1. Community
Everything in Church, and everything pertaining to healthy Churches and evangelism is RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS, RELATIONSHIPS. All things are relational – cultivating and sustaining healthy and loving relationships. Our time is centered on community. In general, people no longer go to church because of loyalty to a tradition or group. In fact, many do not go because they are hostile to their former. Thus, merely advertising the church is no longer an effective way to reach out. People go to church now because they are drawn into relationships with other people, through which they are drawn into an experience of God. We are an alienated culture. For all the many connections people make on social media, most people are not that close to many other people. Human beings are communal beings. We have a desire to know and be known. For the church effectively to reach out, it must be a place where people can connect deeply with God and others. The two are connected. We know Christ through membership in His Body the Church.
Our mission situation is nearer to that of the first century church than it is to the established mid-20th century church in which many of us were raised. Few people actually know what we are doing in church—and not many in the larger culture care. Evangelism begins through relationships. When people get to know us and find us to be a plausible and attractive community, they want to know what we believe. This leads to instruction in the faith and in our life of prayer, which leads to worship. Evangelism must be focused on developing relationships with other people and on opening new doors of entry that do not have to begin with the Liturgy. But the end is indeed to draw everyone to Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, the Mass, the heart and centre of the Christian Faith. The most attractive thing about us is the joy we experience in our community and the way we love each other. People want to be a part of an intimate and authentic community; they want a place where they can know others and be known by others. When people see us as a joyful and intimate community, they are attracted to us and want to know more about the kind of faith that creates this kind of community. However, if a church is characterized by contention, gossip, hypocrisy, and joyless negativity, no one cares what it believes and no one wants to be there. Let us mindful of these truths going forward. Say no to ‘Angry- cans!’ There is no room for negativity in our Church.
2. The Benedictine Model of life
The Prayer Book took the seven canonical divine Offices of the medieval age and translated them into a sacral, hieratic English and placed them in the hands of the laity and clergy both in two Offices, Matins and Evensong. The daily Mass was preserved and opened to the whole community, clergy and laity alike, in their own tongue. The Benedictine monastery was at first closed but then expanded – as it was grafted into the family unit. The paradigm of Anglican worship and life is the Rule of Saint Benedict, a family spirituality of Common Prayer and common work. The ancient Benedictine model of “Mass and Office Catholicism” is the essence of the Anglican spiritual way. If we pursue a genuine life of family prayer and Common Prayer, our parishes will grow, because they will be attractive and inviting: they fill the void of our godless culture and introduce the Christ of the Redemption to the unchurched and the Christ of His Eternal Priesthood to an unsacramental and unliturgical age. It converted Europe in the early Middles Ages and it will again convert the post-and-pre Christian West of the third millennium.
