Anglicanism, A Nice Little Religion

By David Straw I www.virtueonline.org I October 2, 2026

A note before you read: this isn’t aimed at any particular type of Anglicanism. If your own pet subject is missing, that may be why it sounds the way it does. I’m not trying to settle anything between Anglicans. I’m trying to talk about the things we seldom weigh when making big decisions, but probably should. I’m simply giving witness to what it’s like to live the life of the church: ordinary people, ministered to by ordinary priests, in an ordinary parish.

There was a time in the early 2000s, when the Episcopal Church was getting so weird and heretical, that I told my parents I might as well become Roman.

My father put the whole thing rather bluntly. He told me that the Anglican Church was “one messed up organization, but it’s a nice little religion.” Then he said, “You would find Rome to be the exact opposite if you go there.”

Some Anglicans will feel the Call of Rome. Many, especially on the Low Church side, never will. But it is common enough that most of us know someone who has heard it.

Those who feel it are usually bright. They have read theology. They listen to podcasts. They know about Thomas Aquinas, the Church Fathers, the councils and apostolic succession. I

understand the attraction.

There is a great deal to admire in other Christian traditions. An Anglican can spend an evening listening to Pints with Aquinas, Michael Knowles or any number of articulate Catholic and Orthodox voices and come away convinced that something is missing from his own church. He sees the beautiful churches, the ancient liturgy, the vestments, the monasteries and the confident clergy.

Some of it is attractive because some of it is good. But I wonder if we sometimes fail to notice what we already have because we are too busy weighing what somebody else has. What are the benefits we do not weigh? How do we weigh having a priest who doesn’t cover two churches and 3,000 parishioners, but who really knows who we are?

How do we put a price on the priest who knows our wife and our children? The priest who has baptized our babies, visited us in the hospital, prayed with us when our marriage was in trouble, and stood beside us when our parents died? Someone who will sometimes be there for decades. That is not particularly impressive on a podcast. It is simply the Christian life.

I grew up around Anglican/Episcopal clergy. They were not all alike. Some were stern. Some were warm. Some were intellectuals. Some were funny. Some were extraordinary. Some were even grouchy. Every clergyman I had growing up, until I was in my thirties, was a veteran. I am sure that was not everyone’s experience, but it was mine.

There was something about those men that I have never forgotten. They had lived lives not so different from their parishioners. Most were raising families. Some had trouble making ends meet financially. They had served in wars, WWII, Korea and Vietnam, and some carried the scars of war.

I will never forget the priest who broke down crying during a sermon about his friend being killed on the deck of a naval vessel, and all that was left of him was hosed off into the sea.

I will never forget the stern-looking former U.S. Navy surface warfare officer, a Korean War veteran, who would look at us young acolytes, flick his cigarette out the side door and say, “Come on boys, let’s go.” It was like we were going to battle more than church.I will never forget the priest my mother once told us about. A local man had given his wife another black eye. When the priest arrived at the house, the husband said, “Father, this woman is trying to leave me with the kids.” The priest answered, “I know.

That’s why I’m here, to help her get to safety, because this situation is dangerous.” Then he looked the man in the eye and said, “I’m also coming back to help you and your whole family.

But you’d best stay out of the way while I do what needs to be done for her right now.”

And I will never forget the priest my mother sent us to see. Three months into dating, my wife and I were already talking about engagement, and she was rightfully worried. She made us go talk to a local rector. He looked at us and said, “Well, I’ve been married for over thirty years and I proposed to my wife after dating three weeks. Let’s get you kids into some premarital classes!”

I went home and told my mother. I can still hear the sound of her slapping her forehead in exasperation.

My wife and I have now been married more than thirty-five years and have four children. I am not saying I would handle those situations the way these clergymen did. I most certainly wouldn’t. I am saying that most Anglican clergy are real people, speaking a normal person’s language.

And these men were all accessible. The Anglican world has always had some of that quality. It is a family. Not always a peaceful family, mind you. Anyone who has sat through a contentious vestry meeting knows that.

But a family nevertheless. Rome has terrible battles. So does Orthodoxy, which has seen full schisms recently. The difference is that some churches pretend they don’t.

There is a certain honesty about Anglicanism. We have our battles in the open. There is a transparency to it that is almost American Midwestern, or Southern. For all its intellectualism, Anglicanism tells you the truth about itself.

I was reminded of the larger Church during the creation of the Anglican Church in North America. People were so exuberant that someone called me up to tell me it had happened. Then he said there was somebody there I would probably like to talk to, and he handed the telephone to Archbishop Peter Akinola.

Here I was, an ordinary American Anglican, having a three or four minute conversation with a man responsible for the spiritual care of about eighteen million Anglicans halfway across the world. We got along. I understood him and he understood me.

We can be completely American. We worship in American towns. We speak with American accents. We sing American hymns. We baptize American children, marry American couples, bury American saints, and gather around the Lord’s Table as Americans.

We do not have to become English to be Anglican. But neither do we have to become isolated. We belong to a tradition that reaches back to the earliest Christians in England and has spread throughout the world. We share the Scriptures, confess the faith and receive the Sacraments.

That phone call brought something home to me that is easy to forget. Our parish is not the whole Church. Our diocese is not the whole Church. Even the Anglican Church in North America is not the whole Church.

That is one of the peculiar strengths of Anglicanism. It gives us roots without making us provincial. We can be deeply at home in our own country while remembering that the Church of Jesus Christ is much bigger than our country. We are here. But we are not alone.

Our bishops aren’t like branch managers assigned to us from the big downtown bank. Where I minister, in the ACNA, clergy and laity help elect their own bishops, and that’s the way it should be. After all, in many cases they are men the average guy can actually smoke a cigar and drink a bourbon with. They will often sincerely answer even the most peripheral member’s phone call at an odd hour.

Anglican Christians have a common liturgical grammar without requiring every parish to speak with exactly the same accent. It’s like visiting cousins when you attend an out-of-town church.

You know where you are. My father was not trying to write an ecclesiology. He was making an observation. And the older I get, the more I understand what he meant.

Anglicanism can be organizationally frustrating. We have overlapping dioceses in the U.S. We have deep disagreements.

But the religion itself can be remarkably simple to live.

Go to church.

Use the Prayer Book.

Hear the Scriptures. Say the Creed.

Pray.

Confess our sins.

Receive absolution.

Partake of Holy Communion.

Raise our families.

Visit the sick.

Help our neighbor.

Give.

Forgive.

Do our duty, even if that means being Junior Warden over buildings and grounds.

We even have an app for morning and evening prayer. The ACNA puts out iPray, and it’s easy to keep the rhythm. It’s on the same phone that carries all those engaging podcasts. There is something almost radical about the simplicity of being an Anglican Christian.

The Anglican who feels the pull of some other church may believe that he is looking for greater certainty. Sometimes he is.

But sometimes what he needs is more faithfulness. He may think he needs to settle every question about ecclesiology. Perhaps he needs to learn that Christian maturity includes living faithfully while some questions remain difficult.

After all, Anglicans know the via media and living in tension. Questions matter. Truth matters. Doctrine matters. But Christianity is not merely the discovery of the correct ecclesiastical system. It is the formation of a Christian life, and that life is formed through habits.

We learn patience by living with people who irritate us. We learn humility by discovering that our priest does not always preach the sermon we hoped for. I thank God a lot of Sundays the whole service doesn’t rest on my sermon. Thank God for the sacraments! We learn faithfulness by showing up. We learn perseverance by staying when the music is bad but the service and people are authentic.

And perhaps that last one is particularly important. There is always another church. There is always another podcast. There is always another beautiful photograph of another beautiful liturgy.

But eventually, we have to stop looking at the Church from the outside and start living in one from the inside. That is where the benefits begin to appear.

The old woman who has prayed beside us for twenty years. The child we baptized who is now serving at the altar. The priest who knows exactly why we have been absent. The eccentric people we did not choose but whom God has given us to love.

The familiar prayers, hymns, seasons and faces. None of these things will win an argument on the internet. They probably wouldn’t make a very good podcast. But they are part of the Christian life. They are goods. And they are goods we rarely weigh. Perhaps this is one reason I have become less interested in finding the perfect church. There isn’t one. There are only churches filled with sinners trying, by the grace of God, to become saints.

For me, the answer has been Anglican Christianity. Not because it is perfect. But because, for all its peculiarities and frustrations, it has given me a way to live the Christian faith. A Prayer Book.

A parish. A priesthood. Sacraments. Scripture. Friends. And people to love.

My father called it a “nice little religion.” Perhaps that is not such a bad thing to have. Especially when what we need most is not another church to evaluate, but a church in which we can learn to be faithful.

Rev. David Straw is rector at Trinity Anglican Church, Evansville, IN. He graduated cum laude from the University of Southern Indiana where he was a member of Golden Key, Phi Alpha Theta and Kappa Delta Pi honor societies. He completed his graduate work for the ministry at Wesley Seminary in Marion, IN.