From Reverend Martha:  “I wouldn’t know how to put Jesus’ command of love into practice apart from the particular charisms of the Anglican church.

To make sense of the freedom and responsibility of the Body of Christ as set up by Jesus, I need to be part of a church structure that claims a much bigger expression of community than just a local congregation and that sees the local congregation as accountable to the bonds of Communion, across our diverse cultural expressions and linked down through the generations by a sense of common faith making us into the Body of Christ.  And at the same time, that structure needs to be flexible and nimble enough to trust local discernment, to allow difference and variety as part and parcel of our unity, that respects the working of the Spirit in and through us, opening our eyes to a living faith and to an unfolding rather than complete understanding of who God is and what God asks of us.

I wouldn’t know how to follow this witty, funny, powerful and surprising Lord without space for both miracles and questions in my church.  I need to see the way in which God is present and powerful, to have my breath taken away by the amazing things God is up to.  Thank God for my brothers and sisters in faith.  Through their strength and courage and great, generous love, through the stories that they are willing to share of encounter and prayers answered and inexplicable coincidence and possibility, my eyes and heart are constantly opened to see and love the God who really does do infinitely more than we could ask or imagine.  But I also need the honesty of Anglicanism, where individuals can voice doubts and questions, can even flat out say that they do not believe in one particular tenet of faith, and yet can still very much belong, their expressions of faith and generosity and love can still be offered.  I need to know that there is room for my own very imperfect confession of faith and that, when my faith wavers, I can be carried, rather than judged, by my community.

I need poetry.  I simply wouldn’t understand my relationship to Jesus  — the one who is named as Bread, Wine, Water, Light, the True Vine, the Messiah, the Son of God – without the common prayer of the church, common prayer that takes care with the mysterious craft of language in order to lift up the beauty of what we believe.  I need poetry in action, which is the sacramental life of the church.  I need to know that as I eat bread, light candles, exchange the peace, kneel at the altar, stand in prayer, and lift up brimming cups of wine as an expression of hope that God’s Holy Spirit will again show up, that these small acts give visibility to something of the weird and wonderful things that God is doing in our lives, visibility to the promises from God on which our faith hinges.”