grew up with often — and only half-jokingly — said the Catholic Church may claim Peter as its founder, but we go back even further, to John the Baptist, who baptized Jesus Himself.
But the historical facts tell a different story. The first church to intentionally identify itself as “Baptist” organized in Europe in 1609. The Baptist Church in America began under Roger Williams in 1638. If you believe that the Body of Christ is a mystical union of believers, these dates are mere curiosities. However, the Nicene Creed, that document which defines the essential beliefs of the Christian, has a line that is troubling for those of us who stand on this side of the Protestant Reformation: “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church.”
Let me be plain on one point: Belief in the church is not necessary for salvation. The church does not save us. The only savior is Jesus Himself, who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father but by me.” But the early church fathers understood the propensity we have to remake Jesus in our own image. For the early church fathers to include in the Nicene Creed the necessity of believing in a “one holy catholic and apostolic church” meant they understood the importance of the church not merely as a mystical body, but also as an institutional one — that protected the peace and purity of the doctrines of the church.
So while both the Nicene Creed and the 39 Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church make it clear that Jesus is the only way to salvation, both documents also have a clear role for the “church militant,” which is — in a very real sense — the Body of Christ on earth.
These ideas became increasingly important to me as I grew older, because — as Richard Weaver said — “ideas have consequences,” and the older I got the more opportunity I had to see the negative consequences of ideas that in my youth I considered good. The post-World War II evangelical movement, a movement that spawned the megachurch and the parachurch, produced much that is good. In my line of work as a writer and leader for a Christian ministry, I meet people every day who first met God through that movement.
But I also found much in the evangelical movement that over time tended toward the heterodox and even the heretical. Because I have written an entire book about this phenomenon (“A Lover’s Quarrel with The Evangelical Church”), I will not process all of the pathologies of the evangelical church again here. I will simply say this: I came to want more than the therapeutic Jesus of the postmodern church, which is what modern evangelicalism has mostly become. I wanted a Jesus rooted in history, yes, but more than that: rooted in reality.
I do not want you to think that my own journey into Anglicanism was a completely clear-eyed exercise in logic, history, facts and reason. Circumstances and geography played a role. Missy and I value community, so we wanted to attend a church near enough our home for us to be active in that community. That meant that, at different seasons over the next 10 years we were in and out of Episcopal, Presbyterian (PCA) and Anglican churches — as we moved, or they changed. However, by the early 1990s, we were confirmed members of a conservative Episcopal church, and soon thereafter we transferred our membership to an Anglican church that was a part of the then-new but rapidly growing movement of Anglicanism in North America.
We had, after decades of search, found our church home.
If you have read this far, you can see that this story is — as I said at the outset — my story, but it is not only my story. It has been the story of many of the more than 120,000 people who have so far become a part of the Anglican Church of North America. It is the story of Sarah Carter, whose recent article we cited at the beginning, as well as thousands – perhaps tens of thousands of young people. We are people who love Jesus, and who love the Bible, but who have also come to long for more than the anemic theology and pop-culture trappings of the evangelical church.
Indeed, among my friends, I often say — only half-jokingly — that Anglicanism will save the evangelical movement. Anglicanism offers a Reformation theology tested by Scripture, an intellectual tradition tested and refined by history, and two things the modern evangelical church often lacks: beauty and mystery. Anglicanism offers an inkling of the transcendent in its elevated use of language and in its liturgies. These liturgies and language do not merely evangelize us, but deeply form us in our faith and in our very habits of being.
These benefits of Anglicanism have in recent years drawn many evangelicals. In fact, as I have reported on evangelicalism for the past 25 years, I have stopped being surprised when I discover that the leader of an evangelical ministry is Anglican. Though we currently make up far less than 1% of the American population, Anglicans are in leadership roles at many of the major Christian ministries in this country, from Christianity Today to WORLD Magazine. From The Colson Center to Compassion International. Travel to Colorado Springs, a city that has been called the “mecca of the evangelical movement” in the United States, and you will find a half-dozen thriving Anglican churches, with staff from some of the nation’s largest Christian ministries in attendance.
Or go to Wheaton College, the “evangelical Harvard,” and you will also find one of the largest Anglican churches in the country, Church of the Resurrection, within walking distance. In fact, in Sarah Carter’s article, she notes a half-dozen Anglican churches within a short drive of Wheaton.
Two of the nation’s largest evangelical seminaries, Gordon-Conwell and Reformed Theological Seminary, now have “Anglican Studies” tracks. Travel to Nashville, the home of the contemporary Christian music industry. Musicians such as Michael Card, Andrew Peterson and Sandra McCracken perform in churches of all kinds, all around the world. But when they come home, it is to an Anglican church.
That is not to say that Anglicanism does not have its problems. I recently attended the national conference for The Anglican Church in North America and wrote about what I saw and what I think needs to happen in ACNA here. The meeting took place in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. My friend and collaborator (Restoring All Things) caused a stir with his speech there on women’s ordination, an issue that remains unresolved in ACNA.
Neither has ACNA has not been immune from some of the clergy sex scandals that have rocked other denominations. And ACNA remains small.
Also, despite the denomination’s growth, large portions of the country still have no Anglican churches. It has much growing to do before it can have the sort of impact on American evangelicalism that, for example, the Presbyterian Church in America – another small denomination that “punches above its weight” – has had.
Still, Anglicanism offers something to the evangelical church that is currently missing. In the paragraphs above, I spoke of the “benefits of Anglicanism.” But that phrase is not exactly what I mean. C.S. Lewis said he was a Christian because he believed the claims of Christianity to be true. If I were forced to give a short answer to this question, I would say I belong to the Anglican Church because I believe it to be the truest, most robust expression of what the Christian church should be.
If pressed further, I would make the point that I believe the theology of the church to be sound, to be thoroughly biblical in the Reformed tradition. I would also make the point that the Anglican view of the Eucharist — Communion, the Lord’s Supper — is a very high one, and its place in the Anglican worship service strikes me as more obedient to Jesus’ admonition to “do this in remembrance of me.” Most Anglican services therefore include the Eucharist because Anglicans, like many Reformed Christians, believe that it is not merely a symbol, but a means of grace.
I should also admit that, by both temperament and training, I am an Anglophile. However, it is important to remember that most the world’s 85 million Anglicans are not English. Indeed, in the worldwide Anglican Communion, the majority ethnic group is not European, but African — a fact that, in my view, adds to the beauty of the church.
So, all these reasons are why I am an Anglican. And, if you have gotten this far, you might be asking yourself the question: Should I be an Anglican, too?
That question is, of course, between you and God.
This article was originally published at MinistryWatch.
Warren Cole Smith is the editor in chief of Ministry Watch and previously served as Vice President of WORLD News Group, publisher of WORLD Magazine and has more than 30 years of experience as a writer, editor, marketing professional, and entrepreneur. Before launching a career in Christian journalism 20 years ago, Smith spent more than seven years as the Marketing Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers.