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UNITY IN DIVERSITY

Charles Mitchell-Innes, Vicar of the Close (Thursday 1st April 2010)

The English are reckoned to set great store by their mongrel ancestry, delighting in their hybrid and miscellaneous descent, and distinct in this respect from their Celtic confreres. It was certainly gratifying for me last Easter to spend some days driving round Virginia, where my grandmother came from, and establishing to my own satisfaction my mongrel credentials, amid the dogwood and the spring blossoms of that most beautiful of states.

But this was just part of a larger pilgrimage, which began during Holy Week in Boston, where I had been invited to deliver three sermons, for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The setting was a thriving parish in the Episcopal Church, in the suburbs of the city. Its congregation was very mixed socially, economically and ethnically, but united by the bonds of faith and fellowship, and by devotion to its liturgy in the catholic tradition. To be with them for their dramatic and intense liturgical evocation of those (literally) crucial three days in Jerusalem was an unforgettable experience.

On Easter morning, by contrast, we went to Mattins at the Harvard Memorial Church. The congregation -cultivated and elegant - and the service, with a lengthy, engaging sermon as its focal point, set a quite different, but equally uplifting, tone. And it brought home to me the wonderful diversity that exists within the Church worldwide. The Anglican Church itself is a microcosm of this rich diversity, some elements in it veering towards Catholic practice and doctrine, others towards the Reformers; and, in between, a broad continuum.

We are, in fact, a mongrel church, and generally happy, indeed proud, to be so. It is therefore more important than ever not to be seduced by the blandishments of those who insist on the purity of their particular theological breed.

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