Charles Wesley was an Anglican Priest and itinerant preacher who wrote around 6500 hymns in his life. One of the first and best was “And Can It Be.” Likely written shortly after his evangelical conversion in May 1738, it reflects a personal relationship with Jesus through the experience of spiritual rebirth. Charles published “And Can…
What Do Anglicans Believe? An Overview of Anglican Beliefs
When someone visits an Anglican church, if they are new to our tradition, they often ask, “What do Anglicans believe?” As you can imagine, it is not that easy to summarize the doctrinal beliefs of a global communion with a long history and various schools of thought and practice. Nevertheless, here at Anglican Compass, we…
Anglican Worship: Ordered Flexibility & Spirituality
Anglican worship has an ethos of ordered flexibility. There is an overarching assumption that the Spirit works through, not despite, planning and order. The Prayer Book itself, with its written collects borrowed and shaped from a thousand year tradition of prayer assumes this. Order is preferred to spontaneous worship or prayer as more thoughtful, unifying, and…
Anglican Worship: The Object of our Worship
Anglican Worship of the Holy Trinity Like other Christian churches, Anglicans worship God. This God is identified clearly and consistently in our liturgy as the Trinitarian Godhead taught in the Christian creeds. We gather to pray about, to sing about, and to meditate upon his character and attributes. We speak to him, thanking him, “for the goodness…
