... but unbaptized inquirers are a sign of hope

The following is adapted from Rev. Stephen Reynolds' introduction to the 2001 edition of MacCausland's Order of Divine Service. The adaptation and the reprint are with the author's permission

Christendom is dead - I mean, the way of things when the Western world identified itself with the Christian religion, and Christian churches claimed whole societies and peoples for their own. Christianity itself is still alive, and I am reckless enough to think that it has a future. But not as the religion privileged by statutory law and social custom, in a world where belonging to a Christian church was an ordinary part of belonging to one's society and the sine qua non of respectability. That was the world of Christendom, and that world is extinct.

But why bring the matter up here? What does the death of Christendom have to do with the Anglican Church of Canada? We are not hindered from assembling in our churches on Sunday or at any other time; Anglicans are as free to perform their services of worship as Muslims, Roman Catholics, Jews, Greek Orthodox, Buddhists, Presbyterians, or any other religious group.

So the end of Christendom does not appear to have any serious impact on our liturgy. And indeed, governments and the courts have tended to treat the internal life of the churches as a "No Go" zone. Neither the federal government nor the courts show any eagerness to compel the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches, or the Pentecostal Assemblies, to ordain women as well as men; it seems unlikely in the extreme that they will seek to regulate the number of baptisms, or the proportion of eucharistic celebrations to services of Morning Prayer, that we Anglicans can perform. So our liturgy would seem to be safe from the consequences of Christendom's demise.

But the death of Christendom was not a government initiative, nor was it the result of a judicial conspiracy. The Parliament of Canada, the provincial legislatures, and the courts merely followed where society at large led the way; and society at large decided long ago that religion was a wholly private matter, without relevance in public affairs. We are talking about a social, a cultural revolution, not a political programme.

The proof lies in a much quieter phenomenon than judicial decisions and governmental policies, a phenomenon which is taking place in the Christian churches themselves, including our own.

In the old world of Christendom, baptism was not only a religious obligation; it also had the nature of a social entitlement. As a result, mainline churches did not feel that they had the moral (or, as is still the case for the Church of England, the legal) right to refuse the baptismal sacrament to anyone.

Within the past few years, however, we have begun to notice the appearance of unbaptized adults at our Sunday worship. They come as inquirers, "checking out" our church and the faith we confess to see if we and our faith are really for them. These unbaptized inquirers are in their 20s, 30s, and 40s - which means that their parents saw no need for baptism and church-membership over a generation ago.

It is as if a full generation had to pass before those who went unbaptised in the 1950s and '60s could begin to show up in our midst. For they had to grow up and mature and come to realize for themselves that something might be missing in their lives, and that the something might be Christianity. But the fact that it was missing at all means that society had already lost the reflexes of Christendom - that Christendom had already failed - when they were infants.

The church now stands - and has been standing for some time - in a society where a great many people have, at best, only a second-hand memory of any religion. To all intents and purposes, Christianity is new to them, and those who have come to us as inquirers are reconnoitreing the Christian religion for the first time in their lives. What we are seeing now are people coming out on the other side of Christendom's collapse, where Christianity is not a settled expectation which might as well be accepted, but a possibility which may be worth exploring.

In many respects, we are in a situation akin to that of the primitive church, communities at the centre of reality and on the fringes of society. We are an ancient option which, because of the failure of Christendom, has once again become new.

The very fact that such inquirers are showing up in our pews is, of course, a very good sign. Christendom may be dead, but there is (as I say) life in the old church yet. The arrival of inquirers "not previously baptized" gives us reason to believe that there is - and always was - more to Anglicanism in particular than aerating white Anglo-Saxon culture with the afflatus of religion.

Their presence also challenges us to identify what is authentically Christian about Anglicanism, what is at the very centre of our life together, for the sake of welcoming them all the more deliberately and including them all the more genuinely.

But that is how the arrival of unbaptized inquirers, in itself a sign of hope, may also be a problem for our church. Identifying "what is authentically Christian about Anglicanism" is no easy task. What makes it difficult, of course, is the sheer diversity of standpoints that Anglicanism harbours. This may be why, in recent years, several parties within the Anglican mix have sought to outflank the diversity by forging a common front and producing quasi-confessional statements of "Anglican essentials."

Such statements might make the parties involved feel better about being Anglican, insofar as they can project an Anglicanism which "stands for something" - or rather against certain things. But I am not sure that they will make inquirers feel better about us and our faith.

On the contrary, I suspect that confessional formulas are more likely to puzzle inquirers and put them off. For inquirers are not yet part of the internal conversation (or debate) which has given rise to the formulas. One has to be already "in the loop" to figure out the point of the exercise.

I am all for the Anglican Church of Canada "standing for something," but I tend to think that the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed together provide a sufficient statement of what it does in truth "stand for" in the confessional sense.

To uphold the two creeds as sufficient statements of faith is, of course, to suggest that "authentic Christianity" - and therefore "authentic Anglicanism" - will include sound belief. But sound belief itself is and always has been much, much more than a matter of knowing and repeating the correct answers to certain doctrinal questions. The church does not have doctrines for the sake of making everybody toe the same ideological line. Doctrines are in place for the sake of living: they are meant to enable the whole community, and each of its members, to grow toward God more deliberately, more authentically, and more fruitfully.

It is a matter of integrating the way we behave with what we know of God in Christ - and of knowing and loving God in Christ with such consistency that our behaviour manifests a pattern of divine grace.

I have lost count of the number of times that I have heard this remark. The same goes for its partner, "I can worship God without going to church." Together they might be called The Credo of Lapsed Church-Goers. If you are a priest, listening to this particular credo comes with the territory. But I am sure that clergy are not the only ones to be on the receiving end of such statements. Any Christian is liable to be put on the spot in this way, when it becomes known that she or he regularly attends church.

And how do you respond? How have I responded? In all my 20 years as a priest, this credo nearly always caught me off balance. What is the problem? In my own case, a great deal of the block arises from the merits of the lapsed church-goer's credo. For the claim that it makes is true -- about as self-evidently true, so soon as it is stated, as any claim can be.

Of course one can believe in God, of course one can worship God, without going to church. You and I do so. We don't need to drive or walk to a church once or twice a day in order to read the Scriptures and pray and meditate; we do such worship in our homes and in other places besides churches. Indeed, if someone were able to worship God only when inside a church building on a Sunday morning, we might wonder whether that person has really "got" what Christianity is all about. But if the credo of the lapsed church-goer is true, why should the rest of us bother to attend church at all?

There are moments when it is good for Christians to step back and ponder the purpose of our practice, or rather to boldly go where so few have the inclination or take the time to go and -- horrors! -- do theology. In short, the beginning of planning for a new church year may be a season when it is good to consider why -- why we do what we do Sunday after Sunday, weekday after weekday, season after season, year in and year out.

And what is it that we do? Before, after, and in the course of all the activities that fill a Christian community's life through the year, we do the Holy Eucharist. It has been noted that the frequency of the Eucharist as the principal service on Sunday is a fairly recent development in Anglicanism. How this came about is not my concern here, nor is it my purpose to enter into controversy over whether or not it is a good thing. The fact is, the Eucharist is what most Anglicans do before, after, and in the course of all the other activities that fill their communities' lives through the year.

Nor is it anything less than a true reformation of the church that baptism has come once again to be celebrated as a part of the principal Sunday liturgy, no longer relegated to the duller stretches of Sunday afternoons. Perhaps we are beginning to own -- and own up to -- the significance of a principle that our tradition has always acknowledged, that baptism and the Lord's Supper are the two sacraments that are "generally necessary to salvation." Salvation is as great a work as the making-be of "the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home" -- and why should the church, of all communities, consent to hide its celebration of salvation in a corner?

But what does "salvation" itself mean, and why are the baptismal and eucharistic liturgies "generally necessary" for sharing in whatever it means?

Sacraments as 'things'

First of all I should acknowledge that the Prayer Book Catechism does not speak of the baptismal and eucharistic liturgies as "generally necessary to salvation"; it says only that the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper are such. To speak in these terms, however, is to reduce the two sacraments to the status of things; and in the past theologians have all too often extrapolated from sacraments-as-things to the question of the bare minimum of matter and form required to constitute a valid sacrament-thing. This has led some people to think that it is okay to celebrate the bath of regeneration and rebirth with an eye-dropper, and that all they need in order to confect the body and blood of Christ is to recite the bare words of institution and nothing else. Something is missing here, and it is not simply common sense. It is the failure to recognize that a sacrament is, first and foremost, an event, an action, a doing. To be sure, our tradition (of which the Scriptures are a fundamental element) tells us that we will need certain materials -- water and oil, bread and wine -- and that we will need to include certain formulas when we do the sacraments. But baptism and the Eucharist do not exist in a liturgy-free zone somewhere "out there," from whence they may be plucked and inserted into a liturgical celebration, according to need or desire. We may -- and in the age to come we certainly shall -- have a liturgy without a sacrament, but we cannot have a sacrament without a liturgy. So it is not just the thing we call baptism, and the thing we call the Eucharist, which are "generally necessary to salvation." It is the whole liturgical action of baptizing, and the whole liturgical action of eucharistizing, that are "generally necessary to salvation."

But again, what do we mean by salvation? The Second Letter of Peter, for instance, proclaims that God "had given us ... his precious and very great promises, so that through them you ... may become participants of the divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4.) Of course, what participation of the triune life of God might actually be, much less "feel like" (if such a phrase is not a theological oxymoron), is not to be had on the cheap. "Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is" (1 John 3:2). We walk as yet in a realm of images, in a territory of likenesses, amid shadows of what we shall be. But there are no shadows without light to cast them, and the images and likenesses of our participation in the divine nature really do convey the life that they betoken. That is why we have sacraments; that is also why we have the liturgy.

Yes, of course we can believe in God, of course we can worship God, without going to church. But we cannot share in the life of God without going to church, without sharing in liturgia, in the public and corporate worship of the people of God. For the three-personed God, the Source of all being, the eternal Word made flesh, and the Holy Spirit, seeks to make us partners of a transcendent communion through "the mutual society, help, and comfort" that is our communion with one another in the gathered body of Christ.