Canter Bridge

For those familiar with the internecine warfare that has burst with a force uncontainable by Episcopalian comity since sexual politics have become front and center in the American version of the worldwide Anglican Community, the subtle distinction between those of the tradition who now refer to themselves as ‘Anglican’ and those who retain their identity as ‘Episcopalian’ does not go unnoticed.

The A Word has become a fightin’ word.

Not that you’d notice that at Glenbard West on a Sunday morning, where two services of the Church of the Resurrection briefly displace the airs left by high school assemblies. Polemics seem a world away.

Like in Rwanda, for example. Or Nigeria, perhaps.

Those two countries have become leaders in sending episcopal coverage to refugees from America’s Episcopalian denomination. It is the most unlikely reversal of colonial currents, which normally flow in the opposite direction. It is a snapshot—whether one likes it or not—of the emergence of a global church. Who would have thought that the most clear and politically uncorrect analysis of sociopolitical trends in the light of Christian faith who would dare to send emissaries to morally benighted America?

I must confess that a perversely delightful aroma emerges in all this from time to time amidst all the rest of the smells and bells, a barely deniable Schadenfreude after too many decades of ideological arrogance at the top.

But back to Wheaton, Illinois. Actually one should say Glen Ellyn, Illinois, but the pertinent fact is not the political boundary that divides these two west Chicago suburbs. It is rather the shadow of Wheaton College, American evangelicalism’s erstwhile Vatican. The most visible clergyman at ‘Rez’ is a Wheaton graduate. Many of the worshipers who gather here and sway civilly to the neo-charismatic, old-world-Anglican blend are members of the college’s über-sharp student body.

They have come ‘back’ to an explicitly liturgical way of worshiping the Lord Jesus, perhaps weary of the much-denied, invisible, and implicit liturgy that underlies the monotony of much evangelical worship. Or perhaps they haven’t gone back to anything at all. This may well be the context in which they’ve begun the pilgrimage of faith.

Nobody gets dissed on this late-August service. No ‘liberals’ are held up for rhetorical flogging. Instead, a recognizably Anglican pace flows onward as it has in many places and among many people for very many years. Hands are raised in worship, to be sure, and a certain bodily movement to the music (even the old hymns that become liturgically entwined with newer choruses) appears to be de rigeur. The eucharistic moment is both somber and mildly inebriated by a discernible joy.

You have to pry to figure out that this congregation-in-a-high-school-auditorium-bottle has left anything at all. You need to ask a couple of people before you stumble upon one who knows about the Rwandan bishop.

This looks like Anglican faith and practice. Who has left?