Diverse newcomers drawn to unique worship traditions
Worship at St. Thomas’s Anglican Church, a historic Anglo-Catholic parish in downtown Toronto, invariably provokes one of a few strong reactions from newcomers, rector Fr. Nathan Humphrey says.
Some people, he says, ask him, “Wow, where has this been all my life?” Others who come from Protestant or evangelical backgrounds can have a strong knee-jerk reaction against worship that seems to them “too Catholic,” even “weird” or “idolatrous.”
“I don’t think anybody ever comes to the service at St. Thomas’s and has the attitude of ‘meh,’” Humphrey says. “A good Anglo-Catholic parish worth its salt won’t ever result in a ‘meh’ reaction from somebody who comes through the doors, because there’s always a particular identity that it’s conveying.”
Anglo-Catholic parishes—Anglican parishes that embrace many beliefs and practices associated with the Roman Catholic Church—represent a distinct tradition in the Anglican Church of Canada. While priests say this tradition remains a minority in the wider church, they also report thriving Anglo-Catholic congregations are attracting diverse newcomers drawn to its unique worship style.
Churches such as St. Thomas’s trace their roots back to the Oxford movement, a 19th-century trend in the Church of England that favoured the return of many older Christian practices into Anglican theology and liturgy. The movement eventually developed into the Anglo-Catholic tradition.
Practices of Anglo-Catholic parishes in Canada vary, but can include daily Mass, use of incense and altar candles, wearing of certain Eucharistic vestments and a greater focus on celebration of the saints. Choirs often sing polyphonic or Latin chants.
Humphrey says the aesthetic dimension of Anglo-Catholic worship reflects an interest in “the beauty of holiness.” At the same time, he warns against “the spiritual danger of worshipping the worship” and says all worship must centre on Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour to accomplish its chief task of proclaiming the gospel.
“Anglo-Catholicism as a movement is centred first and foremost in pointing to Jesus Christ through music and liturgy and the beauty of holiness, as it’s rooted in the historic understanding of the church and the councils of the creeds,” Humphrey says.
Originally from a non-Anglican evangelical background, Humphrey came to Anglo-Catholicism after meeting the late Frank Griswold, 25th presiding bishop of The Episcopal Church. Humphrey describes his first experience of Anglo-Catholic worship as feeling like “a foretaste of heaven.”
“There’s an immediate notion that something transcendent is happening; that something other than the normal earthly reality is going on,” he says. “There’s an appreciation for the mystical.”
Humphrey says St. Thomas’s is growing numerically with an influx of families, children, students and young professionals alongside existing longtime parishioners.
St. George’s Round Church in Halifax is relatively new to the Anglo-Catholic tradition, assistant curate Fr. Nicholas Lucciola says. He credits former rector the Rev. Robert Petite with instituting the practices in the 1980s.
Sunday worship at St. George’s includes a fully vested priest, deacon and sub-deacon; acolytes, torchbearers and a cross-bearer; incense and singing the gospel from the middle of the congregation.
“People really like the embodied and transcendent aspect of it, that all the senses are used in worship with the ringing of bells, the smelling of incense, the standing, the kneeling, the genuflecting,” Lucciola says. “People who are looking for this really holistic worship experience and a connection to history are really drawn and captivated by that.”
Outreach to poor and marginalized
Anglo-Catholic parishes also place a strong emphasis on ministry to the poor and marginalized, which Lucciola links to the historic experience of ritualist Anglo-Catholic priests in the Oxford movement. The established Victorian church often looked down upon these priests, Lucciola says, and sent them to minister in what he says were often referred to in derogatory terms as “slum and ghetto parishes in urban England.”
Commitment to inner-city ministry is a key part of parish life at St. George’s, located in Halifax’s North End in a neighbourhood with deep ties to the African Nova Scotian community. The historic Africville community was based a few kilometres north of the church before the Halifax city government evicted its residents and demolished their homes in the late 1960s.
“We are smack dab in the middle of urban poverty and so a lot of our ministry is shaped around that,” Lucciola says. St. George’s runs a soup kitchen every Saturday. It also runs Saint George’s YouthNet, a free afterschool and summer camp program for children and youth living in or around the Uniacke Square public housing neighbourhood and hosts free classes by the non-profit Halifax Humanities Society for low-income adult learners.
In Toronto, St. Thomas’s is influenced by what Humphrey calls “strands of Anglo-Catholic socialism” and Roman Catholic social teaching that likewise emphasize solidarity with the poor and marginalized. Its parish life includes a Friday food ministry that provides meals to food-insecure and homeless people. However, Humphrey says parishes do not need to provide social services to justify their existence.
“The worship of God is the highest activity that human beings can engage in … When we go to church and we receive the grace of the sacraments, we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to do good works in the world,” Humphrey says. “But it’s not for the sake of good works in the world that we worship. It’s for the sake of God … The outflowing of the love and grace that comes from God [is] how that gets shown in the world.”
Another Anglo-Catholic parish is St. Peter’s Cathedral in Charlottetown, P.E.I. The Rev. Colin Nicolle, who takes over as rector on Nov. 16, says St. Peter’s was built in a neighbourhood that was poor at the time and has attracted many Christian immigrants from parts of the world with strong Orthodox traditions, who find comfort in familiar worship elements such as statues, incense and chanting.
Nicolle says St. Peter’s has drawn much of its growth from people under 40 who are seeking a “full liturgical life” and find interest in the daily offices, incense and traditional forms of liturgy, which he connects to the desire for a solid foundation that rituals like morning and evening prayer can provide.
“The world is increasingly unstable and unsteady,” Nicolle says. “Everything is just so uncertain—the cost of groceries, of housing, is war going to break out or whatever—that it can be really hard for people. It’s nice to have something that’s dependable … Increasingly as we see younger people seeking this and as the world doesn’t seem to be getting much more stable, I think churches that are really devoted to living out that life and teaching it to people [are] going to become much more visible and necessary.”
This article has been updated from an earlier version to accurately describe the title of altar servers.
