Guest Post: Why Anglicanism?

Brendan Trinkle is a member of our Launch Team and is heading up music for The Parish. 

As the first Anglican church I’ve been a member of, the Parish is breathing fresh air into my notion of community. One of the things I love about Anglicanism as a tradition is its connection to the past, present, and future church. When I read scripture selections from the Daily Office or hear a sermon from the Lectionary, there is a profound comfort in knowing that Christians around the world are drawing and have drawn from the same source, finding discipline and encouragement through calendric rhythms. My definition of community has been reshaped as I consider this relationship to the global, historical church.

The Parish values, as most Anglican churches do, a balance among the evangelical, the charismatic, and the liturgical. For most of my life I’ve understood these words as denominational classifiers, and depending on which tradition you come from a Parish service might feel more like one or the other. Nonetheless, I find it so healthy for a community to let each of these expressions of faith temper the others, learning about and experiencing God through each.

Where the world feels like it moves at breakneck speed, there is comfort and a feeling of safety for me in an emphasis on the ancient nature of our faith. It has helped me understand the timeless truths of God to read prayers and liturgies written hundreds of years ago as the church grappled with the same hardships we do today – pain, heartache, violence, and death. As the writer of Ecclesiastes puts it, “there is nothing new under the Sun,” and that includes my wrestling to understand what it means to live, to be human, and to know God. Many before me have survived the struggle, faith intact.

I know I speak for everyone at the Parish when I say we’re thrilled to be following Jesus in this way, sitting with old forms and finding new life in them. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and yet I think He knows we need to experience His “sameness” in fresh ways.