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We Call Ourselves Liberal Anglo-Catholics. What Do We Mean?

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We Call Ourselves Liberal Anglo-Catholics. What Do We Mean? We call ourselves liberal Anglo-Catholics. What do we mean? Series of homilies for Advent 2016 Advent 1 - Sunday 27 November 2016 Parish of Saint Matthias (Bellwoods) – Mother Joyce Barnett O House of Jacob, let us walk in the light of the Lord! - Isaiah 2:5 When someone fell through the floor in our beloved jewel of a church building last February, we locked the doors so that it couldn’t happen again. I know that some people thought that we should simply do a quick repair and keep going. But what kind of responsibility would we have, if it happened again a second time? Someone else might also be hurt. Also our wardens would incur the liability on our behalf, and I am pretty committed to making sure that neither of those things happen. There is money in the Diocesan coffers that will go a long way towards helping us fix our little church, making it stronger and ready for a future of sustained use. But they want to know a couple of things. Do we have a good sense of what God is calling us to as the parish of St. Matthias? And are we putting in all the resources that we can? We know that the Diocese sees our potential as a centre for ministry and mission in our neighbourhood. We are in a strategic location in the city, we are a diverse community and we are dedicated to God’s mission at St. Matthias. Most of us remember how we responded when Mayor Rob Ford and City Council were threatening to save money by closing Bellwoods House. We responded on many levels, letter writing, calling councillors and making deputations at City Hall. We are missional people. But we have become a bit too insular over time. Understandable when we’ve felt like we had to run as fast as we could just to keep the lights on. But now, to save ourselves and the Anglican presence in this neighbourhood, we have to step out in faith. I spoke to Fr. David Hoopes, the prior at the Order of the Holy Cross about our need to get in touch with and develop our sense of being called to God’s mission. He told me that the danger for Anglo-Catholics is to confuse Anglo-Catholicism with Ritualism. Our ritual must always be in service of feeding us for our work in God’s world. He told me that sometimes people ask him why he is so faithfully present at the clinic for the homeless at the Cathedral. This participation for Fr. David, comes from his faith, his confidence that he is doing what he is called to do with the people that God loves. Our call to mission and ministry comes from our faith, from our beginnings as Anglo- Catholics. I could begin our history with the early church of course, but for today, we‘re going to start in Victorian England. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the church and the state in England were interconnected institutions. But what kind of church was it, bound up in Victorian strictures and morality? Church was for the most part, well-attended. The Eucharist was not celebrated very often. It was Morning and Evening Prayer. Anglicans were pretty staunchly anti-liberal and anti-Catholic. There were some good works happening because evangelical Christians believed in charity. They worked for prison reform and for the abolition of slavery. They were partners with the Crown in expanding the British Empire, as the Christian Missionary Society went out from England along with the army. There is a famous painting in the National Portrait Gallery in London that was painted by Thomas Jones Barker that shows Queen Victoria giving the bible to an ambassador from East Africa. It is called The Secret of England’s Greatness. The High Church in England on the other hand was less influential and at the time, more concerned to preserve the privileges that the church enjoyed. In the 1830s, all institutions were in upheaval, mostly in reaction to the downfall of the monarchy in France. The bishops responded by reorganising dioceses and revenues. But more was needed. The Church of England needed to rediscover their spiritual life. As the evangelicals continued their good works supported by a fundamentalist reading of scripture and an uncomplicated theology, in Oxford something very old and very new was brewing. The men, and at this point it was all men, dedicated themselves to a different kind of revival. They wanted to bring holiness back to human culture. To plumb the depths of Anglicanism and bring out the intensity and spirituality of the early church. John Keble, Richard Harrell Froude, Edward Pusey, and the one we know so well because he would jump ship in 1845 and join the Roman Catholics, John Henry Newman. Sometimes, these Oxford Movement folks were known as Tractarians because they communicated their ideas using tracts. This was not a new idea, many people published tracts, but these were the first that were written by Oxford Dons, for educated people. There were 90 tracts in all and they were thought to be brilliant. They would concentrate on one topic, whether church services were too long for example (No is his answer, and he quotes St. Paul telling us to pray always!) Or more often a tract concentrated on one article in the creed and illuminated it. People found new hope and meaning in them and at only pennies each, the tracts were affordable. During this period, 1830-1845, there was little thought of trying to create innovation. Neither were they trying to appeal to working people. But country clergy were starting to listen and to pay attention to theological questions. After 1845, a more progressive side of the new movement began to emerge. These theologians were listening to the Christian Socialists and to Frederick Dennison Maurice, who, although he was not an Anglo-Catholic, but rather more broad church, had famously said, “There is no true Christianity without Socialism, and no true Socialism without Christianity.” The original Oxford dons continued to preach and teach under the leadership of Pusey. But the departure of Newman had been a blow. The Church of England was still terribly prejudiced against the Roman church. There were no more tracts. This is of course, the time period of our birth here on Bellwoods Ave in 1873. We were founded to be the mother-house for Anglo- Catholics in Toronto, to be close to Trinity College in Bellwoods Park, but also to be a church for the poor and working class people of this neighbourhood. It was built from the trees that were cut down to make room for the church and with pews that would remain forever free and unencumbered by that blight on the Anglican landscape, pew rents. In those days, as in England, most of the church was evangelical and Anglo-Catholics were looked upon with great suspicion. We were here in time to receive the first Anglican sisters when they arrived from England, because no other Toronto parish would allow them to live within their bounds. Meanwhile in England the Guild of St. Matthew was founded based on Anglo-Catholic and Socialist principles. They were concerned to have beautiful and spirit-filled liturgy, with frequent Communion. They were committed to the study and remedy of social and political ills in light of the gospel. Their theology was particularly focused on the incarnation. For God loved the world so much that God chose not only to be with us, but to be one of us. Guild members fought injustice wherever they found it: they called for a reduction in the hours of work, for decent housing, fair taxation, free education for all. And they did not neglect what they saw happening overseas. They opposed 2 forced labour in East Africa. I appreciate that they were known for attacking injustice wherever they found it and they proposed remedies. Ordained Guild members chose to go to the poorest and most difficult parishes, believing that God was calling them to minister among the miners, the dock workers, the unemployed. Unlike the good works of the Victorian evangelicals which was a charity model, the Anglo- Catholics were being called to live in the midst of the people they were called to serve. As Bp. Poole would say to us, “Anglo-Catholics have dirt under their fingernails.” We are called to live out with this principle today. It can be difficult to be with people where they are. Sometimes it is easier to feed people to invite them to eat with us. One of my favourite members of the Guild of St. Matthew was Stewart Duckworth Headlam. He was regularly in trouble with his bishop because of some of his teachings and some of his actions. He was particularly vehement against the traditional model of hell, and preached an all-loving and all-forgiving God. His bishop also disliked Headlam’s support of actors and the stage, especially when he stood bail for Oscar Wilde, who had been charged with the crime of homosexuality. Headlam believed that his teacher, F. D. Maurice was correct when he taught that the Kingdom of God would be a just and egalitarian society. Not long after this, a woman named Vita Scudder who had studied in England came to the United States and was teaching at Wellesley College. She was a Anglo-Catholic Socialist and a Companion of the Order of the Holy Cross. She nearly lost her job in later years because she supported the mill workers strike in Lawrence Mass.
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