Anglicans are Christians who have inherited “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3) through the Ecclesia Anglicana (the English Church). It is believed that Christianity first entered the British Isles as far back as the first or second century. In the year of A.D. 597, Pope St. Gregory the Great tried to send a monk named Augustine to establish a Roman mission, but upon arriving Augustine found an established British Church with its own bishops and customs. For the sake of Christian unity, it was later decided that the Roman customs would be followed in England.
As debates over reform broke out all across Europe in the sixteenth century, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, acting under the approval of the reluctant King Henry VIII and the later zealous King Edward VI, would lead the English Church into its own era of reform. It was during this early time of the English Reformation that Archbishop Cranmer would draw from the numerous books of the Latin liturgy and compile these ancient patterns of Christian worship into the concise first edition of the Book of Common Prayer. This Prayer Book of 1549 sought to maintain the traditional patterns of worship yet now written in the common language of the people and purged of all features contrary to Holy Scripture or to the ordering of the Primitive Church.
From the time of the English Reformation, the Anglican Tradition has matured into a Christian way of worship and believing that is both Catholic and Reformed. While various movements and parties within the Anglican Church have upheld varying emphases, the core aspects of the Anglican Way of being have always been maintained by the faithful in the Global Anglican Communion. The province of which St. Luke is a part of, the Anglican Church in North America, has identified these seven declarations as necessary to be affirmed by anyone seeking to truly embrace the Anglican Way:
1. To confess the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired Word of God, containing all things necessary for salvation, and to be the final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life.
2. To confess Baptism and the Supper of the Lord to be Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself in the Gospel, and thus to be ministered with unfailing use of His words of institution and of the elements ordained by Him.
3. To confess the godly historic Episcopate as an inherent part of the apostolic faith and practice, and therefore as integral to the fullness and unity of the Body of Christ.
4. To confess as proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture the historic faith of the undivided church as declared in the three Catholic Creeds: the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian.
5. Concerning the seven Councils of the undivided Church, to affirm the teaching of the first four Councils and the Christo-logical clarifications of the fifth, sixth and seventh Councils, in so far as they are agreeable to the Holy Scriptures.
6. To receive The Book of Common Prayer as set forth by the Church of England in 1662, together with the Ordinal attached to the same, as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline, and, with the Books which preceded it, as the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship.
7. To affirm that the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1571, taken in their literal and grammatical sense, express the Anglican response to certain doctrinal issues controverted at that time, and that they express fundamental principles of authentic Anglican belief.
