Based upon my work over at Rookie Anglican, I was asked by The Telos Collective to write a blog post about the different ways that people are coming into Anglicanism. What’s drawing them in?
You can read my full post over at the Telos Collective blog, but here’s a taste:
Anglican Christianity, precisely because of its weirdness, can remind us that, in the words of Brad Harper and Paul Louis Metzger in Exploring Ecclesiology, “The church is a cultural community. It is Christ’s eschatological kingdom community, itself a culture that engages other cultures from Christ’s kingdom vantage point” (p. 207).
No “culture of this world” can be equated with the culture of Jesus Christ. This is, I suggest, the important sense in which Christians (and not just Anglican ones) should not be “seeker-sensitive.”
And yet, on the other hand, the very mission of the church seems to demand that Christians be “seeker-sensitive” in the best sense of the phrase. This is because the gospel, though it does contain a powerful critique of a world alienated from God, is only “good news” to the extent that it resonates with (and does not merely refute) the cultures in which it is proclaimed.
So, perhaps we Anglicans need to do a better job of being “seeker-sensitive”—in the sense of resonating with the culture(s).
“Resonating” with the culture, however, does not necessarily mean “approving.” Instead, the church’s resonance with the cultures around it will frequently be “subversive” (again, see Scot McKnight’s previous piece).
Toward that end, I’d like to consider some ways in which I’ve noticed the Anglican tradition subversively resonating with the culture(s) around it—especially those in the United States of America in recent years.
Continue reading over at the Telos Collective blog.
Then, let me know whether you think I got it right or not! What’s attracting people to Anglicanism?