It is our weakness in leadership and proclamation that is so devastating to morale and ministry. And it is not as if nothing is happening, Satan is evangelizing and preaching unrelentingly (see Latimer, The Plough).

We do not appeal to Reformation and Awakening through regard for and reliance on human strength and ingenuity (former heroes as feeble as ourselves actually). It is a call for the enduement of power from on high in times of desperate evil, spiritual darkness and defection, and deep anguish and needs of soul all around us. How do our babblings help us? It is evident that Episcopacy, a noble and potentially godly institution, is our least dependable ally. The appeal is not, so say, to golden days which can become over-glamorous in our estimation, but to the Lord who has displayed might and mercy in the past, and to he who can make generations more holy and godly than the scene we witness now. We cry for the preservation of “the faith” for the otherwise defenseless generations of the future; our families to begin with. What a wave of wickedness rolls toward these dear and vulnerable ones. How shall they cope without gospel hope?

Our Articles are concise, our Confession by no means complete, but they enshrine fundamentals we cannot ignore, and without which our Communion collapses into chaos and irrelevance. We need a muscular message concerning God, grace, sin, and judgment, the hope of heaven and the horror of hell. We can be strong in our teaching and sympathetic in outreaching. There must be ministerial subscription and loyalty towards our Articles, and a stout assertion of our evil and God’s holy compassion.

Our liturgy and manual of devotion disciplines minds and warms hearts and increases our scope in the understanding of our Triune God and the state of ourselves in each approach to the Lord. It discloses unsuspected possibilities in our knowledge and adoration of God granted to great saints whom he has blessed throughout history. We are privileged to share in their divinely directed discoveries. How meagre is our prayer and praise to God when we ignore the aids of the church catholic and fail to fall before God with the company of his people terrestrial and triumphant. Simply taking the Litany as an example, how inspiring and instructive it is in our coming before God and on behalf of his people and the world. Here are petitions and principles that facilitate skilled wrestling with the Assailant of Jacob (Genesis 32:22-32). Our BCP 1662 and all that that volume contains is the best gymnasium in which we can work out day by day (1Timothy 4:8, 1 Corinthians 9:24-27).

God has given us himself and various ordinances and means through which we may become strong once again and in good shape for our earthly assignment. Our current weakness is the cause of great grief and the harbinger of judgment upon us. “Who knows? God may yet relent and with compassion turn from his fierce anger so that we will not perish” (Jonah 3: 7ff). And how a minister and his wife laughed when they saw that I was reading Jonathan Edward’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Current Anglicanism is virtually universalistic on the basis of its views concerning Creation and Incarnation. It has a one-sided message of divine love (mollycoddling) omitting human rebellion and lostness.

In commending our heritage we are to build on it. We are not recommending fossilization in any past epoch. But our necessary developments doctrinally, liturgically, pastorally must derive from our classic origins and maintain consistency with them. There are forces and influences in Anglicanism that would erase our biblical and Reformational heritage and have us forget it. Siren voices and subtle thought would roll us back to former times and deny that Protestantism is still vital to our Christian faithfulness and spiritual wellbeing.

Our utmost concern is to present Christ with absolute clarity, without compromise or rival, and to leave souls utterly dependent upon his sovereign and sweet grace, and to urgently call, and compassionately coax, our “neighbors” to his saving embrace.

The Rev. Roger Salter is an ordained Church of England minister where he had parishes in the dioceses of Bristol and Portsmouth before coming to Birmingham, Alabama to serve as Rector of St. Matthew's Anglican Church.