Returning to a Community of Faith
So as the General Convention of the ECUSA
prepares to meet (starting tomorrow), they have published their Blue Book, which
contains all of the various resolutions and committee reports. Notable among
the reports is the report of the Commission on Liturgy. I could
go on for ever about the various items which are being proposed as part of the
"Rites of Passage: Liturgies for Transformations in the Lives of God's People"
book which will presumably be available soon at a bookstore near you. Over
time, I probably will.However, for now
I was struck by a prayer for someone "Returning to a Community of Faith". Given
the nature of the prayer and the context in which it was located (right after
the "Release from Prison" - I'm surprised they don't have a service for escape
from prison, but we won't go there), I'm assuming this refers to someone who had
renounced the Episcopal Church in some fashion and either gone to another
denomination, or perhaps became a Buddhist for a while. At any rate, I find it
interesting that they needed to produce a new liturgy for this return. In
Orthodoxy (as it is, essentially in Roman Catholicism), the understanding is
that in order to return to the Faith after having turned your back on it, you
need to be formally received back according to long standing liturgical
traditions. In fact, the Episcopal Church has an order for reception for such
folks. In Orthodoxy, unless you were simply attending a different Orthodox
Church, you would need to be Chrismated. This isn't something new, or something
the Eastern Churches invented. We find in the earliest Church councils
(starting at Nicea), that canons were produced governing what to do with folks
who had followed various heresies and had left the Church. To the Orthodox, to
leave for another Christian denomination de facto means following some form of
heresy, so to return would require some sort of Chrismation. I don't recall
what Rome does in these circumstances, but I'm pretty sure its something more
than a handshake.What this all speaks
to is the deplorable lack of an ecclesiology within the ECUSA in particular, and
Anglicanism in general.
Posted: Friday - June 09, 2006 at 02:51 PM
