Improvement and progress in human experience, understanding, and behavior are not inevitable and we can identify much that is retrograde due to the wickedness and forgetfulness of our race. Ours is a dark world and Christ is the only source of true light wherever its beams happen to shine in conscience, all forms of knowledge, and saving wisdom.

The current interest in or fascination with retro (observe publisher's lists, magazine racks, many movies and TV series) is an earnest search for some things we seem to have lost right across the board, materially and mentally. Conceptually we are living in a crude age quickly tending to cruelty through human arrogance, avarice, and ambition in every department of our existence and endeavor. The quest for power, prestige, and wealth drives us at every level of competence and opportunity and the result is that people, our neighbors in Jesus' terminology, are not treated right by rulers, institutions, businesses, and fellow individuals. We are at the mercy of the god mammon and his mean-minded minions everywhere.

People tend to find comfort, meaning, and purpose in what they perceive to be a gentler, fairer, and more leisurely past. Much of this is, of course, a mirage. Our history is a record of audacious rebellion against God our Maker and our horrendous ill-treatment of each other, but in this generation of decadence and decay, elegance, quality, and durability are in short supply (e.g. observe our enlarging wastelands and polluted waters through warfare, abandoned projects, and reckless plunder of nature. It is all a portrait of the godless landscape of our evil hearts).

Nowhere is our need to look back and learn from the past more conspicuous than in the realm of Christian faith. Christian truth, belief, and piety emerge from a sound interpretation of history arising from careful biblical science and a thoughtful survey of subsequent tradition within the community of faith. We all begin our research from a position of ignorance and are susceptible to prejudice as we proceed. It is desirable but difficult to maintain a balance between caution and confidence in what we affirm as a result of our investigations.

Time, teachableness, patience, and prayer are ingredients in our learning of the principles of divinity at any level of seriousness or competence. Dullard or doctor we are each dependent on God our Master for the slender knowledge we attain, the wisdom we acquire (which must always be saving), the spirit in which it is received, and the purpose to which interest in knowing God is devoted. We bow before Mercy for right instruction and accuracy of conviction. Theologizing is a conversation with our Father and Friend who sovereignly and graciously discloses the secrets of his mind and the intentions of his kindly heart. We lean for information and advice upon the speech of Christ in Scripture while the Spirit subdues our pride and makes us pliable to his persuasions and promptings. In theology there ought not to be cocksureness or competitiveness but simply common submissiveness to the Word of God which appraises and refines our subsequent traditions. Our knees are as important as hearts and brains in our seeking of divine truth. We are educated at the feet of the Lord and not at the top of a pile of books.

To the common wealth of Christendom Anglicanism has been entrusted with much of enormous value as Christians of various traditions pool their precious insights and valid practices together for the benefit of all.

Anglicanism proffers elegance, quality, and durability in its formation of Christian discipleship.

Elegance

We all know that God receives the homage and service of the sincere and humble heart in whatever guise these appear - rags or riches, cathedral worship, a rough and ready service in the slums, or a nervous gathering of the persecuted in a make-do place of shelter. Intent is what counts (worshippers in spirit and in truth). But an inward attitude of dignity and reverence, expressed in the beauty of holiness, is what our God deserves, as best as it can be offered outwardly or formally in content, confession, celebration, and circumstance.

The liturgy and doctrine of Reformed Anglicanism as presented in the Book of Common Prayer 1662 - comprehensive of Liturgy, Articles, and Ordinal (preserving Cranmerian ideals also endorsed and articulated by his closest colleagues) supply us with models of elegant expression of divine worship and Scriptural doctrine.

Wherever it is composed and by whom, our thought and language concerning God ought to be worthy of his nature, attributes, and perfection. His authority, might, goodness, mercy, and justice ought to be affirmed in a manner cognizant of the splendor and beauty of his supreme and unsurpassable majesty. We are to fear and extol the One who has granted us a passionate love for himself. Cranmer has bequeathed to us a linguistically lovely, lively, luminous body of texts as a vehicle for the praise of God, our comprehensive prayers and petitions to him, and our proclamation of his great Name. Coupled with the truth he prized is the tone of kindliness and courtesy of the man himself throughout the manual of doctrine and devotion he endowed to us.

Any tradition that is alive and useful happens to be developmental but any development in Anglicanism ought to supplement the origins of our tradition, maintain consonance with them, and not deviate from them. The foundations of Anglicanism are Biblical, Reformational, Protestant, proven, and sure.

Quality

Our Liturgy and Confessional stance are derived from Holy Scripture and the patient, prayerful, contemplations of the eminently saintly in their knowledge and experience of the ways of God delineated in his works and word. Their content has been culled from the earliest ages of the Church through to the basic insights of the faith, especially with regard to the method of grace, restored to the people of God by the Reformers of England and the Continent.

Cranmer's dual achievement of compilation and composition is impressive, informing and ennobling the mind of the worshipper before God, raising it to new heights of awareness and wonder in the divine presence, and maturing the sincere believer in holiness, discipleship, and obedience. Deliberating over Cranmer, among the most thoughtful of Christian leaders, guides us to similar spiritual and doctrinal depth as a community. We have been on short and poor rations for far too long; the equivalent of fast food has emaciated the faithful. Retention of our standards is essential to our survival and renewal. Our heritage is infinitely precious and our earnest review of it can only be beneficial.

However we move into the future we must begin with Scripture and the Reformation and never stray from these great landmarks in our pilgrimage as a people. Our foundations are fixed as much as we venture on to fresh vistas of God's revelation and his purpose for us. We are to grow in various ways of comprehension and effectiveness but everything is to stem from our healthy Scriptural and Augustinian roots.

Durability

If anything is lacking in our nature, experience, culture, and religion it is durability. Everything is so fleeting and transient, and especially in matters of faith. Life is fast approaching the point of extreme shallowness, shabbiness, and ruinous haste. Divine influences and restraints are being withdrawn (we might need humbly to recognize the truth of God's increasing absence in a favorable sense, as much as this offends the pride of the Church and the false and easy optimism of some of its leaders), humanity (good-heartedness) recedes at a frightening pace, and persons fashioned in the divine image are becoming more and more cheap and cheeky in their sinfulness. The signs before us are ominous. The Church has failed to preach the honest truth that our world is desperately evil and in need of urgent rescue through Christ's redemptive grace alone. We have toyed with the things of God and eternal realities. We pander to the world, compromise with it, and avoid the hard truths of Sacred Scripture that we are meant to convey in tones of warning and compassion. We may occasionally touch on human frailty and failings but we rarely expatiate upon the enmity of our hearts toward God. Hence the gospel loses its relevance and power.

Anglicanism has solid and enduring truth to tell out, a message of grace in the beautiful gospel to declare, and effective means of Christian formation to commend. Our standards of belief, symbols for the confirmation of faith, and forms of worship and pastoral care may be equaled elsewhere, but not bettered, and Christians everywhere are invited to share in them and be enriched, just as we are enriched by Christians of different but faithful allegiance who make fellowship with us.

The principles that guide Anglicanism are based on the reality of the reliability of the character of God and the authority and trustworthiness of his speech in Scripture. His truth endures and causes us to endure in his favor through life, death, and all eternity.

In these restless and uncertain times (man's perpetual story) when so many disasters and dilemmas coalesce to provoke our worst fears and prove the plague of our hearts Anglicanism has a commission to fulfill, but only if it returns to the truth, strength, and integrity of its classic Reformational beginnings.

Loyal Anglican Churchmanship in the Great Awakening

You know how strongly I assert all the doctrines of grace as contained in the Westminster Confession of Faith, and in the doctrinal Articles of the Church of England. I trust, I shall adhere to these as long as I live; because I verily believe, they are the truths of God, and because I have felt the power of them in my heart. George Whitefield

Here, let it be observed, is the case of a minister of the Church, engaged in the discharge of his office, whose mind is thus led to the full and cordial reception of these sentiments [Evangelical] by the blessing of God on prayer and study of the Bible. He next discovered, that the Articles and Liturgy of the Church fully agreed with the more enlightened and elevated tone of his own newly-adopted views; and became more than ever attached to her constitution and services, and laboured with more abundant zeal and success in the various offices which were assigned to him as one of her ministers. On Henry Venn by his grandson The Rev henry Venn, Perpetual Curate of St. John's, Holloway.

But the moment a man rose up like [William] Grimshaw, who gloried in the Articles, Liturgy, and Homilies, and preached the Gospel, he was treated like a felon and malefactor, and his name cast out as evil.*

I will never shrink from saying that the cause for which Toplady contended all his life was decidedly the cause of God's truth. He was a bold defender of Calvinistic views about election, predestination, perseverance, human impotency, and irresistible grace . . . . In a word, I believe that Calvinistic divinity is the divinity of the Bible, of Augustine, and of the Thirty-nine Articles of my own Church, and of the Scotch Confession of Faith . . . . Well would it be for the Churches, if we had a good deal more clear, distinct, sharply cut doctrine in the present day! Vagueness and indistinctness are marks of our degeneracy. *Bishop John Charles Ryle

He had a deep love and respect for the Church of England, and as his strict observance of her rules became generally known, some pulpits that were closed to Whitefield, Wesley and other leaders of the evangelical movement were open to him.*

In his later days Romaine was more liberally minded towards those ministers who did not belong to the Church of England, although he himself was always ' firmly attached to the articles of its faith, to the forms of its devotion, and to its ecclesiastical authority'.* *Tim Shenton, An Iron Pillar, The Life and Times of William Romaine, Evangelical Press, Darlington, England, 2004.

He (Romaine) was too full of the election of grace, the divine righteousness and complete redemption, which is in the Son of God, to bend these truths to the temper of half-hearted professors, or to accommodate Calvinistic doctrines to Arminian gospellers. Thomas Haweis

The Rev. Roger Salter is an ordained Church of England minister where he had parishes in the dioceses of Bristol and Portsmouth before coming to Birmingham, Alabama to serve as Rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church