The following article is based on a talk given at the event “Guarding a Good Deposit: Authentic Anglicanism Today,” hosted by the Prayer Book Society of NSW and St John’s Cathedral Parramatta.
Raised as a Catholic and educated by the Jesuits, I speak as one untimely born when it comes to matters Anglican. But I am now an ordained Anglican Priest, or presbyter if you prefer, and have found myself on the Sydney Diocesan Doctrine Commission, which recently produced a report on authentic Anglicanism. Here I want to give some personal reflections on some elements of this report. I don’t here speak on behalf of the Commission, but I also hope not to wheel in any proverbial Trojan Horse, or hatch any Gunpowder Plot!
The challenge of defining authentic Anglicanism
Let me begin by describing the main challenge of crafting a report on authentic Anglicanism.
When you look beyond the Sydney Diocese at national or global Anglicanism—and you can get a glimpse of this within the Sydney Diocese too—you might imagine that the denomination is so diverse in liturgy, in theology, and in practice, that defining “Anglican” could be like asking, how long is a piece of string? And you’d be right.
In the face of that reality, it might be tempting just to sit on your hands, or throw them up in the air, or perhaps even make a virtue of the increasingly fragmented, almost totally amorphous comprehensiveness of global Anglicanism—as if to be authentically Anglican amounts to little more than “everyone does as they see fit in their own eyes”, to borrow from the book of Judges!1
Forty or fifty years ago, people would often try to solve the riddle by saying that at least the denomination has some kind of global coherence through communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. But now even that’s no longer a given.
In fact, the event that triggered the report was a statement by a bishop in another diocese that maybe to be an Anglican is simply whoever identifies as such, and no more. It’s hard to imagine a lower common denominator than that.
And the reason the Standing Committee requested the report was out of a sense that we can do better than that—we must do better than that.
But it is easier said than done.
On the one hand, definitions of Anglicanism can be so doctrinaire that they bear no resemblance to reality. Part of the challenge is that the “Anglican” settlement has been a fairly comprehensive beast from its very earliest days, certainly from the late sixteenth century. And by the time of the Restoration in 1662, it would not be at all historically accurate to say that the church was doctrinally uniform, not even liturgically uniform—at least not in practice, quite apart from formal subscription.
You might say, well at least nobody was denying the biblical teaching on marriage back then. But then, there were other hermeneutical moves that the Latitudinarians commonly made that were very problematic from a Reformed point of view. That’s why there were non-conformists, who, of course, took a stand on some of these things at considerable cost. There were plenty of Reformed Anglicans, but those who remained did so having to navigate the complexities of a relatively broad church. That’s no comment on the current situation in the Anglican Communion—the point is, whether you like it or not, Anglicanism has from its very early days been a comprehensive beast.
On the other hand, lowest common denominator definitions of Anglicanism that are purely descriptive and phenomenological aren’t much use at all, and the more fragmented the denomination gets, the more farcical those definitions look.
A doctrinal approach
The Commission decided to take a more doctrinal approach to defining authentic Anglicanism, because it remains defensible both historically, and also locally within the Anglican Church of Australia.
While it may not capture the full reality of what is true in practice—and perhaps never has—it at least has some formal claim at the level of subscription, or it declares what is supposed to be the case, quite apart from how lax the discipline of that subscription has been from the church’s early days.
So, the Commission decided to proceed from the foundation of the three so-called formularies that continue, at least in the Anglican Church of Australia, to be enshrined as Ruling Principles, namely The Book of Common Prayer (1662), the Ordinal, and the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1571).
As I say, in practice there may be a significant degree of latitude in how the application of these ruling principles has been disciplined, but formally they continue to stake a claim for being at the heart of authentic Anglicanism stretching back to the historical origins of the denomination in the English Reformation.
From these formularies, we isolated three distinctive features, namely:
- the specifically Reformed Protestant, as opposed to say Lutheran Protestant character of Anglicanism
- the Liturgical character of Anglicanism as expressed in the orders of service in the BCP, and
- the Episcopal structure of Anglicanism.
The very nature of the first of these distinctives—the distinctively Reformed character of Anglicanism—points back to the supremacy of the Scriptures as the final decisive ruling principle over every other ruling principle, the norm that norms all other norms, as it were. And this too is something we sought to emphasise in the Report.
So that hopefully gives you a brief picture of the challenges approaching this question, and the rationale for taking the direction we did.
Here, I want to draw out just one observation from these conclusions in relation to the liturgical shape of Anglicanism.
The role of liturgy
As the Commission drafted this section of the report, I was a little surprised at the strength of conviction around the table on this distinctive, and the sense that the report perhaps provided an opportunity to speak into a space that’s suffered significant neglect in the Sydney Diocese over the last two or three decades.
These reports do not represent the official position of the Diocese, but are merely advisory in nature. Be that as it may, we agreed that the breadth of liturgical direction that’s expressed in The Book of Common Prayer was intended to serve a critical catechetical and pastoral role—not only catering for a wide range of pastoral circumstances beyond the daily offices, but also in the very profile of its liturgical structure and rhythms—to catechise congregants in the shape of Christian discipleship as it conforms to Christ revealed to us in Scripture. In that way, the liturgy reinforces a Christian hermeneutic, a posture of receiving Christ and being conformed to Christ in word and sacrament.
Let me give an example of what I mean.
A case study: the liturgical calendar
One thing that distinguishes the Anglican Prayer Book liturgy from other Protestant forms of worship is its consciously Reformed reception of the ancient Catholic liturgy in its daily and seasonal rhythms. The question of the liturgical calendar actually generated a bit of friendly tension on the Commission. In my view it’s an inalienable feature of the Prayer Book’s liturgical profile.
The daily offices of Morning and Evening Prayer; the service of Holy Communion, of Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, Ministration of the Sick, and Christian Burial; the masterful arrangement of carefully crafted collects alongside the lectionary, all express what I might call a rich “figuralism” in the way it intentionally maps the story of Christ, and belonging to Christ, onto the contours of daily life and the natural succession of years.
By “figuralism” I am referring to the way God has intentionally ordered the whole of creation to Christ, specifically in and through the words of Scripture. In this way, even the very natural rhythms of the seasons and our daily lives are intended to resonate with and magnify the beauty of what is uniquely revealed to us about God in the gospel.
With this in view, the liturgical seasons aren’t just intended to serve as a cerebral “illustration” or reminder of Christ’s journey from the manger, through the cross and resurrection, to his final return.
They do communicate that, but they are actually intended to show how that story redeems the full sweep of our embodied existence in this world—so that those, as it were, “wearied by the by the changes and chances of this fleeting life” would be constantly reminded in the liturgy that Christ had staked a merciful and redemptive claim on all of it (by the way, that phrase isn’t actually in the 1662 BCP, but the sentiment is!).
For if our lives can be mapped out in a succession of years, with its seasons of beginnings and endings, of seed time, growth, and harvest, so our years capture what is also mapped out in miniature in each and every one of our days, with its beginnings and endings: a daily succession of dawn, noon, and dusk.
That was always the point of the church’s liturgical calendar—to superimpose our spiritual journey as Christ’s disciples onto the natural succession of our days and years (at least as they would unfold in the northern hemisphere!): dawning hope in seasons of decline (Advent), light and joy in seasons of darkness (Christmas), humility and lament in seasons of growth (Lent), as well as joy, thanksgiving, and measured humility in seasons of plenty—stretching out over an entire year what is the normal pattern of discipleship.
Moreover, what the daily office recognises with its careful selection of canticles and collects, is that in each day there is, in a sense, not one season but them all—Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, as well as ordinary times of thanksgiving, perhaps in different proportions depending on what each day presents, but all of them nonetheless.
Take, for example, the Third Collect, for Grace, in the Order for Morning Prayer:
O Lord our heavenly Father, Almighty and Everlasting God, who hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day: Defend us in the same with thy mighty power; and grant that this day we fall into no sin, neither run into any kind of danger; but that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance, to do always that is righteous in thy sight.
Or the Third Collect, for Aid against all Perils, in the Order for Evening Prayer:
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ.
This is why, of course, a whole tradition of hymnary has grown around the liturgical calendar that pays homage to this point. “See amid the winter’s snow”2—that’s not a kind of soppy nostalgia for a cold dark Christmas with lashings of mince pies and mulled wine. No, “see amid the winter’s snow”—as if to say, right at the “dead of night,” when the full forces of darkness have done their worst, stirring within us is the same ancient song of the shepherds: “Lo, … a wondrous light”, for Christ is born in Bethlehem (cf. Luke 2:8–20).
This figuralism is deeply biblical, of course. When the Lord Jesus took to himself the designation “light”—I am the light of the world (John 8:12)—that’s supposed to mean that you never look at a sunrise, or a day or even a night in the week, the same way again. “Awake O sleeper and rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you!” (Eph 5:14). “The night is nearly over, the day is almost here. So let us put aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armour of light” (Rom 13:12).
And the Prayer Book intentionally harnesses this biblical figuralism in liturgical form. That’s not unique to Anglicanism, of course, but it’s been received into Anglican identity in a form chastened by the Protestant Reformation.
Thoughtfully using the liturgy in our own context
I’ll finish with a problem this poses for us.
As non-agrarian city-dwellers, dismembered from the passing of the seasons, the figuralism of the liturgical calendar has become somewhat lost on us. At any rate, the calendar really doesn’t make any sense in the southern hemisphere—and even less sense in the tropics! I was at a conference earlier this year where Catholics and Orthodox theologians were considering among other things the date of Easter, in light of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. One thing I didn’t hear in the mix was any talk of moving the date of Easter to sometime in September!
So for us Anglicans in the southern hemisphere, is the only remaining function of the liturgical calendar to provide an annual, if rather cerebral reminder of the important events in Christ’s life?
If so, is it a surprise that many have come to regard the calendar as a rather redundant form of ritualism—except perhaps where it can be shoehorned into some evangelistic cycle of annual Christmas and Easter outreach, or to provide an outline for a preaching programme?
Can it be retained in any form without a jarring sense of anachronism? Perhaps not—at least, that’s how I normally feel every time I have to endure another Christmas in the sweltering summer heat.
Maybe we have more hope of retrieving something useful from the daily office. But how many churches offer the daily offices, and of those that do, how many turn up? Perhaps there is an opportunity here for creatively weaving the daily office, or a form of it, into the regular habits of our discipleship. I for one have been helped by the Church of England’s Daily Prayer app on my phone.
Perhaps we should remember that Archbishop Cranmer always intended the liturgical feature of Anglican life to be a living thing, and not to ossify into a stale and hackneyed traditionalism. So, whether we keep bits of the liturgical calendar or not, perhaps there’s an invitation here to appropriate liturgy in thoughtful and creative ways that help reinforce the truth that every mundane aspect of our daily lives is deeply embedded in and ordered by the language and figures of Scripture.
This article was originally published in the ACR’s Easter 2026 Journal.