It is hard to believe it has been over one year since I announced I was leaving the SBC and converting to Anglicanism. To this day I receive an email or phone call once or twice a week from a pastor saying, “I want to become Anglican, but I am stuck. How do I get out?” Although each story is different, at some point every one of them give the same reason for why they want to leave their pastorate and become Anglican.
I went to a ____ [Baptist or evangelical] seminary, and I have been pastoring for ____ years. But I’ve been reading the Fathers, Fathers I never read in seminary, and it has become obvious that my ____ [Baptist or non-denominational] polity is not catholic. The church of the Fathers was one that believed bishops and their apostolic succession was essential to catholicity. I now realize that catholicity for the Fathers was not just about the doctrine of God and Christ. To make matters worse, after ____ years as a pastor I have accepted the fact that worship will never center on the sacrament of holy Eucharist and the real presence of Christ as it did for the Fathers. I want out, but this is my job and my family is dependent on my salary. I want to become Anglican, but I am middle age and I cannot see how without losing it all. There’s not an obvious onramp for someone like me either. I’m stuck. Can you help?
You are not alone. I know what it is like to live in that dark cave wondering if there is something beyond the shadows on the wall. I have lived to find out there is a bright sun waiting on the other side. But you may need help feeling your way there.
First, you are right, catholicity is not less than the Trinity and Christ, but it is so much more. As I have pointed out before, we do not receive the creeds of the councils apart from bishops. Even before the creeds the indispensability of bishops was apparent. As evident in the writings of Fathers like St. Ignatius and St. Irenaeus, catholicity depends on episcopacy. They are adamant that the apostolic succession of bishops is essential to the unity of the church under an apostolic authority. Hence St. Ignatius (c.50-c.110), bishop of Syrian Antioch, praises the Ephesians for obeying their Bishop. He describes their obedience to the bishop as if it were music that brings them into harmony with Christ himself. “For your council of presbyters…is attuned to the bishop as strings to a lyre. Therefore in your unanimity and harmonious love Jesus Christ is sung. You must join this chorus, every one of you, so that by being harmonious in unanimity and taking your pitch from God you may sing in unison with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father…” Later he changes metaphors to a house: “For everyone whom the Master of the house sends to manage his own house we must welcome as we would the one who sent him. It is obvious, therefore, that we must regard the bishop as the Lord himself.”
Therefore, as a first step, follow the wisdom of St. Ignatius who commands you to be in “fellowship with your bishop…united with him.” Find the nearest diocese and ask for a conversation with the bishop. Sit down with him if possible. He may bring along his canon theologian or even one of his priests. Be honest with him about your predicament and ask him what Holy Orders looks like for someone in your situation who needs to start all over. Unlike some denominations where ordination exams are sufficient, your bishop will likely explain why you must take time to unlearn the worship you’ve known in order to discover worship anew according to the prayer book’s sacramental understanding of reality. (More on this in a minute.) Bishops are often quite experienced as shepherds over shepherds, and, knowing the priests and churches in their diocese well, the bishop will likely have a bird’s eye view of the landscape, knowing where to plant you and your family in the soil of Anglicanism. He may even consult with other bishops to see what they advise. If all this seems intimidating, start with the best Anglican church near you, and begin the conversation with the priest.
Second, do not starve yourself waiting for this sacramental reality, but find the best Anglican church near you (even if it means driving some ways) and begin partaking of the Eucharist. If available, go to morning (or evening) prayer as well. Some may even partake of the Eucharist during the week. Remember, you are looking for a church that understands how critical it is for the priest to consecrate the bread and wine to be, as the prayer book says, “the Body and Blood of your Son Jesus Christ” (BCP, 2019). You will not find a solution to your predicament in the study but in the sanctuary—in worship.
Many assume that the difference between Anglicanism and other traditions is merely a matter of more liturgy. As if the issue at hand is one of “worship style.” You must put this mentality to death; it is an evangelical way of thinking about worship, and it will forever keep you from understanding the Anglican way. Anglicanism is not about a style (bells and smells) but a sacramental rule of life, one in which you submit yourself to a new reality in which time is consecrated around the mystery of the paschal lamb.
Third, if you are serious about converting you must die to your modern ecclesial instincts, trained as they are by your past experiences, especially in the American church. Anglicanism is where celebrity pastors and personalities go to die. If you want to have a “platform” and a “following,” do not become Anglican. Worship in an Anglican church does not rise and fall with preaching and the charisma of the pastor in the pulpit. Preach it and they will come, is what many a seminarian has been taught. Critical as it is for the Word to be preached, even if the priest should deliver a poor homily, the rest of the Eucharist liturgy feeds the sheep. When you walk into many an Anglican church you may not see a pulpit or a big screen at the center but an altar. The first time you see the “pastor” you probably will struggle to pick him out since clergy in the processional are vested in such a way to bring attention to Christ rather than to themselves. What they do wear (e.g., cassock-alb, stole, and possibly a chasuble or cope) speak to their office.
Related to this, you need to know that your decision to become Anglican will come at a cost. You will be faced with uncertainty. You will lose friends. You will be “cancelled.” I have talked to pastors who wake up in the middle of the night gasping for breath at the uncertainty of what is behind this door. You and your spouse must be on board and together you must be fortified (a virtue, by the way) for the challenge at hand. But as someone who has walked through that door, I can now say to you looking back, it has been so worth it. The grass is greener on the other side.
Fourth, dying to your modern ecclesial instincts also means discovering a whole new understanding—a whole new world—of Holy Orders, one in which the priesthood is not so much about pastoral activity as it is about sacramental function. This last point is, in part, what makes the grass so much greener.
In his book, Corpus Christi, E.L. Mascall opens with a chapter called, “The One Church,” in which he says, “I have noticed that in discussions between Free Churchmen and Anglicans about the ministry there has been a strong tendency upon the part of the Free Churchmen to look upon the ministry entirely in terms of pastoral activity, while the Anglicans (or at any rate many of them) have laid the primary stress on its sacramental and liturgical functions.” Mascall shares why this difference makes all the difference: “In consequence, the Anglican clergy have seemed to the Free Churchmen to be almost entirely preoccupied with devising and conducting church services and to be lacking in concern for people’s souls. … But it needs to be emphasized that, when we say that the primary function of the Christian minister is sacramental and liturgical, we are thinking of him neither as a machine for saying masses and pronouncing absolutions, nor as a professional organizer of inspiring ecclesiastical functions. It is indeed true that his priesthood is most fully and publicly exercised when he is standing at the altar as the celebrant of the liturgy. But what is the liturgy itself? It is the perpetuation in the Church’s midst of the redemptive act of Christ, the means whereby the people of God are made one and the sins and needs of the world are brought before the throne of the Father. And this, so far from excluding the pastoral character from the priesthood, necessitates it.”
Read Mascall’s words again. Here is the hard part for many to understand until they take the risky step into the dark unknown and convert their whole being to the Anglican way: if Mascall is right about the difference between Anglicanism and Free Church, then the convert who was once a pastor will have to start over, and the place to begin is under the altar. Only then will you be ready to talk to your priest about Holy Orders because only then will you understand the primary purpose of the priest. That is humbling, but unlike denominations where you personally decide to plant a church by starting a website, you must spend time relearning what it means to be a church at the foot of the altar, then as a deacon preparing the altar, and only then, after due consideration by your bishop, priest, and church, at the altar as a priest yourself.
Before I sign off, a word for fellow Anglicans. We cannot underestimate how incredibly difficult it is for someone midlife to walk away from a job that supports their family to enter a tradition in which no job is guaranteed to them in the church for several years. How they are to support their family in the meantime is the great unknown, and a fearful one. If a convert is young, they set off to seminary and begin discerning Holy Orders in the context of a diocese, bishop, and church that can guide them. But as my weekly conversations reveal, the pastor leaving his church at midlife has none of this at all. Best case scenario, there happens to be a diocese, bishop, and church in his backyard. But in many cases, there is none to be found. With no blinking onramp into the ACNA for someone in this unique predicament, something needs to be done, whether informally or formally I leave to the experts. If the ACNA is to grow, this is one way it can happen. As important as it is to support the young couple headed off to seminary, we must be conscientious of the many pastors in midlife looking to change traditions altogether. One thing keeps coming out in my conversations: many of them have something younger folks do not, namely, they know from experience the modern approach to ecclesial catholicity is a dead end. They now merely need a door to open, an entryway to those vast lands where catholicity flourishes. It is worth discussing how we can make more doors or at least make the doors that do exist more visible, so that these pastors looking to convert do not give up and assume there is no key to unlock the door they do not know is right in front of them.
Afterword—
The last question (though it is usually the first question) I am always asked in these emails and phone conversations is, “What should I be reading?” I try not to answer this question until the person is immersed in an Anglican church because the non-Anglican (often Reformed) instinct to keep everything at bay until “I, the decider” make a paper evaluation of an entire tradition based on a confessional statement is corrosive, even abortive. Anglicanism does have a theology, but that theology is not really understood until one is at the altar. But if sacramental participation is taking place, then I usually advise reading these works in the following order: Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (to root out the biblicism of Puritanism prevalent in ecclesiology today); St. Ignatius’s Letters and St. Irenaeus’s Against Heresies to see apostolic succession firsthand; E.L. Mascall’s Corpus Christi because most converts know they need the real presence of Christ but are not sure what that means. Last, I recommend A History of the Church in England by J.R.H. Moorman, to help them move past the myth that Anglicanism is the product of Henry VIII (Moorman’s early patristic and medieval chapters are enlightening, demonstrating there were bishops in England long before pope Gregory sends in Augustine of Canterbury). Moorman also keeps them from reducing Anglicanism to the English Reformation, and opens the reader’s eyes to a beautiful broadness that is seen in his later chapters on the Caroline divines and the Oxford movement.
Photo credit: Original image by Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P.