Anglican Worship and a Christmas Field Trip

I enjoy the opportunity to visit Anglican churches during my travels and experience what might otherwise be overlooked at my own parish.

It wasn’t always this way: church visits when on vacation as a child aren’t something that I recall. Now, I rarely miss a Sunday – with the exception of a brief visit to Saudi Arabia this past October, which, unsurprisingly, lacks publicly accessible church services.

This Christmas, a road trip to visit family in South Carolina included worship at parishes in Emporia, VA, Charleston, SC and Greenville, SC. Each was delightful in its own way.

Most congregations in my diocese are located either in suburban Baltimore-Washington or in college towns like Charlottesville (My own parish is atypical of the vast majority of Anglican congregations in both size and composition). I’ve made it a point to visit smaller communities.

Emporia is a small incorporated city in southern Virginia (the third smallest in the state) and home to my friends Allan and Betsy Sharrett. Allan serves as chancellor (legal counsel) for my Anglican diocese and a lay leader at Church of the Resurrection. Geographically and demographically far removed from northern Virginia, Emporia is known – if at all – for being a speed trap on I-95. It has a population that is nearly two-thirds African-American and (according to the Association of Religion Data Archives) has the highest percentage population of adhering Muslims in the United States as of the 2010 census (28.99%).

“We’re basically a small group,” Allan describes of the parish of about two dozen, which has a substantial bible study time together followed by a communion service on Sunday mornings. On Wednesday, the congregation hosts “Dinner Church” – a time of Christian teaching accompanied by a meal shared together. Emporia is far enough south that people still regularly attend church functions on Wednesday nights, and “Dinner Church” has a larger attendance than the Sunday morning service.

During the extended passing of the peace, everyone greeted everyone else, and I met congregants who drove from North Carolina for the closest Anglican church. There is also an “ecumenism of the trenches” on display: Church of the Resurrection is hosted by a Baptist church, and cooperation is commonplace across denominational lines.

Christmas Eve brought me to St. Michael’s Church, my sister’s home parish in Charleston that I have the good fortune to be able to visit two or three times each year. Among the oldest parishes in the ACNA, St. Michael’s Church is a vibrant congregation of about 400 on a Sunday morning (some families have worshipped here for several generations) and a building that appears in most of the tourism brochures for the historic city (the church’s distinctive spire was featured in a British Airways advertisement announcing service between Charleston and London). The church retained control of its property following the conclusion of litigation with the Episcopal Church.

While St. Michael’s Church and Church of the Resurrection are different in their worship experience, St. Michael’s also has a “Super Wednesday” program (that often features the Alpha course, bible study, music ministry, and dinner together) and a strong relationship with other downtown congregations. The traditional service may resemble 20th Century mainline Protestantism, but St. Michael’s is also a “spirit-filled” church with healing prayer and a global mission emphasis that reaches far outside of its walls.

The first Sunday of Christmas brought me to my parents’ parish of St. George the Martyr outside of Greenville. About 140 gather on a Sunday, split between two services. Anglo-catholic in churchmanship, St. George is friendly and growing, partly due to transplants including my own parents who relocated to Greenville. Part of the Anglican continuum (mostly formed from churches that separated from the Episcopal Church in the 1970s onward prompted by changes to the Book of Common Prayer) St. George draws people who actively seek out something different than the “bapticostal” churches widely represented across upstate South Carolina (Greenville is usually listed among the most religious cities in the United States).

Sacramental ministry and preaching that regularly draws from patristics (the teaching of the early church fathers) mark the worship at St. George where services are “in the rich and reverent heritage of the historic English Church.”

Once again, there is a Wednesday night program. I greatly appreciated a lecture series on the life of C.S. Lewis, and there is a strong interest in religious art, including iconography.

I returned to the DC area on New Year’s Day and was back in the pews of The Falls Church Anglican that Sunday, both appreciative of what characterizes my own parish and grateful to share in worship and learn from those at Church of the Resurrection, St. Michael’s Church, and St. George the Martyr.