Episcopal Identity, Part 1: Informed Worship
FROM THE RECTOR
People often ask me about the Episcopal Church and what it means to be an Episcopalian. Sometimes these questions come from strangers who see me in a clerical collar or newcomers who are just starting to learn about our tradition, but frequently they come from people who have been worshipping at St. Paul’s for years. Who are we? What do we believe? What is distinct about our denomination?
In this three-part series, I will explore the ins and outs of the Episcopal Church by describing why I am an Episcopalian. I hope you will do the same and share with me and others why you belong to our church.
I grew up as a Methodist, going to church almost every time the doors were open, but I discovered early on that I had a hunger for something more—not better, not different, just more. I went to a residential school for my last two years of high school, and, although I usually went home and worshipped with my family during the weekends, I walked to the Episcopal Church down the street for special services on days like Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
I remember being absolutely captivated by every aspect of worship in that church. The congregation stood together, knelt together, and sat back down together. People were juggling hymnals, prayer books, and bulletins, yet they never seemed to lose their place in the service. Out of the corner of my eye, I marveled at those in my pew or across the aisle who seemed to know exactly when to bow and when to make the sign of the cross. Every time the priest said, “The Lord be with you,” we all responded with one voice, “And also with you.” I was home.
What initially attracted me to the Episcopal Church was what I (inaccurately) felt was its “High-Church” worship. A quarter-century later, I realize that truly High-Church worship is sacramentally centered in ways that the church I first attended was not, but, to this lifelong Methodist, any physical gesture, like making the sign of the cross, qualified. But I quickly discovered that what really made me feel at home in an Episcopal service was not just the formality of worship but how that formality taught us something about God.
Back then, I could not have articulated a theological connection between the intentionality of worship and the Episcopal Church’s beliefs about God, but the emphasis on ritual drew me closer to God in several ways that I could that I could feel. First and foremost, worship in the Episcopal Church required that I bring God my best. When I went to church, I knew that I was encountering something—the presence of the divine—that graciously yet insistently asked me to give back everything I had to offer. I wanted more than a casual experience of God’s presence. My spirit yearned for the sort of meaningful exchange that only a real encounter with God could offer, and everything from the timeless language of worship, the beautifully complicated hymns and service music, the approachable intellectualism of the sermon, the necessity of simultaneously using multiple liturgical texts, and the physicality of the whole experience gave me just that.
Second, in a way I had never experienced before, worship in the Episcopal Church invited me to give my whole body to the liturgy. Initially, I had no idea why we were bowing when the cross went by or before we went forward for Communion, and I did not understand why we only made the sign of the cross some of the times when the Trinitarian formula was spoken, but I recognized that I was able to worship God with more than my mind and my mouth. Other than kneeling at the Communion rail, I had never knelt to pray before, and I found that, as my body adopted a prayerful posture, my heart and mind followed close behind. Without anyone saying a word, the movements and gestures of worship taught me that God was manifest in ways that transcend our understanding and comprehension.
Finally, in the Episcopal Church, Holy Communion was something we shared not only on the first Sunday of the month but almost every time we gathered together. Growing up, those were among my least favorite Sundays because, in addition to enduring a really long sermon and rambling pastoral prayers, we also had to sit through the extra Communion prayers. Looking back, I remember liking the text of the eucharistic prayers and the act of receiving the bread and the grape juice, but it felt like too much was being squeezed into the service.
In the Episcopal Church, things felt more balanced. The sermon was (usually) still important, but the preacher seemed to know instinctively that a thirty-minute sermon would not fit into a service that also included Holy Eucharist. Also, the reverence and holiness with which the prayers were said at the altar and with which the congregation came forward to receive “the gifts of God for the people of God” let me know that we were doing something special. Somehow I knew that the Jesus I had heard about my whole life was actually there to meet me in a way I could see and taste and touch. Worship in the Episcopal Church embodied the belief that God reveals Godself to us sacramentally—materially and spiritually at the same time—and that seemed to shape everything we did in church together.
Over the years, I have worshipped in lots of Episcopal congregations. Some of them have been genuinely High Church, and some have been “snake-belly Low.” Regardless, all of them have approached worship with the same sacred intention, trusting that God comes among God’s people in ways that transcend their understanding yet invites them to give their whole selves—body and mind—back to God. In that way, what we do in church blends the sacramentality of the Catholic tradition and importance of an individual understanding of God as revealed in scripture, which is the hallmark of our Protestant history.
That has been our heritage as descendants of the English Reformation. Although we share a Protestant identity with many other denominations, the Episcopal Church is both Catholic and Reformed, and a commitment to informed, biblical, traditional, sacramental worship has defined us through the centuries. In ways that I will explore in detail next week, it is that particular and peculiar commitment to worship that has shaped our theology and that most clearly defines us as Anglicans—not merely as a “middle way” between Catholic and Protestant but as a genuinely unique tradition in the Christian faith.
I suspect that many of you who did not grow up in the Episcopal Church were also drawn initially to this denomination because of its commitment to worship. What was it about our church that helped you experience God in important, meaningful ways? How does our worship inform your understanding of who God is and what God asks of you? Why is the Episcopal Church the place where you most fully experience God’s presence in your life?
Whatever it is that has brought you to our church, our worship is what unites us, not only as a congregation but as a global denomination. As I will describe next week, our commitment to common prayer and worship makes it possible for us to experience unity with each other and with God despite all of the differences that we bring to God’s table and, even more than that, to celebrate those differences as a fuller experience of the reign of God here among us. Stay tuned!
Yours faithfully,
Evan D. Garner