ECCLESIASTICAL TITBITS III

Recently I cited an e-mail from the Reverend George Armstrong to the Assistant Dean. In it he wrote of Mother Teresa ‘with her truly “mainstream” Christian orthodoxy…’. Further on he again uses the term saying of the Cathedral staff ‘as you stand fast for a truly open and inclusive mainstream Anglican Faith’. Add to this the closing words of Muriel Porter’s acknowledgement in ‘The New Puritans’ where she writes ‘This book is dedicated to those Sydney Anglicans striving to protect the mainstream Anglicanism of their forbears’.

I found an echoing response to those statements in my own being. Despite the attempted hi-jacking of the term “mainstream” by a dissident group of Anglicans it has deeper and more lasting connotations. All who have found a home in Anglicanism, in whatever stream they have found appropriate, can claim “mainstream” status. Here I am reminded that Cleverley Ford wrote that if the Anglican Church did not exist many of us would not have a spiritual home.

I sought to rephrase these things and thus come up with my understanding, and that I believe of most Anglicans I have met. I believe that Anglicanism is a broad and deep river formed by all the diverse tributaries joining force to make it the body of faith it surely is. On behalf of the millions of Anglicans of all times and all spheres I reclaim the adjective “mainstream” for the whole church.

PISCATOR