Associating with Anglicans (Part 2)

The Church in the Age of Revolution

The beginning of the 18th Century saw a dramatic decrease in religious fervor, though not necessarily in religious discipline or witness. The post-reformation period saw a community attempting to maintain a witness in a world that was seeing the growth of rational thought and scientific discourse. In terms of the Church, several important events took place. When Charles II’s successor, James II, again began to demonstrate an over-emphasized relationship with catholicism, many feared that it would either be a repeat of Mary's brutal regime or the revolution that had arisen under Charles. Anxiety over these warring postures became the grounds for factions to develop within Parliament, which eventually aided the deposition of James II to replace him with the Dutch Protestants William III and Mary II. In the Church, however, many bishops felt compelled by conscience to abstain from taking the Oath of Allegiance to their new monarchs, having already sworn civil obedience to James. This created the nonjuring schism of the late 17th Century. The Dutch rulers gave way to the Hanoverian Dynasty in the early 18th Century, which steadied again the course of the English Church. Arising from among the nonjuring clergy was William Law, whose devotional texts became indicative of the period’s focus on piety and consistent witness within a constantly shifting culture. The Church of England enjoyed a period of comfort after the extremity it had previously faced. This, however, led to new issues.

It was from this quiet scene that the Evangelical movement arose, particularly with John Wesley in the mid-18th Century, which centered on a revival of the importance of personal faith in the power of God as conveyed in the preaching of the Gospel. Historian John Moorman notes the movement as having four focal points: 1) Conversion: that believers must be ‘born again’ as a response to a call for a complete change of life in light of the truth of what God has done for humanity; 2) Biblicism: evangelicals have an extremely high view of biblical authority and personal reading of the Bible; 3) Crucicentrism: a highly emphasized focus on salvation as coming through the death and resurrection of Jesus; 4) Activism: the call to have an active expression of faith and displayed through a sharing of the Gospel in word and action. Christian historian David Bebbington notes that an additional development of the Evangelical Movement was a renewed and augmented doctrine of assurance, by which believers believed almost to an extreme extent in the immutability of their salvation once gained in conversion, which perhaps allowed for the great sense of pathos generated by preachers within the movement. Its greatest strength is in its stress of personal relationship with Jesus over and against the passivity that can sometimes be engendered in liturgical settings.

While one branch of the Evangelical revival coalesced into the Methodist Movement within the Church of England and largely retained its ecclesial roots for a long time as it remained in established parishes, other branches of the movement found space to range out on the frontier. The Wesleyan movement was joined by famous preachers such as George Whitefield, who became known for their poignant and lengthy sermons highlighting the movement's tenets, though admittedly becoming less ecclesially-grounded. As Whitefield and others journeyed to British colonies in America, the Evangelical movement became distanced from its ecclesial structures in the Church of England. It incrementally hitched up with similar evangelistic renewals among the Confessional Protestants. This First Great Awakening resulted not in forming a new Church but rather in an energy distilled from all of them. Out of that renewalism came revivalism, a roaming itinerant spirituality that came and went among the Churches. It is no coincidence, as well, that this movement coincided with rising revolutionary sentiment among the colonies. As Christians absorbed the possibility of loosing ecclesial structures, so they also began to consider the loosening of political arrangements as well. As I noted in my posts about Evangelicalism, we are still observing the effects of that movement and its relationship to the political sphere today.

After the Revolution, the Anglican Church in America found itself in a bind. The Anglican clergy in the new nation found themselves uncertain about their continuity with the episcopal succession of the ancient church since they could no longer submit themselves for consecration (which at the time required an oath of allegiance to the sitting monarch). To their aid came those nonjuring bishops in Scotland who consecrated the first American bishop, Samuel Seabury. As a condition of his consecration, however, the Americans agreed to incorporate the liturgical language of the Scottish Book of Common Prayer. In particular, they advised the Episcopal Church to integrate the ‘epiclesis’ from their Eucharistic Rite, the point in the liturgy when the Church invokes the Holy Spirit to make the bread and wine the Body and Blood of Christ. That language reflected the liturgical sensibilities of the East, drawing from non-jurors' own dialogues with the Orthodox, which we discussed in a previous post. A year after the United States Constitution was ratified, the Episcopal Church released the 1789 American Book of Common Prayer. Anglicanism in America had taken root.

Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics

In England, the early 19th Century brought the Church to a crossroads of whether to reconsider its relationship to its catholic heritage. The primary cause of the Oxford Movement came from the actions of a Whig administration whose administration in the 1830s led to the reduction of bishoprics and the leasing of Church lands, creating the fear that there would be a wholesale secular takeover of the Church’s properties. As such, the movement was at first an attack on theological liberalism and accompanying governmental overstepping. What resulted was a return to the Church Fathers and a contemplation of the constitution of the ancient Christian Church. The major arguments of the Oxford Movement arose from the meditations that certain ancient Christian traditions had been lost during the Reformation and should be reinstated.

As a part of this effort, the Oxford Movement of the 19th Century drove a reevaluation of ancient catholic practices and disciplines. John Keble’s The Christian Year laid a foundation for the orderly practice of personal piety throughout the year, combining the Scriptures with the Book of Common Prayer in a single volume. Moreover, the sermons of John Henry Newman and later Edward Pusey established the basis for a return to greater ornamentation in what came to be called ‘high church’ liturgy. By the mid-19th Century, the Church of England had meditated deeply on the salvation of souls with the Evangelicals and its relationship to tradition with the Oxford Tractarians.

Still, they had yet to consider the adornment of the Church’s liturgies. The Tractarians argued not only for the permissibility of ornamentation of the Church’s liturgies but for why they were reasonable and even necessary. Yet this provoked a conflict over what degree of ornamentation, especially in the Eucharistic Rite, was appropriate. The Tractarians saw in the Church’s architectural and liturgical history every reason to beautify the Mass with the utmost ceremony, given their meditation on what was happening as Christ became present there. The Oxford Movement’s influence even led to a proposed Prayer Book revision in 1892, which reflected their scholarly efforts to evaluate and emphasize the centrality of the Eucharist, the use of the Missal in the Mass, the ornamentation of worship, the reinstitution of religious orders, the Calendar and the festal year, and the use of vestments. Even so, the proposed book would not attain widespread appeal, as not all Anglicans favored this return to Anglicanism’s pre-Reformation roots.

Here, the relative tolerance of the Elizabethan Settlement and the Anglican motif of being the via media, or middle way, created a perplexing situation. Perhaps to everyone’s surprise, the era of enthusiastic Evangelicalism was followed by equally enthusiastic Anglo-Catholicism. This movement, however, provoked the apprehensions of Anglicans with an allergy to anything resembling Roman Catholicism. Thus, in 1873, Bp. George David Cummins (then the Assistant Bishop of Kentucky) initiated a dialogue with Anglican low-churchmen over preserving the distinctly Protestant elements present in the Church. Through the lens of Anglican Evangelicalism, Cummins gathered the voices of Anglicans who emphasized those Protestant Confessional identities within the Church, particularly the Evangelical and Reformed (Calvinist). Cummins and his colleagues contended that the Oxford Movement represented a departure from the essentially Reformational identity of the Anglican Church to characterize theirs as a ‘continuity movement.’ Meanwhile, the Anglo-Catholics contended that the Anglican Church’s life began long before it departed from Rome’s jurisdiction and that they were the continuity movement from which the Reformers were departing. Both cited the Elizabethan Settlement as a vindication for their position, and also as the grievous reason why the other had been allowed to persist.

Out of the conflict arose a movement within the Protestant Episcopal Church called the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC). Despite its name, it did not profess a distinctly Calvinist theology, although one may observe how it eventually tended in this direction. As the REC coalesced into its own entity, it saw a diminishing relationship with the developed theology of the Church in the West, seeking instead the reformational goal of ad fontes, returning to the sources of Christian faith. What resulted was a traditionally Evangelical Anglicanism mixed with elements of Puritan sensibilities (becoming as Presbyterian as Anglicans could feasibly become). In their liturgical practices, REC Anglicans adapted elements of the 1662 BCP, which was still pure enough (in their minds) of the corruptions of creeping Anglo-Catholicism. They developed their own Book in 1873, which underwent several revisions through the 20th Century. To this day, the REC remains an odd bird in the Anglican menagerie, not clearly aligning with the broader Episcopal Church in the U.S. or the Church of England. They are presently in communion with the Anglican Church of North America (which we will discuss below) but also have a vexed time at it. The REC is a living embodiment of that era of Confessional Protestantism on Anglicanism but also seems to struggle with itself and everyone else regarding what makes the Church sufficiently Protestant, making it a work in progress.

The immediate aftermath of the REC’s departure from the mainline Episcopal Church came as the Church was still healing from a recent division during the American Civil War. As the South seceded from the Union, their dioceses had convened in Montgomery, Alabama to create a new province in formal separation from their northern brethren. After the war, the Church began to confront the difficulties of being a Church that included newly emancipated slaves when it had variously fought or supported the institution of slavery in the previous centuries. It was not possible at that time to say that the Episcopal Church was for or against slavery, as bishops had argued for both sides of the debate. One can observe in this identity crisis the taproots of the Episcopal Church’s enthusiasm to embrace an increasingly aggressive regimen of social reforms in the ensuing century, leading it to a breaking point in the 1970s. The grievous moral injury that a support of slavery had inflicted on the Church, to say nothing of the incalculable loss of a generation of churchmen in the war itself, would have a profound effect on the stability of the Church as it entered the 20th Century, an era which would only unfold more horrors.

Anglicans in a World at War

So many different influences conspired toward the end of the 19th Century to present Anglicans with perhaps their greatest identity crisis. The British Empire's waning influence disrupted the unity among Anglican provinces as sudden political independence forced the Church to contend with a host of new relationships with local, indigenous governments, many of which were formed through the violence of civil strife. The United States persisted in an isolationist posture after a century of westward expansion and civil conflict. At the same time, within her borders, regionalism and a massive influx of new immigration tested the extent of its pluralistic ideals. Europe was in the throes of radical socialist uprisings made possible by the waning influence of a Church rendered inert by its slow or retrograde responses to modern Biblical criticism, rampant social inequality, and techno-industrialism. Philosophically, Darwin was revising notions of what it meant to be embodied, Freud was revising notions of what it meant to be ensouled, Marx was revising notions of what it meant to be a political creature, and Nietzsche was revising notions of what it meant to belong to God. Modernism arose with a revived, revolutionary ambition—this time not to reform the old structures but to do away with them and replace them entirely.

Meanwhile, the rise of the Social Gospel confronted the Church with demands for effective responses to emergent social injustices. In the United States, especially, the Social Gospel drew on the Episcopal Church’s ambiguity toward racial injustice in the previous century and the economic inequality that arose in its wake. At the same time, the suffrage movement was well underway, leading toward elevating women’s voices through recognizing their right to vote and questioning how the Church would adapt to their new influence. The emergent political theories from Europe made their way to the United States, galvanizing labor movements to demand greater economic power. Suddenly, the older forms of religion were deemed useless to grant people the place and power they sought and increasingly felt was theirs to seize by whatever means necessary. The Church was faced with incredible social pressure to update itself to meet modern sensibilities or be consigned to the rubbish heap of irrelevance.

Yet even while the modernizing world demanded that the Church change or die, many faithful Anglicans of evangelical and anglo-catholic stripes were out ministering to their communities. The Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Communion blessed a renewal of monastic and religious communities in 1897, which resulted in a deepening of spirituality that coincided with a bolstered social focus. We might also look to the slum priests in English cities, who ministered in the most abject of conditions while worshiping the Lord in the beauty of holiness. The Church was rising to meet the real spiritual and material needs of the day. Even so, that response was to be radically disrupted by the apocalyptic years of the two world wars to follow.

In 1916, a teenage C.S. Lewis wrote to his father at the outset of WWI, “All those who have the courage to do so and are physically sound, are going off to be shot: those who survive are the moral and physical weeds—a fact which does not promise favorably for the next generation.” The world of Victorian gentility would be disfigured through the unspeakable loss of life in the trenches of Europe as the Allies pushed back against the Central Powers. The nightmarish absurdity of the new kind of war and its lethal technologies threw wave after wave of the best and brightest into the field as cannon fodder. Many of those who survived were traumatized and maimed. As Lewis suspected, the loss of life and of many young leaders altered the course of governments and churches in the ensuing generation.

Even so, the darkness served as a backdrop to many luminous presences. In the universities, Lewis would survive the horrors of the Somme and return to Oxford, where the gap in legacy admissions would afford him more opportunity to pursue his studies in the company of what would become a group of famous Christian intellectuals called the Inklings. In the Church, Bp. William Temple would revitalize the Anglo-Catholic spirit, leading the Church toward spiritual healing grounded in the stability of the ancient Faith that had endured epochs of profound suffering and so could speak directly to the moment. In the United States, revivalism and fundamentalism sparked a response from the Church to speak from its foundation in sacred tradition to answer the emergent questions of churchmanship and faithfulness and to weave together the impulses of Christian education, personal devotion, and charity toward neighbor.

As the war had decimated the strength of a generation, new alliances were formed across ecclesial hedges to reconcile old animosities and meet new and overwhelming needs with a diminished corps of ministers. So, the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer was created to meet this need. Fittingly, this revision saw a massive reintroduction of prayers for the departed to give the language of prayer and lament to that grave era. The 1928 revision can also be characterized by enrichment in theological expression and flexibility in liturgical use. It was a prayer book acknowledging the broad spectrum of Anglicans in America and the need for a unifying Rite. It also assumed that the liturgical and ecclesial distinctions of those different Anglican groups would fill in the spaces created by the BCP’s austerity in rubrics and ceremonial guides. Thus, from the Anglo-Catholic end of things, this period also witnessed the advent of the American Missal, an English translation of the Western Catholic Rite. Ritual manuals developed alongside the Missal to supply what the BCP left open-ended, reincorporating traditional liturgical elements into the prayer book communion service. However, while the 1928 BCP answered the liturgical and parochial needs of the day, it would play an unintentional role in a divisive season of the Church yet to come.

The Second World War broke the imagination of everyone who participated in it. One can observe the sense of sheer exhaustion in the poetry of T.S. Eliot, who witnessed, as both an atheist and a Christian, the cultural collapse resulting from the war. Another generation perished in the conflicts, with another generation of survivors returning home ravaged by war trauma and moral injury. Even so, for Eliot and others, English spirituality's quiet beauty proved a haven to unpack a generation of perplexity and destruction. As I noted in a previous post, it was at this point that Christians in all the ancient Churches drew surprisingly near to one another in ecumenical conversations, with surprising openness to reconsider sacramental intercommunion and the renewal of fraternal relationships. Even so, the same spirit of modernism—which had brought humanity to lay hold on the means of extinguishing itself—had not yet finished its course. The generation that survived immediately entered an era of perpetual conflict on the global scale compounded by perpetual social revolution at the local level.

The Anglican Cultural Revolution

While it did not begin with him, a useful figure for illuminating the radical shift in the Episcopal Church is Bp. John Shelby Spong. As an undergrad, I read his seminal work Why Christianity Must Change Or Die as a preparation for watching his 2005 debate with Dr. William Lane Craig, then a titan among Evangelical intellectuals. His career as a priest and bishop in the Church spanned the era of progressive social and theological reforms arising as a response to the cultural revolutions in the broader American and English societies. Spong was raised by his mother in a fundamentalist strand of Christianity after his father’s untimely death when he was 12. Despite the severity of that environment, he continued as a Christian who ultimately sought in his image of God the fatherly presence and compassion that seemed to be missing from his formative years. His view of Christ was adoptionist, asserting that Jesus represented the best that humanity could muster, born of his faithful but socially-scorned mother, Mary. In becoming the Christ, God the Father infused all of the divine love into Jesus, and in Him was progressively working out the reconciliation of God with humanity.

One can observe how these convictions shaped his work as a Bishop. A staunch advocate of social justice, Spong had been a priest during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, and the early days of the women’s liberation movement. His own consecrating bishop was the last Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church to be a social conservative, though he had demurely expressed willingness to step aside for social causes to go forward. Spong was consecrated as a Bishop just in time to participate in several significant breaks from Christian tradition, including being among the first bishops to ordain a woman to the priesthood (which had been understood to have a male character since the time of the Apostles), and later to be the first bishop to ordain an openly gay man to the priesthood as an expression of his support for LGBTQ+ advocacy. Symbolic of the Episcopal Church at that moment in time, Spong was vocal as a priest and bishop in the revisionist movement that carried the day.

In its best light, Spong and the progressive wing of the Church sought to make reparation for the shameful ambiguities in its history in America while also opening doors of evangelism to the young, seeking generation who was championing for civil rights. But rather than interweaving that energy into the Church, the Church began fundamentally to alter its structural, liturgical, and pastoral embodiment of the ancient and apostolic faith. Many defenders of this era will attempt to argue that the changes in the Episcopal Church did not touch the essential marks of holiness and apostolicity, but as Spong and his contemporaries became more vocal in their departures from the Scriptural and conciliar doctrine of the undivided Church, it became evident that the visible changes were but the symptoms of the spiritual changes that had been taking place for years. Then, in a series of Resolutions on the floor of the General Convention in 1977, those changes became codified into standard Church discipline, and marked the beginning of another major split within the American Church, this time not between low and high churchmen but between social / theological conservatives and progressives.

The conservative and traditional dioceses within the Episcopal Church responded to these changes with efforts to retain a remnant of the Anglican Church amidst mounting pressure to conform to the progressive stance of the mainline Church, while also confronting rising antipathy toward organized religion more broadly in society. To this end, the Congress of St. Louis in 1977 was a gathering of Anglicans who rejected the theological changes of the Episcopal Church in America and the Anglican Church of Canada, changes which those gathered regarded as a substantial departure from the Faith once delivered. The product of the Congress was the Affirmation of St. Louis, which became the constitutive document for what later became known as the Continuing Anglican Movement. The tangible result of the Congress and the Affirmation were the Denver Consecrations of 1978, at which the first bishops of the Continuing Anglican Movement received their consecrations to preserve the succession of bishops and the teaching of the apostolic faith.

The Episcopal Church’s reaction was bifurcated. On the one hand, it revised and released a new prayer book in 1979 that attempted to hold together the traditional and progressive elements that had not departed. The 1979 book retained a traditional language rite alongside a contemporized rite, with the aim of allowing individual dioceses to select which ritual would govern their worship. For the first time since the Reformation, the Book of Common Prayer was no longer ‘common.’ While the book incarnated a desire for greater inclusivity, it did so at the cost of one of the primary premises of Anglicanism. Yet the gesture toward including conservatives proved to be short-lived because, on the other hand, the mainline Church began to crush all efforts to join the Continuing Anglicans. Churches that expressed a desire to depart were quickly brought into litigation, with the diocesan and provincial offices working to strip them of their properties so that they could be populated by those without such traditional misgivings. That tendency to prefer the progressive to the traditional has endured in the waning numbers of traditional parishes and dioceses in the Episcopal Church.

Meanwhile, the first twenty years of the Continuing Anglican Movement were marked by fearsome internal fighting. While the members had agreed in their disagreement with the Episcopal Church, they struggled to form a constructive and positive way forward. Many were engaged in protracted legal battles over their parish properties, which created an embattled culture whose pitch rose with animosity toward the mainline Church. But even among those who were able to retain their churches, dioceses found themselves at odds over whether the Continuers would retain the structures of the Church they had left or reform them. The flux that this conversation inaugurated became a battleground for warmed-over fights between low and high churchmen, and between warring egos among the early bishops and senior clergy. By the mid-1990s, the Continuing Anglican Church had sub-divided twice more along lines of geography, theology, and cults of personality. Whatever momentum they had leaving the Church in the 70s had been largely lost by the end of the millennium, delaying and even preventing other conservative elements who had waited longer in the Church from joining their ranks. The besetting sin of infighting among the Continuers would contribute to another division in the decade that followed.

The late 1990s witnessed a strategic bid by the Roman Catholic Church to entice frustrated or despondent Anglo-Catholics away from their spiritual tradition. In the creation of the Anglican Ordinariate, the Roman Church opened a pastoral provision for priests who wanted to leave the embattled Anglican Communion to become Roman Catholic while still retaining the privilege of being married and using Anglican ritual in their parishes. Though it was presented as an ecumenical gesture, at its core the pastoral provision initiated a long-term plan to regularize Anglicans into the Roman Catholic Church. The allowance of their extraordinary liturgical forms and married clergy only obtained in the generation that transferred, with the provision growing more constrained, with the next generations of those parishes being expected to conform to the norms prescribed by Rome.

As some Anglicans took Rome up on its offer, another separation movement was beginning within the mainline Episcopal Church, arising in those dioceses that had retained their traditional character in the midst of an increasingly liberalizing Church. In 2006, those conversation partners convened to form the Common Cause Partnership, involving conservative elements in the Episcopal Church, the REC, and from among the Continuers. This group eventually birthed the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) in 2009. Learning perhaps from the Continuing Movement of the 1970s, ACNA cast a wider tent of inclusion when it came to their ministry partners, developing a ‘three streams’ theology that attempted to hold together the Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical, and Charismatic expressions of the Church. Further, as the novel treatment of Holy Orders had become prevalent in the previous three decades, ACNA made the fateful decision to host what it called ‘dual integrities,’ granting dioceses to choose for themselves whether to retain traditional definitions of Orders or to adopt the 20th Century revisions. Such a broad definition of the Church bolstered their initial numbers and has continued to contribute to impressive church planting and average Sunday attendance. Further, ACNA pursued and completed a revision to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer in the creation of a 2019 Edition that attempted to return to a sense of liturgical orthodoxy while still permitting as much range in ritual as possible.

Relationships between ACNA and the Continuing Anglicans have been strained at best. The Continuers tend to view ACNA from the embattled perspective of those who suffered copiously during the initial departures from the Episcopal Church. The three-streams and dual-integrities theology of ACNA appears to the Anglo-Catholic sensibilities of the Continuers to be an unsustainable compromise that merely winds the clock back on the ruptures of the Episcopal Church, but which is bound to repeat the same divisive history. At the same time, the ACNA tends to view the Continuers as a failed experiment in how to break away from the Episcopal Church. They rightly critique the divisiveness that compromised a promising conservative renewal movement in the 1970s for the sake of individual egos. Even so, the Anglo-Catholic elements of ACNA have begun to recognize that the broadness of their unity comes at the potential cost of actual integrity. As recently as last year, the largest ACNA diocese (Fort Worth) asserted that it exists in ‘impaired communion’ with the rest of the ACNA over the dual-integrities, and that the communion cannot continue as though it is business as usual. Similarly, the recent generations of clergy and laity among the Continuers have softened toward their Anglo-Catholic brethren across their various hedges. In 2017, four of the main Continuing jurisdictions entered into a concordat declaring sacramental intercommunion and recognition of each other. Since then, one of those jurisdictions (the Diocese of the Holy Cross) has entered under the authority of one of their communion partners (the Anglican Catholic Church) bringing the group of four down to three. It is a move in the right direction. There is good hope, and a lot of ground-level work already underway, that signals the possibility of unity in the future, especially as the liberalizing elements in the Church continue to aggressively pursue their course.

Reasons for Hope

There are ample reasons for hope in the future of Anglicanism. As I have written in previous posts, we are in a season of confronting gross heresy within our tradition of the Christian faith. The other ancient traditions of the Church have faced their own similar seasons over the centuries as well. Sadly, our brethren in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches seem keen to use this season of rupture in our Church to entice the faithful away, regarding us as a sinking ship. But, more likely, we will be like they have been. We will endure a century or so of ascendent heterodoxy, which will refine us into a faithful remnant ready again to pursue the Lord’s work. It is likely that our vocation is to keep calm, carry on, and to remain faithful to the Faith once-delivered to the saints.

When I look out at the Anglican Church, especially in America, I see many of my brother-priests and scores of faithful laity doing precisely this long, obedient, and faithful work. I have worked side by side with Anglo-Catholics in the Episcopal Church, in ACNA, and across the Continuum. There is so much common ground upon which to unite. However, I am not ignorant of the real challenges to that unity. Among Anglo-Catholics, there is much healing and forgiveness that must be pursued to repair the ruptures and church trauma of the past fifty years. The Continuers will have to move forward in their life, refusing to repeat for a second generation the divisive cults of personality that characterized the first. They will also have to forgive those who did not join them in the initial fray. Likewise, the Anglo-Catholics of ACNA will have to accept the untenable compromise in which they persist, and look past historical stereotypes among Continuers so as to learn from those who know what it is like to be faithful in actual ecclesial exile. We have much to offer and to learn from one another, if we will.

As we conclude this post, I can think of no better parting words than the Collect for the Church in the Book of Common Prayer: O gracious Father, we humbly beseech thee for thy holy Catholic Church; that thou wouldest be pleased to fill it with all truth, in all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, establish it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of him who died and rose again, and ever liveth to make intercession for us, Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.