The Most Rev. Peter D. Robinson is the Presiding Bishop of the United Episcopal Church. He also serves as ordinary of the Missionary Diocese of the East and vicar of Good Shepherd Anglican Church in Waynesboro, Virginia.
The “Anti- Syndrome” is one of the ongoing pathologies of the Continuing Anglican Movement. There is quite a bit of positive advertising out there on church websites, but when you actually get to St. Francis-in-the-Fens, what one finds is that this is often a cover for the same old anti-TEC, anti-liberal, anti-gay rhetoric that has…
The Genius of Anglicanism Although Anglicanism has long had ‘Low’ and ‘High’ Church parties, there was, until the late-19th century an underlying theology that united them. The ‘High’ and ‘Low’ concepts of churchmanship were very largely a product of which elements of the English Reformed tradition they chose to emphasize. In terms of the way…
It would probably scare some folks half to death to hear that the commonest form of high churchmanship in the mid-1800s was described as a robust Protestantism. This was because it took seriously the Bible, the Prayer Book, and the Articles of Religion, and had, historically, grown out of churchly reaction against rigid Calvinism which…
Part 5. Architecture Until the mid-nineteenth century, most of England’s churches were mediaeval structures swiftly adapted to reformed worship in 1559-1562, with the introduction of the 1559 Prayer Book and the accompanying Elizabethan Injunctions. These had then been subjected to a process of slow evolution over the next two centuries as reformed worship matured and…
Part 4. Ceremonial We do not think of 1700s Anglicanism as being particularly interested in ceremonial, but there was a good deal left over from Lancelot Andrewes and his school, with their concern for the beauty of holiness. There was a basic decorum to public worship, which included the basic Anglican rule of “sit to…
Part 3. Music in the Parish Church By contrast to the cathedrals, where a full choral establishment of organist, lay-clerks, and choristers was the norm, the musical resources of parishes churches were much more various. Some small and remote parishes simply had a clerk who would line out the metrical psalms that punctuated 1700s Anglican…
Part 2: Music Anglicanism in the 1700s had two distinct musical traditions, which, for the sake of convenience I will call “cathedral” and “parish.” In using those terms, it must be remembered that the cathedral style of worship was also maintained by other places having a choral foundation including the Chapel Royal, the Royal Peculiars…
Part 1: The Liturgy In the eighteenth century, liturgy meant the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. The colonies used the BCP of the parent church, and Ireland’s 1666 edition was very little different from the main text. The American BCP, of course, does not appear until nearly the end of the century, and differed only…
Growing up in the Church of England the Book of Common Prayer (“BCP”) was more of a tool and a reference point than anything else. By the time I came along, it was not the exclusive liturgy of the Church, and modest attempts to modernize the liturgy were being made in the form of the…
I spent an interesting twenty minutes on Monday reading an article entitled, “The Anglican Appeal to Lutheran Sources: Philipp Melanchthon’s Reputation in 17th Century England” by Dewey D. Wallace Jr., which first appeared in the Journal of the Historical Society of the PEC in 1983. In it, Wallace outlines the Philippist influence on the English…