Ananglican

Just because they say it, that don’t make it so.

There is, around the U.S., and indeed here in Bay County, a group who call themselves “Anglican Church.” It’s a breakaway body that, like other breakaway bodies, loves the name “Anglican” and so have glommed onto it. The fact is, though, that what is “Anglican” in the world is what is “in communion” with the Archbishop of Canterbury. That particular body, and its affiliate national connection, were some years ago singled out and named by the Archbishop of Canterbury as specifically not in communion. So they worship using the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of The Episcopal Church and call themselves “Anglican.” Anyone can hang up a shingle, but that doesn’t make it so any more than calling oneself Robert Frost poeticizes one’s doggerel, or walking around with a scalpel makes one a heart surgeon.

But if they want to be FoxAnglicans, who cares.

Somewhere among Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon books there’s a story of the tiny family group that considers itself the last surviving remnant of the one true church. As those in church with them strayed into error, they have split off and broken away and split off and broken away and split off and broken away, in order to preserve pure doctrine. Every Sunday morning they arrange the dining room chairs around the living room and gather. One of the women has baked a loaf of bread which at the proper time gets passed round the circle and everybody breaks off a chunk and munches solemnly. It’s their Lord's Supper. One woman is there, the wife of a family member, who apparently is a Lutheran (or maybe Methodist, I don’t remember). When the bread comes to her, she breaks off a chuck. Instantly, one of the members leaps from his chair and snatches the morsel from the woman’s lips, shouting, “You ain’t in fellowship.”

It’s the inhospitable nonsense of almost every Christian denomination and so-called “Non-Denomination”. You've got to be in fellowship or you cannot share the blessings. What a load.

A popularism some years ago was "WWJD?". What Would Jesus Do? When it comes to feeding and fellowship and communion, it’s no rhetorical or hypothetical question, because Jesus did do. Every time Jesus fed the crowd, he fed everybody who was there. Never once did he order his disciples, “Check and make sure they’re baptized and in fellowship before you give them bread.” He simply Took, and Blessed, and Broke, and Gave. The notion that the “Church” owns the Altar, the Holy Table, is so much stuff. If the Lord is there, it’s His table, His Altar, His Bread and Wine, His sherry and bickies, and WWJD Rules. If the "Church" announces its rules, restrictions, prohibitions and conditions in the invitation to the Lord's Supper, then it ain't His Supper; it's Someone Else's.

It’s ludicrous that a group bolts the Anglican Communion and thinks to take the name “Anglican” with them, like many of them tried to take the real estate and the trust funds and the candlesticks. But WTH do I know or care. "Just because they say it, that don’t make it so." They are Ananglican, actually.

In Apalachicola years ago, the priest at St. Patrick Catholic Church was transferred and a new priest came in. Compared to the charismatic, warm, kind and friendly priest he replaced, the new man was aloof and distant, and -- surprising, unusual and disappointing for a Roman Catholic priest -- thick and ignorant. Among other densities, he called us the Epsicopal Church and us Epsicopals. That has sort of grown on me, actually: let the Faux-Anglicans, the Ananglicans, have the name. We can be Epsicopal. Nearly Hitovity Epsicopal. It has a nice ring to it. We can be Epsicolopians.

TW+

Pictured: AnanglicanischePauluskirche