Jeffg - I pray for your search and hope it's more successful than mine, but I wouldn't keep my hopes up too much.
Brigid, I just thought of this locator map for ACNA Anglican Churches, in case you haven't seen it yet. http://www.acna.org/map Peace and blessings.
Rexlion said: ↑ Brigid, I just thought of this locator map for ACNA Anglican Churches, in case you haven't seen it yet. http://www.acna.org/map Peace and blessings. I have also checked out a ACNA Church locally, pretty good/not bad. Only thing I found kinda weird is that the priest/pastor/clergy had been a Presbyterian minister then appearantly switched over to the ACNA mission church which I checked out a few times. Have to admit I have a suspician of Presybertian/Reformed clergy going heavy on Calvinistic/Zwiglian pre-destination and from what I understand Calvin/Reformed have a differant view of the Eucherist. At the same time, I've tried to keep an open mind and give them a chance. I would go back to that particular ACNA mission again, but as I've siad before am doing some Church hunting
Jeffg, you could always make an appointment with the rector to sit down together so you can ask him some pointed questions. That's what I did in the week after my first visit. I had to be satisfied in my mind that I could sit under his teaching without getting surprised by something I'd object strongly to.
I would not worry about the background of the Priest; in the Orthodox Church, we have a number of convert Priests, many of whom used to be Presbyterians or even Calvinist Baptists, and I can assure you they did check their Calvinism and Zwinglianism at the door. The main thing for me would be the liturgy. If I found an Anglican church that was delivering in this respect, that I also had reason to believe had what one might call sacramental vitality, that would be sufficient.
I wouldn't be too concerned about a presbyterian, and calvinism and zwinglianism are not the same thing. A traditional calvinist would hold to a sacramental view of communion while zwinglers are memorialists. I also find (and I have a great deal of experience having been of the Reformed persuation at one time) that election, in practice, rarely comes up or makes them any less evangelistic.
But Anglicanism does not demand that. And so, one can find aberrations like a local cleric near me who is a five point Calvinist and a raving Pentecostal at the same time. I've encountered a bishop or two who is more likely to send his postulants out to Covenant or even Dallas Theological Seminary where they can get a thoroughly Reformed education rather than have anything to do with an Anglican school.
My point, which I could have expressed more clearly, was to the extent that Presbyterianism can manifest in a manner incompatible with Anglicanism (although for a brief period in the early 20th century, there was a high church movement in both the Church of England and the Church of Scotland, and one would expect due to the Royal attendance at both of these churches a certain similiarity had developed and probably still exists to some extent), in a traditional jurisdiction enforcing the use of the Book of Common Prayer, the BCP should filter out any of the more unpleasant aspects of extremely Reformed theology (for example, the BCP has a catechism and liturgical texts which definitively define baptism). The only place where one would likely have reason to be concerned about extremely Calvinistic theology might be the Reformed Episcopal Church I should think, but they joined ACNA, a group which also includes Anglo Catholics and others. Which surprises me; I would have thought they would have instead pursued closer fellowship with, for example, the Presbyterian Church in America. As I see it, the main downside of winding up with a very Reformed vicar is you will likely wind up with inferior liturgics due to less attention being paid to vesture, indeed the rules on vestments might be ignored, like in several low church parishes, and one is less assured of the liturgical elegance which has come to characterize Anglicanism. However, since that is not the case in the parish in question, according to @Jeffg, I don’t think he would need to worry about that. Of course, there is the Church Discipline thing associated with Calvinistas like the 9Marks people, who I greatly resent not the least for their once posting an article that excused Islamic persecution of Christians in the Middle East on the grounds that Catholic and Orthodox Christians in those countries were “image-worshipping, pornography-viewing drunks.” If the liberal culture infesting the ECUSA (and almost entirely dominating the unfortunate United Church of Christ), and the horrifying statements of people like John Shelby Spong represent one extreme of offensiveness, fundamentalists like 9Marks represent the other. But I don’t think a fundamentalist could get ordained into any traditional Anglican jurisdictions, and to the extent they might be, the BCP would forcibly mitigate such tendencies. I should think the most fundamentalist an traditional Anglican priest might be would be someone along the lines of Rev. D. James Kennedy, memory eternal, who I rather liked (and who had a beautiful church music program at Coral Ridge; alas, if only he had been an Anglican, Coral Ridge Hour would have been even more spectacular!) Actually we really need, in the US, a charismatic Anglican liturgical traditionalist in a suitable congregation, in a suitably splendid old church, to webcast and broadcast the traditional Anglican services, beautifully served, along with a thundering homily in the grand tradition of St. John Chrysostom. The venue would need to be something like the restored Anglican parish in central Chico, CA, or at the very least, if a former Episcopal parish, one of the less ugly ones.