Rachel and I have settled into attending All Saints Community Church. It is a very small (~40 people there on any given Sunday) Anglican Coalition in Canada (ACiC) church which, theologically, is to the Anglican Church of Canada as the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) is to the Episcopal Church. There is a key difference in heredity of the laity, however. The laity in AMiA is largely composed of disaffected evangelicals while, from our limited experience of ACiC the laity seem to be largely disaffected Anglicans. There is a distinctly different flavour to the service according to this. But I digress.
Let me paint a picture of a typical Sunday.
All Saints meets in a dainty little Catholic Chapel in the lazy seaside community of Crescent Beach. Small paintings of the stations of the cross hang on the walls and culminate in a 10 foot tall 'crucifix' that stands over the alter depicting our risen Lord standing triumphantly next to the cross. The priest wears white robes graced with a forest green stole.
Encased in the formal garb and traditional liturgy is a spirit and style of worship that brings me back to Hillcrest Chapel (the Assemblies of God church I grew up in) of 1992. Peter Klenner, the priest, spent much of his life in Australia, and has the accent to prove it. He preaches dynamic, interactive sermons. He shies not from discussing issues of social justice and poverty. Peter speaks plainly. He was the first person I have heard explicitly speak the equation that is really the foundation of AMiA and ACiC and that was implied in so much of the discussion from Urbana '06: “we [the Western Church] are resource wealthy and spiritually poor. The church in the developing world is spiritually wealthy and resource poor. Therefore we should give the church in the developing world the material resources necessary to teach us and others, spiritually.
The key difficulty Rachel and I have with this church is that there is one other “young” person. She is 35. We don't have many peers. So, we decided to attend the “Young Adults” service at a local evangelical megachurch in the hopes of meeting some peers. I felt strangely alien through the evening, which was filled with descriptions of the structure of the service, cliches about 'accountability partners,' 'quiet times,' 'generational differences,' 'reaching out and doing evangelism,' and the like.
When I made the observation that the content of the service seemed to be method-rich and gospel-poor as we drove home, Rachel described a profound and gripping observation. Many Evangelical churches assume knowledge of the gospel. Except when 'evangelism' is being done. Many churches have, in stark contrast to what their theology would state, created a faith of works. Accept the logical proposition “You're a sinner. Jesus died for your sins. Believe this and you'll go to heaven,” do your 'quiet times,' talk regularly with your 'accountability partners,' and you will be a good Christian. If this observation is true, there is a serious and frightening possibility that the evangelical church will die in the same way that the mainline protestant denominations have died over the past century. Let us hope this will not be the case.
We left this experience deeply grateful for the one sermon Ken Ross, the priest at The International Anglican Church in Colorado Springs, always preached. Jesus died. Jesus rose from the dead. That changes everything!
