If the Church of England continues to reject God’s Word, it will indeed die for lack of true knowledge, from sheer starvation and thirst. A church cannot live on aesthetics alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. Only on that rock can we truly behold the beauty from which and for which we were ultimately created.

What does it profit a Church if it gains the whole world and forfeits its soul?

I visited Winchester Cathedral recently with my family. It was awe-inspiring. We sat in for evensong.

I am so often struck by the beauty of choral evensong in Anglican churches. I wish there was a way for faithful Biblical churches to recreate it. Because the songs, readings, and prayers remain essentially Scriptural—at least prior to the sermon (if there is one)—faithful Christians can still benefit from it. At the same time, however, there is, and should be, something troubling about it. Why?

For one thing, you cannot be a Biblically observant Christian and not notice the contrast between the beauty and truthfulness of the words sung or read in such a service and the institutional reality in which you are singing or reading them. In this, there is something strangely out of step with the very English Reformation which ultimately birthed practices like evensong in the first place.

Evensong was founded on the principle that the Word of God is authoritative over the Church, and thus ought to be the centrepiece of its worship. This is why evensong is still brilliant, because it’s still ultimately founded upon Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s Biblically saturated Book of Common Prayer. There’s no getting away from it. And yet, the Church of England still manages to close its ears to what is there to be heard.

To be open to what God’s Word may be saying—however inconvenient—is to continue in the reformational spirit necessary for generational faithfulness in the Church. But as with the Reformation of the 16th century, when churches no longer allow themselves to hear and do what God’s Word says, they open themselves up to infiltration, apostasy, or stagnation.

This problem is exacerbated when the Church does not even realise its drift from the truth. But it is worse when the Church does realise but merely “reinterprets” its unfaithfulness, such as when it brazenly marches on with all of its performative Scripture-affirming practices while refusing to actually obey Scripture when and where it matters in their time.

A Prophetic Warning

This is the paradox of modern Anglicanism. They love their Bible-saturated traditions but they no longer love the Biblical truth to which those traditions gave such powerful witness. Indeed, these prophetic verses from Isaiah seem to diagnose well the present condition of the Church of England:

“They have lyre and harp, tambourine and flute and wine at their feasts, but they do not regard the deeds of the Lord, or see the work of his hands. Therefore my people go into exile for lack of knowledge; their honoured men go hungry, and their multitude is parched with thirst.”

– Isaiah 5:11-12

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