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Terry Waite
Fifteen years ago last week, Anglican envoy Terry Waite was released from captivity after being held for 1,763 days by the Islamic Jihad. An adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Waite had been kidnapped in January 1987 when he went to Beirut to negotiate the release of Western hostages.
Today Waite no longer works for the Anglican Church. In fact, he no longer even attends services. Fed up with attempts to modernize the Anglican worship that he says have “left little time for contemplation and quietness,” he began going to Quaker services last month.
—TIME, November 27, 2006, page 13
The extraordinary decision by the Anglican Church to cast aside its two prize possessions, the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible, has had unforeseen consequences. On February 27, 2005 I delivered a homily in this church which was occasioned by the striking coincidence of Pope John Paul II’s last days and a meeting of bishops in England which portended the end of the Anglican Communion.
The following week I had a pulpit exchange with the Church of the Advent, where I delivered the same homily, which this time prompted a burst of spontaneous applause. A few days later I received a letter from one of the Wardens requesting a copy of my text. She wrote: We thank the holy spirit for giving you boldness through your sermon, which spoke truth to our ears and hearts.”
Encouraged by this response, I sent the substance of my homily to the Anglican Journal in the form of a Letter to the Editors. I suggested that the Anglican Communion started to unravel when its member churches took the fateful step of replacing the Book of Common Prayer with modern service books.
The Book of Common Prayer, I wrote, was the crowning achievement of the English Reformation, and its use by Anglicans all over the world was an expression of our common origin and tradition. I referred to something C.S. Lewis once said, to the effect that when the Church has taken a wrong turn, it needs to fess up and change course.
My letter was never published, and that came as no surprise. Nowadays, for an Anglican to have anything good to say about the Prayer Book is considered politically incorrect.
Terry Waite is someone who, in the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “does not trample his own soul underfoot,” and I am sorry that he has had to go elsewhere for what is no longer to be found in the church which he served so heroically.
But the good news is this: what Terry Waite is seeking with the Quakers is still available here at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Toronto.
November 26, 2006
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