Introduction
“Anglicanism,” said the customer adviser in the local bank, as she took down the details of the new job that would mean a move into another financial jurisdiction. “What's that?” I embarked cautiously and with an acute sense of perjury in the 1530s, with Henry VIII's domestic arrangements and their consequences for the English Church. “O yes,” she said immediately. “I've seen that on television.” It seems that there is no point in having scruples over misleading strangers about the causes of the English Reformation and what came afterwards. Costume dramas, documentaries, a succession of best‐selling historical novels, and the high profile given to the Tudors in school history syllabi have already defined the territory for the wider market. That picture has been reinforced for English audiences by the visible role of the Established Church in royal marriages, baptisms and funerals, and other public occasions.
To derive an idea of Anglicanism from these sources is to embrace only one element of its relationship with the Reformation, in which the events of the first half of the sixteenth‐century are acknowledged as the movement that gave birth to a Reformed English Church, no longer under the authority of the pope. It is that movement which produced the Prayer Books and the claim to their special contribution to an English literary and linguistic heritage. In reality, this view lives in tension with a determined effort to prove that the Church of England is not a Church of the Reformation, but part of a much longer continuum of Christian worship in Britain.
In this light, it is not surprising that historians, ecclesiologists, ecumenists and liturgists have given much attention to Anglican identity. Even getting past the word “Anglicanism” requires many qualifications. The series editor of the recently published Oxford History of Anglicanism defends it as ‘the “least‐worst” appellation to describe this religious phenomenon through the centuries of its existence.’ Readers are invited to accept that the term now fulfils the task of encompassing “the Church of England in England, its presence beyond that nation, and…that denomination over its entire historical existence.”Footnote 1
Defining the problem
At one time, efforts to pin down Anglicanism would have begun with liturgy. The idea that anyone wishing to know what Anglicans believe should look at the way they pray has been remarkably tenacious, though Stephen Sykes, and more recently Paul Avis and Alec Ryrie, have tackled claims that Anglicans have no way of articulating doctrine other than in liturgy.Footnote 2 Their efforts have not extinguished curiosity about liturgical distinctiveness, but there has been a change in the way that quest is pursued. Two factors have been influential in this. The first is a steadily growing consciousness of the Anglican Communion, with its 39 Provinces and 85 million members worldwide. The second is the growing divide, particularly evident in the Church of England, between Catholic and Evangelical forms of Anglican worship.
A set of essays on Anglican liturgical identity from the International Anglican Liturgical Consultation's 2005 meeting concludes with a long list of characteristics and valued elements. Authorised texts, an ordered worshipping space, freedom to allow a variety of styles, responsive texts and extended intercessions are all mentioned.Footnote 3 It would be hard to claim that any of these things are the peculiar attribute of Anglicanism, if by that one has a precise model in mind of what Anglicanism is. There is no mention of the Book of Common Prayer, for instance, and the reason becomes apparent when the contributors’ starting points are recognised. They represent a number of Provinces of the Anglican Communion and their experience of what it means to be Anglican has different streams of influence. The essays concentrate explicitly on current practice and thus make reference to the Reformation only in locating their present position and their future orientation.
This article urges Anglicans not to lose sight of the Reformation in trying to understand what binds and identifies them today. Some of the most determinedly expressed principles of Reformation – the right to worship in the vernacular, the exercise of authority in the interpretation of scripture and the conduct of worship, liturgical uniformity, and the role of the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist in the life of the Church – are strategically useful keys for unlocking contemporary questions of Anglican identity. Some of them might have been established (even if uneasily) by the end of the sixteenth‐century, yet they remain vigorously alive in new manifestations. In examining apparently old debates in their current forms, I make no pretence at a solution to the problem of identity. What follows are markers on the contested territory of what it now means to be Anglican.
Reading and interpreting scripture
The system of common prayer that emerged as the 1549 Prayer Book was explained in a Preface that still commands admiration in the canon of promotional literature. It set out the arrangement of liturgical life around the reading of scripture, according to rules that were “few in number” and “plain and easy to be understood”. People could be sure, the Preface confirmed, that they would encounter nothing but “the very pure word of God, the holy scriptures, or that which is evidently grounded upon the same”.Footnote 4 The Preface has in its sights the disruption of the lectionary by proper readings for festivals and saints’ days, sometimes to include non‐scriptural material. It does not attempt to address the interpretation of scripture. My guess is that this was because the system of preaching licences and the Book of Homilies took much responsibility for that duty in the day to day life of the Church of England. The matter was far too close to the hearts of the Prayer Book's compilers to have been omitted carelessly.
How scripture is interpreted determines the way the Church is ordered. That is a very Anglican principle. Yet it is hard to escape from the fact, in much recent writing, that scriptural interpretation is one of the most contentious issues for the Anglican Communion. The Oxford Handbook of Anglicanism, published in 2015, places its chapter on the Bible first under the section headed “Crises and Controversies”.Footnote 5 The crisis arises when interpretation is disputed. Few can be unaware that the contest for truth is taking place on an international stage, as the Bible is being asked to deliver clear answers on whether gay and lesbian Anglicans may be ordained, whether their relationships may be recognised in marriage, and whether women may assume roles of ordained leadership in the Church. In 2008, the Global Anglican Future Conference which gathered bishops boycotting the Lambeth Conference after the furore following the consecration of Gene Robinson as Co‐adjutor Bishop of New Hampshire in The Episcopal Church in 2003, confronted these questions. The “Jerusalem Statement” that issued from the conference defines an orthodox Anglicanism, which takes a conservative stand on all of these topics, and has since become a foundation text for breakaway movements such as the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).Footnote 6
Mark Chapman, one of the editors of the Oxford Handbook of Anglican Studies, writes in his introduction to the volume that “there have been few theological resources that have been shared across the churches of the Anglican Communion which offer a way forward in reaching a degree of consensus or agreement (even agreement to disagree)”.Footnote 7 In the 1540s, it was possible to produce a Book of Homilies that set out the teaching of scripture on topics like faith, good works, and the fear of death.Footnote 8 Scriptural interpretation in the twenty‐first century comes through multiple media and may be encountered more in podcasts, on YouTube, in blogs, and on Twitter, than in church. Individuals are more concerned to find Christian teaching of quality than Anglican, Lutheran or Methodist teaching. But how do you judge quality? And does this formidable array of material have the effect not of broadening perspectives, but of allowing those with particular views to be confirmed in what they have always thought? Conservative branches of the Anglican Communion – Nigeria, Uganda, Sydney and continuing Anglican Churches like the ACNA network – have been quick to use the resources of digital communication to promote their message.
The Anglican Consultative Council began steps to address this situation at its meeting in 2009 (ACC‐14), by inaugurating the Bible in the Life of the Church Project. The initiative was undoubtedly a response to pressing issues and conflicts in the Anglican Communion. Its intention, however, was not simply pragmatic. Addressing questions of sexuality, women's ministry and inter‐religious encounter was to entail properly critical engagement with developments in biblical hermeneutics. The steering committee is anxious to avoid over‐reactions. Exploring the possibilities of reader‐response criticism, for example, does not render the historical‐critical method obsolete.Footnote 9 How this work will develop and bear fruit remains to be seen. Although fifteen groups participated, linking participants from Anglican churches in diverse cultural contexts, the project has not yet involved enough people for real results to be assessed. There is no evidence yet that the diametrically opposed views represented by bishops around the Anglican Communion are shifting.
Andrew McGowan, Dean of the Yale Divinity School, has written acutely about the current impasse in an editorial to the Journal of Anglican Studies, a journal founded by Australian scholars in 2003 in response to the changing face of Anglicanism. He diagnoses a profoundly unAnglican attitude to scripture – self‐obsessed, weak on any missionary impulse, and instrumentalist rather than celebratory and expectant. Scripture in his analysis is at present a conspicuous source of disunity:
Anglicanism has rarely been well served by introspective quests for its own identity. The great movements and moments in Anglican history, contested as they may be – the Reformation, the Oxford Movement – have been to do with the character of the Church catholic, of Christian faith, of the sacraments, of Scripture – not of Anglicanism. Current quests for Anglican renewal, unity and identity often risk missing this fact, and the basic insight it offers into the character and mission of Anglicanism. Anglicanism can only be defined, let alone renewed, by focusing on larger questions of Gospel, Church and world rather than on those of Anglican polity and identity.
Anglicans tend not merely to respect but to love the Bible. If at the present time it is evident that they differ about its meaning in certain cases, this is not a new or unusual phenomenon; it is the willingness on the part of some to depart from conversation, even and especially about Scripture, that most distinguishes the present Anglican crisis.Footnote 10
The Vernacular
The Preface to the 1549 Prayer Book offers a way to worship in “suche a language and ordre, as is moste easy and plain for the understanding, both of the readers and hearers”.Footnote 11 It does not entertain illusions about the universal competence of clergy in Latin. Anglican liturgy today is celebrated in many languages. Some Provinces have remained close to the Book of Common Prayer, even when translating from English into the vernacular. These include Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi.Footnote 12 Others are currently undertaking revisions that retain common structures, but emphasise local setting and character. This attention to the local – one might call it a geographical vernacular – is proving to be the source of immense liturgical creativity. Where a culturally western colonial Anglicanism meets and acknowledges the culture and traditions of indigenous peoples, a vivid and experimental style of composition has resulted. High on the list of favourite examples to illustrate this is the version of the Benedicite produced by the Province of New Zealand‐Aotearoa, with its colourful array of local flora and fauna:
Benedicite Aotearoa
O give thanks to our God who is good:
whose love endures forever.
You sun and moon, you stars of the southern sky:
give to our God your thanks and praise.
Sunrise and sunset, night and day:
give to our God your thanks and praise.
All mountains and valleys, grassland and scree,
glacier, avalanche, mist and snow:
give to our God your thanks and praise.
You kauri and pine, rata and kowhai, mosses and ferns:
give to our God your thanks and praise.
Dolphins and kahawai, sealion and crab,
coral, anemone, pipi and shrimp:
give to our God your thanks and praise….Footnote 13
Australia, too, is generating much vigorous and locally rooted composition, often with a strong emphasis on care for the environment. Examples include laments for deforestation, fire and flood. The Anglican Church in Southern Africa is mid‐way through an extensive revision process that seeks to give expression to the African context of its patterns of worship.
We do not have to travel across continents, however, to discover the renewed call for a proper use of the vernacular. Despite the best efforts of drafting committees, liturgical English has not always sounded to English Anglicans like their own familiar speech. At one time, this would not have been a matter for action and the complainants would have been advised to persevere with the difficulties until they mastered the art of saying their prayers in words remote from their normal experience.Footnote 14 Since the publication of Faith in the City (a report on urban priority areas) in 1985, the response has been very different.Footnote 15 Two examples from fairly recent Church of England revisions illustrate the challenge.
Soon after the principal volume of Common Worship appeared in 2000, there were protests about the elaborate style of its collects. Twenty years of the Alternative Service Book 1980 had accustomed worshippers to the direct and grammatically simple collects accompanying the two‐year Joint Liturgical Group lectionary. Now they found themselves once more confronting relative clauses and occasional striking archaisms, as the pendulum swung back to Prayer Book idiom.Footnote 16 A formal submission to the General Synod requested “additional collects for each Sunday and feast days in the liturgical year in a worthy contemporary idiom”.Footnote 17 In response, the House of Bishops commissioned a set of Additional Collects.
The result is something quite unlike the classic collect form – more of an arrow prayer, focusing on a particular plea for divine help. To my knowledge, no research has been done to discover how widely they are used, and whether they are appreciated.Footnote 18 Prayer Book collects often became loved because they were learned by heart. It is more difficult to remember texts that do not depend on graceful rhythms, elegant balances, and images of the grace and mercy of God. A comparison of the Common Worship Collect for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity illustrates the contrast in styles:
Almighty and everlasting God,
you are always more ready to hear than we to pray
and to give more than either we desire or deserve:
pour down upon us the abundance of your mercy,
forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid
and giving us those good things
which we are not worthy to ask
but through the merits and mediation
of Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.Footnote 19
God of constant mercy,
who sent your Son to save us:
remind us of your goodness,
increase your grace within us,
that our thankfulness may grow,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.Footnote 20
Still more recently, the Liverpool Diocesan Synod entered a plea for a rite of baptism in accessible language, motivated by the experience of clergy working in areas high on the Index of Multiple Deprivation. The submission explained that:
Our church has grappled before with the old chestnut of a tension between understandability and historic theological reference in our rites. This is as sharp as ever in Initiation rites involving large numbers of people, including key players like parents and godparents, who are unchurched. The pictures and metaphors of the service don't resonate with their knowledge and experience; the metaphors from scripture and history are unfamiliar to most (e.g. “slavery in Egypt” or “brought to birth by water and the Spirit”). It was a common experience of clergy to feel they were losing touch with congregations at important moments in the service unnecessarily. The unease expressed is not about the number of words in the service, but that those words do not connect with too many people.Footnote 21
This too has been acted on and a set of alternative texts now exists, intended for the baptism of infants. One of the significant problems encountered by the drafting group concerned biblical imagery. Since the publication of Faith in the City, the idea that strong, concrete images and a reduction in the number of words used in worship make liturgical material easier for less literate audiences to comprehend has become a form of orthodoxy. How do you meet that requirement when composing a prayer for the blessing of water to be heard by a congregation who come to church mainly for marriages, baptisms and funerals? The choice has fallen upon Moses crossing the Red Sea as a parallel to Jesus leading his people to freedom; and the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan.Footnote 22
Brevity does not necessarily mean simplicity. To understand a single biblical image, you need a repertoire of biblical narrative. Here, the socioeconomic divide ceases to be the factor that determines comprehension. The designers of a handsomely produced card containing the new texts have grasped this more readily than the liturgists. They advertise their aim as “[meeting] the spiritual needs of those who seek baptism for either themselves or their children, but who may not understand the church's traditional ‘language’ on the subject”.Footnote 23 Assumptions about education and class have disappeared along with the term “unchurched”. It is simply the fact that a great number and variety of people are no longer connected to any church practice except through occasional offices or rites of passage.
The Sacramental Community
A current challenge for the Anglican Church life is how to deal with new forms of church, or fresh expressions of church, once it becomes clear that a worshipping community is moving to a stage of maturity. The rules governing corporate worship do not always fit easily with evolving patterns. Authorised forms of prayer are often perceived as obstacles, and the usual mechanisms for instruction and admission cannot always be applied when it becomes apparent that some sort of sacramental life would be the logical next step. These questions arise when fellowship meals begin to develop a different character, when children are born into the community, and when adults wish to make a public profession of faith. Recognition of the need to address such developments has been greatly assisted by the Church Army Research Unit, through a project led by its former director, George Lings. The research acknowledges two approaches, one requiring some formation in Christian doctrine and proper preparation before admission to sacramental life, the other accepting sacramental patterns as the result of the evolution of the community and sometimes disrupting the accepted ideas of the order of administration and admission.Footnote 24
Three illustrations give a glimpse of a much larger and very diverse picture. The first comes from a community that began as “a safe place for people who were far away from church to begin to explore faith”.Footnote 25 The second looks briefly at the introduction of eucharistic worship into the Messy Church movement. The third reflects on baptismal practice.
The Upper Room began in Cirencester c. 2010, under the leadership of a lay woman called Kim Hartshorne. She has subsequently been ordained as a “pioneer minister” in the Church of England and continues to serve this community. At an early stage in its life, Hartshorne blogged about the difficulties created by the rules on authorised material. She spoke of the Church's confidence in the ability of shared texts to “shape us into God's people”. The problem was that the words themselves offered little for the community to share. “[T]hey do not reflect our experience of life, or of God,” she wrote. “These are not our words; culturally they have not come out of our hearts, our streets or our struggles, and so cannot easily come out of our mouths.” The only solution for communities like the Upper Room was to compose their own liturgical material, “empowering people who use indigenous language and expression to find their own authentic voice in lament and worship”.Footnote 26
In an essay published since her ordination, Hartshorne reflects on the way the community has developed. She begins in general terms, noting that the kinds of competencies that Anglican worship implicitly demands, like literacy, physical mobility and reasonable cognitive skills, create barriers. The repertoire of conventional postures (kneeling, sitting, standing) can be confusing to newcomers struggling to follow a service and conform to the customs of regular worshippers.Footnote 27 The Upper Room community has taken its own steps to address the difficulties:
Over the years we have worked to strip back and simplify the language, locations, rituals and practices of Christian faith, to mix up who leads and speaks, and to “de‐clutter” what is happening in Communion, to reduce the cultural hurdles. We meet in a room with sofas and armchairs; everyone is seated in a circle at the same level and remains seated throughout; there is no lectern; a simpler translation of the Bible is used, following the lectionary; people who are new to the group are asked to join in by offering the cup of grape juice or writing prayers.Footnote 28
One of the most intractable aspects of authorised forms of liturgy has proved to be the confession. For those regular attenders who have experienced trauma and abuse, part of the process of healing is coming to see that some things are not their fault. The better alternative has been to write material that more closely reflects this experience.Footnote 29 This is an unusually thoughtful and analytical response to the question of authorisation. In many places, awareness of a form from which regular worship is deviating would hardly feature in the landscape. The anxiety it raises for the Church of England, under whose aegis it lives, is that community is seen only in an intensely local sense. The principle of shared language has not so far been extended to a consideration of what bonds this community to the larger ecclesial body of which it is part.
Messy Church began in Portsmouth in 2004 with the objective of providing a form of worship that consciously welcomed children and families, recognising the need for opportunities to worship at times that accommodated the complexity of family life. It has since become a much larger operation, with a network spreading across the world. The formula for gatherings, which happen at a different time from principal Sunday services, involves thematic activities, some scriptural teaching, a meal, and a time of prayer. As time has gone on, some groups have felt that the movement towards eucharistic participation was becoming impossible to ignore. The questions that have arisen around this touch on the length and formality of the authorised order for the Eucharist, and the verbal density of the service itself. The Messy Church website provides plenty of anecdotal material describing the journey that various groups have made to this point.Footnote 30 In general, they have adapted the order of service (“respectfully”, the movement's founder, Lucy Moore, emphasises) and the principle of welcome and hospitality has been the primary driver in the completely inclusive manner of the celebration. At the time when eucharistic celebrations in a Messy Church framework were somewhat controversial, Moore wrote:
Is Holy Communion a reward for Christians who understand it, have done the course and already ‘belong’, or is it a gift from Jesus to help us all ‘taste and see that God is good’, to remember him by and to celebrate his death and resurrection?Footnote 31
Implicit in her challenge is an approach to eucharistic theology and practice that gives priority to community‐building and welcome, to the affective and the immediate, rather than to the recapitulation of the whole drama of salvation and its formational effect upon regular participants. Since 2016, Messy Church has been represented on the Church's Liturgical Commission. The purpose of this is not to inhibit organic developments, but to recognise them as a legitimate part of the Church's life and to offer support which is not available within the Messy Church movement itself. It has been helpful that the Church of England has authorised Eucharistic prayers for use when a number of children are present, and there is work to be done in discovering how widely they are used and what assistance is given to worshippers meeting them for the first time.
Baptism presents another field of enquiry. A noticeable trend, particularly in Charismatic Evangelical church communities, is the preference for immersion (or perhaps more correctly submersion) baptism. This has become associated with a powerful personal profession of faith and a fair number of adults baptised as infants seek baptism in this way. The Church of England has found routes around this – renewal of baptismal vows by immersion but with no words uttered or hands laid on candidates. Leaders of larger Evangelical churches have joined in making a plea for some sort of official provision to be used to meet the increasing demand. The unanswered question is what is going on in the minds of those who have been through this ceremony. One example does not support a theory, but I mention a candidate exploring a vocation to the priesthood, who, realising that the Church of England does not smile on rebaptism, revised her description of what she had undergone as an adult to a reaffirmation of faith. For students of liturgical performance, there is an intriguing difference between baptism celebrated in this way, and baptisms where most candidates are infants and take place by affusion at the font. In the latter case, there is usually some degree of formality, though clergy are apt to make explanatory comments throughout. In the former case, applause, laughter and gasping have become conventional as candidates are pushed under the water in the baptismal pool (often imported for the occasion) and then assisted out in drenched clothing.
In one sense, these developments, are problematic for the guardians of church authority, who must decide whether to intervene to inhibit them, or to greet them as initiatives in mission and evangelism which are attracting newcomers to Christian life. In another sense, they might be allowed to have something in common with the Reformation desire to return ad fontes – to get back to a purer and simpler source. It must be admitted immediately that the quest is informed by the biblical narrative models of the Last Supper, the upper room of Acts 1, and the baptism of Jesus. It is not the scholarly pursuit that led the Reformers to the Church Fathers, but the expression of a desire to achieve some sort of authentically Christian experience. The negative implication might be that institutional church practices have diluted this experience. There is potential for a positive development, however, if practitioners were to develop further catechesis out of the immediacy of what they offer as biblical practice.
Liturgical Taste
Minimalist though their requirements were, the Reformation Prayer Books insisted on standards of order: a linen cloth on the table (altars were not referred to after 1549). The IALC essays on Liturgical Identity echo this in noting the “aesthetic sensibility” characteristic of Anglicanism and the value placed on “worship in an ordered liturgical space”.Footnote 32 For communities like the Upper Room, or Messy Church groups, or candidates for baptism by immersion, conventional ecclesiastical taste and order are being replaced by new categories. Sofas, folding tables spread with materials for craft activities and cleared for a communal meal, and hired birthing pools are becoming part of what it means for the church to gather. In some instances, the privileges of beautiful places of worship and the resources of music, art and relatively formal liturgical language are rejected as intimidating and diminishing. They have been accused of impeding rather than fostering the church's mission. To answer this, the church will need to develop what might provisionally be termed a new aesthetics of reception and participation. It will need to be able to say, for example, why a Palestrina mass setting attracts accusations of exclusiveness, while an act of worship supported by a professional music group, who effectively stage a rock concert, does not. It will need to understand the reactions to ways of celebrating the sacraments sufficiently to be able to know the difference between expressive joy and irreverence.
This is much more than a matter of class, age, taste and education. Christopher Irvine's meditation on the way Christians are formed through all the resources of worship shows how interactive contemplation can enrich experience – listening for the summons to be formed in the likeness of Christ, imagining the figures in a mosaic processing to their baptism, attending to the presence of other bodies at the eucharist and remembering the bodies that might have worshipped in the same space over generations.Footnote 33 Irvine's work is a model of how to engage the liturgical imagination without implying that this requires very sophisticated competence. It draws on the resources of painting, music and sculpture with enormous appreciative skill, showing how these works can draw an audience or a congregation into a scriptural narrative or a sacramental act. It is rooted in a God who creates humanity in his own image, who treats them as his handiwork, who creates them anew, and calls them into a new creation, doing all this by emptying himself of glory and taking on the despised form of a slave (Philippians 2.5‐11).
Who speaks for Anglicanism now?
Kenosis is not an inappropriate model for the current vocation of the Church of England as it finds itself adjusting and relinquishing its role as arbiter and source of liturgical practice not just at home, but across the Anglican Communion. The tables of contents of the Oxford Handbook of Anglican Studies and The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to the Anglican Communion offer eloquent testimony to this shift. Contributors come from all over the Anglican Communion, the emphasis is not on history (though this is given its place) but on current practice, emerging themes, conflicts, and what Anglicanism might look like in the future. The Handbook speaks of “Anglican Identities” rather than “Anglican Identity”.Footnote 34 The Church of England appears as one voice among many and not as the chief source for determining what Anglicanism might be.
Andrew McGowan accepts the more reticent stance of the Church of England but also sees a new and particular responsibility, which it is called to undertake in the crises currently affecting worldwide Anglicanism:
The scope of Anglicanism is unmistakably global, and recent discourse has come to question the traditional Anglican focus on or even deference to English and practice. The Church of England of course never had juridical authority over others in the Communion, and even its moral authority may now be weakened in some important respects, both for good and ill. Yet the fact that all Anglicans belong to a tradition that stemmed in whole or part from the faith and witness of the English Church means that body retains an importance for the rest, based not on mere nostalgia, or even on ‘bonds of affection’, and certainly not on formal jurisdiction, but on history itself. What happens in the Church of England may happen to the rest of us, whatever else may happen too…. Having been a crucible of Anglican Christianity, England is now also becoming a laboratory for how Anglicanism could survive and engage a post‐Christian reality.Footnote 35
This article has pointed to areas of church life in which the Church of England is already in experimental territory: its control of the words and forms used in public worship, the internal fractures caused by conflicting interpretation of scripture, and the necessity to develop a theological and practical response to situations where sacramental life is developing along unconventional pathways. Rather than producing an account of Anglican identity, it has shown how elusive that identity has become. The most repeated concept in the Preface to the 1549 Prayer Book is ‘understanding’. Today's Anglicans are summoned into a new form of understanding. This is not a free for all, in which anything is acceptable under the generous canopy of Anglicanism. On the contrary, it is hard work. Cranmer's advice would be that we should ‘not refuse the pain, in consideration of the great profit that shall ensue thereof’.Footnote 36
