WE ARE HISTORICAL
We Are Historical
We believe that the Church has a great heritage of teaching and tradition rooting us in the Apostle’s teaching and keeping us faithful to the Holy Spirit’s presence and power in our lives.
We believe in the three creeds: Apostles, Nicene and Athanasian as being sufficient statements of the faith "once delivered."
We affirm the teaching of the General Councils of the undivided church.
We receive the 39 Articles of Religion as a response to certain controversies of their time and as expressing fundamental principles of Anglican belief.
We uphold the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a true and authoritative standard of doctrine, discipline and worship.
Anglicans are firm in tradition and rooted in Apostolic Succession
The Anglican Church today remains organically linked to Jesus Christ through an unbroken line of bishops. When an Anglican is confirmed, or when a deacon or priest is ordained, a bishop places hands upon that person and prays for a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit. That same bishop once received this ministry in the same manner, having hands laid upon him by another bishop, who likewise stood in a long chain of consecration. This pattern of prayer and laying on of hands forms a continuous historical connection that can be traced back through the centuries to the apostles themselves, and ultimately to Christ.
Apostolic Succession binds the Church to the living Jesus—the one who walked this earth and gave His life on the cross. It affirms that Christianity is not a tradition pieced together from a discovered text or built upon fascination with a compelling historical figure. Our faith does not rest on a modern attempt to reconstruct who Jesus might have been. The memory of Jesus was never lost. The apostles knew Him directly: they witnessed His life, heard His teaching, understood His mission, recognized the authority given to Him by the Father, and experienced the work of the Holy Spirit through Him.
That firsthand knowledge was not merely personal; it was entrusted to the apostles as a sacred gift, joined with the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Through teaching, preaching, and the laying on of hands, this faith, authority, and life were handed on to those who followed them. By God’s sustaining grace, that apostolic faith has been preserved within the succession of bishops, and it is this living continuity that Anglicans continue to affirm today.
Being rooted in early church history, we take seriously the foundation that the early church fathers established for all of Christianity to be built upon. These church fathers were taught directly by the Holy Spirit infused apostles, and thus were instructed on the correct, orthodox, interpretation of the infallible, inerrant, New Testament texts by the very authors of those texts themselves. The early church fathers, especially those within the first 500 years after Christ’s death and resurrection, prove to be especially valuable for us to correctly interpret meaning of Scripture.
If you’re trying to find the interpretation of something, and there’s no direct interpretation in Scripture, the obvious place to start is with the earliest interpreters of the spoken teachings and written text.
Apostolic and early Church tradition does not compete with Scripture—it helps us see Scripture accurately.
If a doctrine was universally taught by:
The apostles
Their disciples
The early Fathers
The entire undivided Church for thousands of years
…then any modern interpretation contradicting that consensus is almost certainly wrong.
This is why the earliest interpreters are higher authority than the latest theologians of today.
Ignatius, Polycarp, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Clement, Justin Martyr, Chrysostom, etc... lived in the world of the apostles; modern interpreters do not.
So when the early Church fathers unanimously affirm:
Baptismal regeneration
Infant baptism
The Real Presence in the Eucharist
Apostolic succession
The sacramental worldview
…Christians today must take that seriously.