Anglican Adjectives pt. 4: Pastoral
For those of you desiring to learn more about the Anglican tradition and its history, I invite you to pick up JI Packer’s wonderful book The Heritage of Anglican Theology. In this book, Packer lays out seven shared “Anglican adjectives” — essentials shared by all Anglicans.
The seven adjectives are: biblical, liturgical, evangelical, pastoral, episcopal, national, and ecumenical. In this series of brief posts, I plan to tease each of those adjectives out.
What It Means To Be “Pastoral”
As Anglicanism formalized during the time of the Reformation, there were somewhere around 10,000 local parishes—geographic areas, each with its own church and pastor. With this map and these churches already in place, the emphasis was growing up the people of these local parishes—a congregational focus. This ‘growing up’ was done through the works of the pastor, use of the Prayer Book and catechism, and the partaking of regular services in the church (Sunday Communion Service and weekday Prayer Services). Through the regular rhythms of reading the Bible and praying together as a church, adults and children alike were discipled into maturity and active faith.
At one level, this type of building up is rather mundane—it lacks the fireworks of the evangelistic tent revivals or the charisma of revivalist preaching. However, that was more or less by design. The church sought to raise up its people, not through extraordinary circumstances, but through rhythms in every day life. “[The] pattern was that you teach young people the faith in church, and you explain to them the reality of faith and worship. Thus you draw them into the worshipping fellowship so that they grow into personal faith.”
“Even today, as in fact has always been the case, the majority of people who come to faith do so gradually through involvement in some form of Christian worship, rather than by standing up in a meeting, signing a decision card, or going into the counseling room. The latter sort of conversion, of course, is always talked about from the pulpit and platform as if it were the most important. Statistically, however, it is not.”
“In other sections of the evangelical world, the primary emphasis has often been on the pastor as preacher or controversialist…Some pastors have only ever seen themselves as preachers…Let the congregation pastor itself. But that is not the Anglican way.”
“Anglicanism has always been pastoral, always concerned with making Christians, and then shepherding them … The minister is ordained, first and foremost, to find Christ’s sheep and then to walk with them as a shepherd, leading and guiding them from the beginning of their spiritual lives right through to the end.”