To the whole body by the whole body for the whole body with the whole body.

We are frail, we are fearfully and wonderfully made 
Forged in the fires of human passion 
Choking on the fumes of selfish rage 
And with these our hells and our heavens 
So few inches apart 
We must be awfully small 
And not as strong as we think we are. 
—Rich Mullins

I haven’t spoken, or written, much about our more definite move to Anglicanism the past year. It feels like a natural transition for us, not only because it’s one we both have been drawn into for a long time, but because it has felt healing to us in ways we didn’t know we needed. Less antiseptic, though, and more balm.

But I also haven’t said much about it because going to has meant leaving behind. Making a clean break from what had at one time breathed life into our dry bones. Neither of us ever identified as Baptist or Reformed specifically, but for five years for me and three for Nate, we navigated life in those spaces and held similar values there.

When we left Texas in 2015, we left in part because Big Church did not work for us, nor we for it.* We headed to a smaller church with similar values and when we left there a year later, we left those values too. We landed in an Anglican church outside DC for our time there, but when we came back to Texas a year after that, back to Big Church, we came back limping and jaded. I don’t know what we expected but what we got was more disorientation. It’s hard to write about this without you making unfounded assumptions about that Big Church (which is still full of many people we love and respect), but what I hope I can convey is mostly that we’d changed. Maybe they’d changed too, I don’t know. But we had definitely changed. We were grieved. We were mourning. We were scathed. We were confused. We needed the whole body to care for our whole bodies.

I feel the tension of what I’m not saying right now, you might too. You feel I am being vague and I am. I believe firmly that if one isn’t part of the problem or solution, then one doesn’t need details. But I am also being vague because I think most of us feel the tensions I felt and still feel, and I hope in sharing a bit of this, you will be able to see your own sentiments expressed.

You’ve heard me talking ad nauseum about the body recently (I don’t know if you noticed), but that’s because I cannot veer away from it, not even slightly. The word God chose to use to talk about the church, of all the words he could have used (like group or blanket or shoe or art), was the word body. This terribly uncomfortable and complex and temporal and weak and strong and beautiful and broken and becoming thing, this body. This is what he called his church.

I used to believe that membership to a local body was the primary sign of obedience and participation in the local body was the mark of maturity. But I was a foot being only a foot and only seeing value in other feet. Unless you looked and practiced like me in my body, I didn’t respect you. The hubris of that sickens me still. It nauseates me.

I have reams I could write about this, and may, but I have become undone. In the best and worst ways, God threw me overboard and sat me in the belly of a fish. It stinks. But it’s been teaching me that not only is my own body not as strong as I thought it was, but the bodies I have been a part of were not as strong as I thought they were. This isn’t a statement on any particular body, it is just the reality of all local churches in all locales. We’re fumbling through life, our bodies bearing on them and within them traumas and besetting generational sins and we’re doing our best but goodness gracious, it’s hard to do what’s right. I’m talking about both the body in which we live and the body of Christ.

Of all the reasons I am drawn to Anglicanism, it is the use of the whole body in its practices that draw me most. It is the rising and kneeling and receiving and dipping and seeing and sitting and turning and singing and smelling and hearing and touching and passing. There is an embodiment there that I haven’t yet experienced in most local churches. It is not the presence of the bodies themselves, but the call to the whole body by the whole body for the whole body with the whole body—broken, blemished, and beautiful as she is. There is a complexity there, a lack of uniformity, that keeps drawing me in.

Christ came in a body for the body and left the practice of partaking in his body still to the body of believers here on earth. I don’t even know where the mysteries of that start and end, but I do know, at the very least, it is far more serious than I ever gave it credence. Just as we need more than just feet or knees in a body, we need more than one way of thinking, more than one way of being, more than one uniform way to be a Christian in the whole Body of Christ.

Does Anglicanism get this right? No. Neither do the Baptists. Nor the Charismatics or Roman Catholics or Presbyterians. Just as we as individuals are all various parts of the whole body, local churches are parts of the whole body too. None of us can do it perfectly on our own. I see that now in a way I couldn’t before and needed to. Not just so my own pride could be bludgeoned, but so that I could stop bludgeoning everyone else with my pride too. Today it is the earthy embodiment of God at work in the “bent world” that I find in Anglicanism and this is what draws me to it. Imperfectly, limping, pulling one leg behind me most days, if at all, but drawn still.

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*I understand how some of you may flinch from this language, I once did too. That’s okay.