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This book is a response to a suggestion made by a friend, who read a report of an interview with me in the Professional Supplement of the October 1980, issue of The Episcopalian. In that interview, I had expressed the opinion that many Episcopalians seem to be speaking these days to important matters with little knowledge of our Anglican heritage. His point was that one reason for this is that there is next to no material available to help people know that heritage. He went on to advise that I might try to do something about that lack.

His suggestion fell on fertile ground. In my own evolving life in the church a renewed concern for our Anglican outlook has been awakened. I am convinced that most of us, if not all, are members of this communion for important reasons that we hold dear, but often find difficult to express. A symptom of this is the resistance of many of us to an unthinking appropriation of other styles of belief and practice, which resistance may appear to others as a mere perverse obstinacy. What may be happening is that we cannot verbalize a threatened loss to what we sense very deeply as intrinsic to our Anglican way.

In pursuing this line of thought I have written a book which is necessarily personal. It describes frankly my understanding of what it means to be an Anglican. I can claim for that fifty-one years of active and thoughtful participation in the Episcopal Church, but certainly not an absence of a bias. I have never known two Episcopalians to agree totally, and the fact that we can admit our disagreements is only indicative of our Anglican freedom to acknowledge the polymorphous nature of all human knowing, something not every Christian body is comfortable admitting.

I would argue that my approach is reasonable. I am not saying that it is always analytical or that I have sought to prove my position. This is not what I think Anglicanism intends by being reasonable. By “reasonable” I mean that the argument does not violate in any obvious way a reflective, balanced examination of experience by one who believes himself in love with God.

I am aware that not everyone likes the name for our communion of “Anglican,” and may find the title and subsequent discussion irritating. There are those who have taken the title Anglican unto themselves to name their own schismatic groups. Obviously, this is not a practice that can be supported. Occasionally someone comes up with the notion that “Anglican” is the equivalent of “high church,” which is wrong. There are others within the Episcopal Church who believe that because Anglican means “English” that it is too provincial. On the contrary, let us acknowledge that the roots of our peculiar way of looking at the Christian experience are provincial; they evolved from the English province of Christendom. This should bother us no more than Roman does the Roman Catholic Church. I mean by Anglican, to be specific, nothing more than those Christians who worship according to some authorized edition of the Book of Common Prayer and who are in communion with the see of Canterbury.

In this spirit, I find it much easier to identify Anglicanism with persons rather than a system, although I do not agree that we lack a system. This personal approach has dictated the design of the study, inasmuch as each chapter draws upon some one individual whom I judge to epitomize the point to be made. This will, it is hoped, make the subject matter concrete and more readily appropriated. We are a people-oriented church and it is important that we make a concerted effort to know and celebrate our heroes.

There is no intention to pursue the many obvious loose ends that each chapter leaves dangling. This book is intended to make a beginning for whoever reads it — priest or lay person, inquirer or lifelong member — and to invite an intelligent and ever more informed quest. I am of the opinion that it is neither possible nor desirable to make a neat package, but there is spiritual growth in the effort.

Sometimes the only thing outsiders recall about the Episcopal Church or Anglicanism is that it is supposedly divided into high church and low church. Inasmuch as this is a gross simplification of a very complicated history of Anglicanism and is fundamentally untrue, there is no discussion of that issue in this book. I have sought to take a position which I believe to be consistent with the theology of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church. This book promises among those who listen to lay to rest the so-called churchmanship controversies that have sapped the energy of the Anglican Church for far too long.

Some years ago I had the occasion to preach in a seminary chapel on the Feast of the Bestowal of the American Episcopate (November 14). It provided an occasion for a “cradle Episcopalian” such as myself to ask why he was an Anglican. The answer that came to me then and remains with me is that, with all its irritating nonsense, I know of no place in which I could have more freedom to be that Catholic Christian which we are called to be. I leave it for the reader to ponder my meaning.

On how many occasions have I delighted in expressing thanks to those who made a book possible. The list always differs a bit. This time there is the University of the South and Robert Ayres, its Vice-Chancellor, who acknowledged my need for a sabbatical leave. Robert Haden, LaRue Downing and Ed Hartley all gave me a place to work and time to do it at the Kanuga Conference Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina. I am grateful to Lisa Kirby, who typed the manuscript. The Rector, Alex Viola, and the people of St. James Church, Hendersonville, warmly welcomed my wife and me to their lively community, and as a result, I found new enthusiasm to write thankfully of our Anglican heritage.

The book is dedicated to one who lives in Hendersonville, a quiet, deeply devoted priest, who has been my mentor and friend for more than thirty-eight years. As one grows older he realizes who counts to him, and Gale Webbe is one right at the top of my list.

Urban T. Holmes

Monday in Holy Week, 1981