The British are Coming! (***Bow Tie Dialogue Ep.02 - The Anglican Show!!!***)

Anglican Identity, Reformed Catholicity, and the ACNA

Welcome back to the Bowtie Dialogues here on Conversations with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey, and of course I am your Calvinist. Today I'm joined by a group of Anglican ministers who are going to dialogue with me on the subject of their understanding of the church, church history, theology.

Where do we agree? Where do we disagree? And what Bible passages would we run to to make our points? And what do we really think about each other? What do Baptists think about Anglicans? And what I'm more interested in, what do Anglicans think about Baptists?

And we're gonna have a good time while doing it. So I want to introduce my very distinguished crowd today who are here giving their time to this Bowtie Dialogue. I have Nick Lannan, I have Drew Collins, I have J .D. Koch, I have Matt Kennedy and Charlie Kohlberg.

And I think I'm saying their names correctly, but if I am wrong, they can correct me in just a moment. And in doing so, I want to also say that all of these men were brought together by Drew. So thank you, Drew, for pulling this together and giving us a wonderful Bowtie Dialogue today.

As we all know, the Anglican church and the church that I represent, which is not Presbyterianism, even though a lot of people think I'm a Presbyterian, I represent the Reformed Baptist Church, does have some differences.

And what I find often is we tend to get in our own groups. We tend to get in our own denominations, our own fellowships, and we know a lot about what we believe, but we don't often know about why other people believe the way that they do.

Sometimes we end up creating some straw men. We have wrong ideas and we build up straw men just to burn them down on things that we disagree about. And so what I've done with Bowtie Dialogues is I've created this series as a way to get to know other denominations straight from the mouths of men who preach in these denominations.

And so, as I said today, and jokingly on the YouTube thumbnail, it says the British are coming because this is our Anglican Bowtie Dialogue. And I'm really looking forward to asking questions, talking about Anglicanism, its history, its teachings, the theology of it.

But before I do that, I'm gonna have every man introduce himself. We're gonna start going around the guys. We're gonna ask them to introduce themselves. And if you would tell me, did you become an Anglican first?

Were you saved in the Anglican church? Maybe you were born into it. Maybe you were saved through an Anglican minister. Or did you get saved through another denomination and be, as it were, converted to Anglicanism?

And if so, what was it that appealed to you and drew you into Anglicanism? So I'm gonna begin with Nick and ask him to answer that question for us.

Thanks, I'm Nick Lannan. I'm the rector of Grace Anglican Church in Louisville, Kentucky. Our word rector just means senior pastor. I grew up in an Episcopal church, which as I'm sure we'll talk plenty about on this conversation, was for a long time the major expression of Anglicanism in America.

My mom had grown up in an Episcopal church before leaving the church. She was a hippie at Woodstock. My arrival on the scene in the late 70s brought her back to the church. And I think just coincidentally, the local Episcopal church was the one that was closest to our house.

But it was a wonderful church. And that was the church in which I heard the gospel and became a Christian. And the rest is history. I'm now in the ACNA, the Anglican church in North America, no longer the Episcopal church.

Like I said, that's a story that I'm sure we'll talk plenty about, but that's my short version of how I came to be Anglican.

Awesome. And I did, I posted a Twitter question. I said, what would you ask if you could ask a group of Anglican and one was about the ACNA? So I do want to get back to that eventually and say, how did that come about?

And maybe you could give us a short history on that. Nick. All right, Drew, tell us your story.

Well, and we are all three or all four in or five. Five. Well, I'm a history major with the math. We're all in the Anglican church in North America. My name is Drew Collins. I'm rector of St. Andrew's Anglican church in Savannah, Georgia.

We are a parish of the diocese of the Southeast of the Reformed Episcopal church, which is a part of the ACNA. I was raised actually in the PCUS, which no longer exists, but it was the old Southern Presbyterian church that was absorbed into the PCUSA in 1983.

And it was there that I heard the gospel in a actually fairly liberal church, but God moves in mysterious ways. And in my early twenties, started thinking about going to seminary, decided that I couldn't do that in good conscience in the PCUSA.

So I went to the Associate Reformed Presbyterian church, which you've never parodied them, but they are kind of like, they're a NAPARC denomination, very similar to the PCA and had a great time there, still have many dear friends there.

Went to their seminary, back at their seminary now as a student, but the prayer book drew me in. And so I don't like to use the term convert to Anglicanism, because I don't see a Baptist or a Presbyterian becoming an Anglican as a conversion.

I see it as moving, changing. You're moving from one room to another in the house of God, household of God. You're not changing religions.

Sure, and let me clarify with that. When I say converting, I certainly agree with you that we are all followers of the same Christ and the same universal church.

Some people who didn't, that's why I mentioned that. But I have been an Anglican through the Reformed Episcopal church since 2004, spent four years in the canonically resident, the Diocese of South Carolina where JD ministers, but came back to the Diocese of the Southeast when I took the call to this parish.

Love it here, have a great group of people.

Wonderful, thank you, Drew, and thank you for sharing that history with us. All right, JD, I'm gonna switch to you now and wanna make sure, is it like saying JD? Is that how you prefer, or is JD how you prefer?

It's like lady with a J. Lady with a J, gotcha.

That's it, I don't know why. That's a whole longer story, but yeah. Thanks for having me on, I'm JD Koch. I'm the rector of St. Luke's Anglican on Hilton Head Island. And I guess I saw, well, my mother grew up in the Episcopal church in Baton Rouge, St. James, Baton Rouge.

And by her own attestation, if she's watching, love you, mom, got saved at a Billy Graham crusade in college at LSU in the 1970s, early 1970s. And as a result of that conversion, we never stepped foot in an Episcopal church ever again, as far as I knew, at least growing up.

And so I actually grew up in kind of the, I guess the best way you could call it, kind of like the Jesus movement church. It eventually became a vineyard, primarily through the music and that was a wonderful way to grow up.

Lots of flip-flops actually have kind of come full circle, lots of flip-flops and Hawaiian shirts and things like this. But it wasn't until college, I entered college intending to be a politician and then through the Lord's intervention ended up, by the time I was a senior, considering the ministry and having grown up in the free church, I essentially had all of the options available to me and not a lot of direction, except for the fact that I had, as a good sort of child of the late 90s in college, become what I now understand to be possibly some of the young restless and reformed crowd.

And so ended up reading a lot of John Piper in particular and sort of kind of good reformed theology at the time. And so I was headed off to Gordon Conwell, I thought, cause I was just where one would go, or at least among others.

And I was introduced to my now wife as a senior who came from a long line of what we now would call sort of evangelical Anglicans, many of whom were sort of founding members of the Anglican church in North America.

And I was introduced at that point to a picture of reformational theology that was biblically sound. It was committed to the doctrine of justification by faith alone. And it was also utilized the historical tools of the 2000 year Christian tradition to educate, equip and form people.

And so I saw for the first time a picture of what some would call kind of reformed Catholicity that was just quite inspiring. Cause I had no, I wanted a church that was thoroughgoingly biblical, as I said, committed to reformation principles and also sort of open to the tradition in an open-handed way.

And well, here we are, that was 23 something years ago and so far so good. So there we go.

Amen. Well, thank you for that very much. All right, we're gonna go over to Mr. Matt Kennedy and share with us your story, brother.

Yeah, thank you. I was baptized at three years old in an Episcopal church and that's because my mother had just been converted. She, a woman next door to us, knocked on her door and came in with a big black Bible and shared the gospel with my mom.

And that day she became a Christian and I happened to be going to an Episcopalian day school that was attached to a church. So that's where we went to church. And so I was raised in the Episcopal church.

I didn't, we went every Sunday, but I didn't, I don't think I ever heard the gospel there. I'm not saying I didn't preach it, but I didn't ever hear it. So it wasn't until I left for college and I went through a stage of, I thought I was an atheist for a while, I thought I was an agnostic for a while, I thought I was, all through the stages of disbelief.

And then at 24, I heard a sermon by R .C. Sproul on the radio and ultimately that's my, turning my life over to Christ. And I said, I decided to go back to the Episcopal church because I didn't know anything, anything else.

So that's where I went. I happened to walk into the one, one of the few Episcopalian churches in Houston, Texas, that was solid Orthodox church. And that rest is kind of history. I went to seminary from there.

And now I'm the rector of Good Shepherd Anglican church in Binghamton, New York.

Excellent. Thank you. Thank you, Matt, very much. All right, we're gonna finish out this with Charlie. Let him share his part. And I want you to add one thing to yours, Charlie, because you were the first one on that had the collar.

Well, I don't know, Drew may have been first, but you have the collar. I want you to tell us what, why you guys wear that collar? Because that may be something that Baptists aren't used to and it's not a bow tie.

So I'm definitely not used to it, so.

Well, the thing that the, a lot of Baptist non-liturgical churches don't realize is if you take the collar off on the inside, it says kills fleas and ticks up to three months. It helps us down here in the South.

No, so the collar is, a throwback or an image of the bond slave. And so we are servants of Christ. The black that you see priests wearing is because we're not lawmakers. We are those who are to interpret and teach and uphold what God's word says.

And so you'll see the judges wear black too because they're not lawmakers, they're to uphold, interpret, and explain the law. So that's kind of our garb. Sometimes we wear this with pants, other times with Bermuda shorts and whatnot, anyway.

So I grew up Presbyterian. I went to a Presbyterian seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary. And I was originally ordained in the ARP, Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. And so, you know, the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church and the REC have these familial bounds.

So there's a theological closeness there. So for me to transfer from the Presbyterian to the Reformed Episcopal was like basically the same paperwork of going from one Presbytery to another Presbytery in that denomination.

So it's very close bond. The reason was is because as you're studying and as you're a student of the Reformation and of theology, what I began to realize is that if John Calvin or John Knox or Augustine walked into my little Presbyterian church, they would have no idea what we were doing.

And they'd probably be mildly offended that it wasn't a Reformed expression or consistent Reformed expression of worship. And so going back and looking at the way the church worshiped, that what I found was that when Anglicanism is done correctly, when we are theologically, liturgically, and biblically self-conscious, when we understand that our service is drawn from scripture and it's driving us back to scripture, when you get to a place like that, that it is the most comprehensive expression of the Reformed faith.

It is a faith that believes, that preaches, and it worships consistently with the biblical principles that we hold dear.

So that's how I got here. Amen, amen. Well, thank you again, all gentlemen, for sharing that. And what we're gonna do now is I did produce a list of questions that I wanted to ask. And unfortunately, while I would love to hear all of you give answers, unfortunately, if we all tried to answer every question, we wouldn't be able to do that.

So I know that there was a little bit of pregame discussion about some of you being prepared to answer some of the questions. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start out with the first one on the list.

And I wanna say this for my audience sake. Some of these questions, I know the answers to, but I'm asking it for the sake of my listeners and also to make sure I'm right. Because if I say I know the answer, but not being Anglican, I may have a wrong understanding.

And as I said earlier, I hate straw men. I hate when people straw men me, I hate when people straw men my position. So I don't wanna do that to other people either. So my goal is to hear exactly how you guys, and I figure having five men who are studied and pastors and teachers and rectors of the church, you guys should be able to give me a pretty good answer to these questions.

So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna throw these questions out. If you're prepared to answer and you just wanna jump right in, you can. If someone says something and you wanna add to that, you're welcome to.

The only thing I would say is let's not do a lot of repeating. If somebody says it really well, we can move on to the next if you guys are all satisfied with that. But I do hope to hear from everyone as we go.

So the first question I have on my list is, can you describe what makes Anglicanism unique among the other denominations? What is really unique about Anglicanism? I'd say I think J .D. said it a little bit.

I think it's a form of Catholicity. That's the one thing is that when I'm asked, are you Protestant or Catholic? I say, yes, because But I'm not Roman Catholic, but it is a way of being within the stream of Catholicity while still being also Protestant and Reformed.

So that's kind of my elevator pitch for that. Well, let me ask this.

And again, anyone is free to answer. None of you would affirm the authority of the Pope. I'm correct.

Am I correct in saying that? There is no jurisdiction in the realm. That's right. That's right.

A good way of understanding Anglicanism as a practice, and as we believe it here, is that we have a Reformed liturgy. Our principal Reformer, Thomas Cranmer, took the liturgy of his day and ran it through the grid of scripture.

And changed some of the prayers, but kept a lot. So the form of our worship looks as much, looks very ancient because it is, but it also has a Reformed flavor to it. So sometimes people walking into our churches do think, oh, this is a Catholic church, a Roman Catholic church.

It's not. It looks like it, but it's not. Some look more Roman Catholic than others. But our theology, if you look at our formularies, which are our confessional documents, if you read the prayer book from 1662, the 39 articles, the homilies, you'll see that our tradition is thoroughly Reformed in a way that I'm sure you would recognize.

Maybe a little bit broader around the edges. We don't define as many things as you guys do, but it is thoroughly within the Reformed stream, theologically speaking.

That's right. Yeah, we had Reformation in England, obviously, but it stopped short of sort of the iconoclasm in other places. So we destroyed a lot of the, Henry VIII began, took a lot of the monasteries.

We destroyed a lot of the artwork, but not all of them, and most notably the cathedrals. So we had this Reformed theology, sort of the engine of our church that was housed within a lot of what was still visibly kind of a high medieval sort of sacramental, at least looking system, like these great cathedrals like Ely and Westminster and these places.

And so you had this at the onset, kind of a blending of, in many cases, the best of what the kind of high medieval church had to offer aesthetically, but with an entirely new sort of biblically grounded theology undergirding it.

And that took a couple of decades, if not centuries, to really work itself out. And there was some disagreement along the way. Nevertheless, if you embrace that sort of origin story, for lack of a better word, of the English Reformation church, well, then you can proudly call yourself a Reformed Catholic without, and understand what you mean.

So that's kind of what I was, one of the distinctives.

If we have time, let me jump in, cause I'm gonna kind of dovetail in on a couple of things. That kind of like what JD was saying, one of the uniquenesses of Anglicanism as you kind of experience it and walk in and worship, is that it is very much holistic.

In other words, that we believe that God created, we believe that God redeemed. When Christ came, He assumes the fullness of our human nature and so that every point, whether it's through our cognitive listening to a sermon, whether it's through our posture of kneeling or standing, whether it's through the visual devotional prompts that you see all around you, whatever it is, that the gospel is being proclaimed to you through what you see, through actions, through your stances, through all of this.

And so in that sense, it's very much engaging. It's very much holistic rather than what I would say, having been a Presbyterian minister is sometimes a reductionism to just the cognitive. We've come to a TED Talk on the Bible and that's fine and that's important, but it leaves a whole lot out.

The other thing kind of dovetailing on what Drew said about historic Catholicity, what a lot of people don't realize when, so I've got you up there, you're our Calvinist. And if I ask most people, what do we mean by Calvinism?

They would rattle off something like TULIP, irresistible grace, blah, blah, blah. And so, but that's not, Calvin didn't add anything to that, that's Augustinian. And Calvin's major contribution to really theology was the primacy of the person, meaning that Calvin realized that God, not exclusively, but very seldom reveals himself just in terms of his brute nature.

That most of the time when God reveals his nature is mediated through the persons of the Trinity. Our God is a personal God. So the reason I bring that up is because, like we've all heard of St. Nicholas, St. Francis, St. Bernard, you know, all these saints.

What we don't realize is that prior to the Counter-Reformation, you were only called a saint if you were an Augustinian. And so if you weren't, so like if we take, just like Billy Graham, a godly man, did great work for the church, God used him, but probably not what we would say a Calvinist today.

Well, I would say he's a Calvinist today. Yeah, okay. And an Anglican as well.

And an Anglican, that's right. Everyone is an Anglican, yeah. Welcome to the big house. So, no, but they would have called him Blessed Billy Graham. And so it was, he's great, he did a lot, but there's just something theologically off that means he's not fully to be imitated.

And so when you look back on what Cranmer was doing, it wasn't inventing something. We didn't go into the Sistine Chapel and paint over Michelangelo's painting or redo it. We cleaned it. We got all the years of grime and all the years of pollution that had come in there.

And so what I would like to say is that when you enter an Anglican church that's doing it right, and there's some knuckleheads everywhere you go, but when you walk into an Anglican church that's doing it right, you're worshiping in the same way that the church is worshiped at its health down through the ages.

And so when the church has been healthy and when the church has been theologically and liturgically consistent, that this is this vein that has come through. And so we are a traditional church for modern world.

All right. That's an interesting aside. Billy Graham, of course, was raised Presbyterian, became a Baptist, ministered as, or was ordained a Baptist, but toward the end of his life was asked, if you had it to do over again, what do you think you'd do?

And he said, he thought he would find a very comfortable home in evangelical Anglicanism. So there's that. And now he does. Now he does.

Well, we've had a couple of names that have been thrown around in this conversation. One, Matt mentioned Thomas Cramner, and I believe JD, or JD did, and someone else mentioned King Henry VIII. And I did have a question on here, and I'm jumping down a little bit, but the question of the beginnings of the Anglican church.

I know one of the often accused, and I would say probably a straw man that is used to defame or discount the Anglican church, is that it was started as a way to provide the King of England a divorce. And again, I'm not saying this is what I believe or what I would teach, but I know that this is out there.

I know that you guys have probably heard this. I'm not the first person who said this to you. So I'm asking, what are your thoughts on that as when someone tries to discount the history and the historicity of the Anglican church as it only started to satisfy a lustful desire of the King?

How do you deal with that? Or do you even consider that worthy of an answer?

Well, it's certainly worthy of an answer, I think, because of how prevalent the question is. But there were winds of Protestantism, if you will, blowing in England as early, probably even earlier than John Wycliffe in the 14th century.

So this is well before Henry VIII. People are starting to see the need for reform in the church. And even during the time of Henry VIII, Henry certainly became less, I don't even know what the word would be, theologically laudable at the end of his life, but perhaps was more a committed Christian at the beginning.

And he really thought when he had trouble producing a male heir that he was being judged by God because he had married his brother's wife. And he wanted to be faithful. And so tried to commission people to figure out what the truth of the situation was.

And those winds of Protestantism that had been blowing for hundreds of years now had certainly infected in a good way, if you can say infection in a good way, Thomas Cranmer and his ilk. I mean, Cranmer went to Germany and came back married to the niece of the reformer Andreas Osiander.

So there's definitely some Protestantism happening there, right? This is a Catholic priest who is now married. And so the need for Henry to get his marriage annulled was simply the opening that Cranmer and the other theologians saw to start this Protestant church that they'd been dreaming of and really trying to start all along.

That's right. Yeah, and I don't wanna apologize for Henry VIII too much, but I think it's anachronistic not to appreciate the historical situation he found himself in having come through the War of the Roses, having been sort of the conciliar king that was going to do the one thing the king needed to do, which was to prohibit, to stop civil war from happening again.

And the only thing he could do to do that was to have a viable male heir. And so he can be faulted as everyone can for many things, but I think it's a simplistic reduction to just say that he was this kind of giant philanderer because that wasn't the problem.

Like no king even up until today is really held accountable to his extramarital dalliances. That wasn't the problem. He needed to have a legitimate male heir. And when that was failing to be produced, well, then what we saw was, at least on a grand scale, one of the first kind of exegetical disputations, maybe in the, certainly in the English speaking world, that had ever taken place.

You had actual academics who, with the critical Greek and Hebrew texts in front of them, sitting down and having these scholarly disputations. I mean, Henry Marshall, the entire scholastic apparatus, all of the various colleges came together and to seek an answer for this.

And fundamentally the argument was, is the Pope more powerful than the Bible? Because the Pope was willing to grant all sorts of ways to kind of wiggle out of the marriage and sort of save face as the supreme ruler and give Henry what he ultimately wanted.

But that wasn't sufficient because the real question was, is the Bible true? Can I have a legitimate divorce according to the scriptures or is the Pope the authority? And I think when that began to be asked, well, then you see the rest of the dominoes fall, which led to, well, which led to Elizabeth and the formation ultimately of the Church of England.

Excellent.

The Via Media, Open Table Communion, and Differences from Reformed Baptists

Well, thank you, gentlemen. That was a wonderful answer. And I wanna also jump on something else that was said earlier, and this was Drew who made the point of a reformed Catholicity. And I know some of the rest of you have mentioned this as well.

When I've used in my videos, I've used the term via media, which I heard, and I think I understand what it means, but I wanna ask you if I am correct, and I'm gonna ask you guys, because I used it like when I was doing my shooting video, I had the nine millimeter rifle.

This is the best of both worlds, right? I got a rifle accuracy with a pistol cartridge, so I said that was it. And then, so, but is it that, because I've heard this, I've heard two different arguments.

I've heard that the via media, meaning the middle way is the middle way between Catholics and Protestants, but I've also heard that it is the middle way between Lutherans and reformed. So which is right or both wrongs?

That's my question.

Well, what I think what you just spoke of is, yeah, when I speak of, and it's a little, I don't know, quirk of mine, I have many. When I speak of who you just referred to as the Catholics, and I mean, no disrespect to my Roman Catholic brethren, but I always qualify it with Roman because I'm not willing to surrender the term Catholic, but as Matt was gonna say, it's the latter of the two historically was what was meant.

Richard Hooker was, he's a theologian, Anglican theologian in the 17th century, and he was working through the debate going on between Puritans and those who were more close to the established church.

And so people have recognized that Anglicanism coming out of those kinds of disputes has embraced elements of maybe more Lutheran thought and in Calvinistic thought as a result and blended them together.

And you can see it when you read our articles of religion, you can see both of those influences coming through pretty clearly.

Okay, well, and that's very helpful. And I like what you said, Drew, that you're arguing for a genuine Catholicity rather than a Roman Catholicity. And interestingly enough, I'm gonna be interviewing a young man.

Have any of you have ever heard of the Redeemed Zoomer? Yes. Have you? He has like one of the largest pages on YouTube and he's just a young man and he's just talking about church and playing video games, but he's a very interesting young man.

But we're gonna talk, I'm having him on, I've had him on before. We're gonna be talking a little bit about what makes the genuine Catholic. And by that, I mean the true church, the universal church. Because there was a graphic that was put out where it had a circle and it said, this is the true church.

And then they had all the, how much of each circle was in the circles. I don't know if you guys saw that online. We're gonna be breaking that down and talking about it. But when we say Catholic, and this is good for my listeners to hear, we're saying it with the sense of Christ's body, Christ's universal body.

Yeah, and I think Sorry. I was at a Roman Catholic church one evening for a pro-life function. And the priest who was the pastor of the church asked, is anyone in here not a Catholic? And I was in a collar, I was in a black suit, but this lady knew that I was not a Roman Catholic.

And she said, well, you ought to raise your hand. And I said, madam, I'm a Catholic, I'm just not a Roman. And that's my standard answer for that kind of thing.

JD, you had some thoughts? Well, I was gonna say, this is probably maybe another question here, but this is one of the areas of where we are less, perhaps precise than the Calvinists and the Lutherans would be on certain questions, most notably like, Eucharistic, sort of real presence for lack of a better word, or baptismal, what happens at baptism, ecclesiology, soteriology, these things, where we fall, I've given this, I've said this in front of LCMS or Missouri Synod Lutheran professors, as well as Reformed, and I haven't gotten much pushback.

And I say, either one of you with your positions could find a home within Anglicanism, at least historically and theologically, it's just we wouldn't be able to, you wouldn't be able to enforce your understanding on sort of the entirety of the church.

Although we do have bounds as to what you couldn't believe, which falls broadly in line with what we would say a general Protestant sort of confession of justification by faith alone, sola fide, the Pope does not have jurisdiction in this realm and so on and so forth.

So the solos of the Reformation, we can wholeheartedly affirm, and yet we would hold them in slightly different ways in amongst individual clergy, but broadly speaking, we would be in agreement. And so that's where, for instance, in our Eucharistic theology, there's been a perpetual fight about exactly where and how the quote unquote real presence takes place.

And so the answer is yes, the answer is somewhere between the sort of the consecration reception, the presence of Christ is received in a real way, and yet we are somewhat squirrelly, I wouldn't say squirrelly, we're less articulate on precisely how that happens in a way that would make the Lutherans, the Lutherans calling the Presbyterians Nestorians, for instance, that have such a clear vision on what exactly takes place and vice versa, we would say, well, we're just not as comfortable getting that specific.

And so that's a cause of frustration to sort of my Lutheran friends and my Presbyterian friends. And yet we sort of, I don't know if it's temperamental, theological, but we have agreed to allow for a certain leeway in understanding and theology that is too broad for some, and although increasingly too narrow for many.

So maybe that's the via media right there.

And that raises a very interesting question, JD, and I wanna break etiquette here if I can for just a moment, because I'm gonna jump, when I say break etiquette, I'm gonna jump to a different question and come back, because what you just brought up about the table brings up the question number nine, which is if I were to come into an Anglican church as a Baptist, now I wanna say on this particular issue, I would probably be even further away from my Reformed Baptist brothers.

Most of my Reformed Baptist brothers would hold to a Calvinistic spiritual presence view of Christ in the table, where I would hold more to a Zwinglian memorial perspective. And I see your face, JD, you just got real surprised.

And maybe a little I'm not really surprised, but I'm just wondering how long till you change that bow tie into a collar. That's what I'm wondering.

Well, the point I'm making, well, if I held to the view that I hold, which is the Zwinglian perspective and that Christ is certainly with us always, but in the table is memorialized until he returns. If I held that view and I came into an Anglican church, if I visited any one of your churches and the Lord's supper was served during the service that I was present at, would I be welcome or would I be asked to refrain?

I mean, in general, if you are baptized in the name of the Father and the Holy Spirit and you're a believer in Jesus and you're not under discipline in your church, you're welcome to take me. And I don't know of any Anglican church that doesn't say the same.

So basically we have an open table. Now, Charlie and my parish, we both use the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, but the Reformed Episcopal Church has its own Book of Common Prayer. And it's actually in the liturgy that our fellow Christians of, well, you can modify it.

And I do because I say, baptized in other branches of Christ's church who love our divine Lord and Savior in sincerity and are sincerely invited to the Lord's table. So you would be, I mean, it's actually codified in the liturgy and you would be most welcome to receive.

You can be as wrong as you are about it. Not only in the liturgy. I'm sorry.

I beg your pardon? He said I could be as wrong as I wanna be. About communion. It's okay to take communion. What's interesting is you mentioned the Book of Common Prayer. So much of the language of Christianity, particularly wedding ceremonies, things like that are drawn from Anglican sources we don't even realize.

And in what you just said about your position on the table, that's our position. If someone comes in and is a believer, so long as they're not under discipline, so long as they are not out of fellowship with their church as a result of some gross sin or perpetual state of habitual sin, they would be welcome to come and share with us too as well.

Yeah, Keith, I worked for a number of years as a hospice chaplain, and I can't tell you how many times I was at a death and would read the litany for the dying for the Book of Common Prayer and have a Baptist minister.

So that's pretty good. Where'd you get that? So they would wanna pop up in all kinds of places.

Well, that's funny. And well, I'm gonna go back up a little bit on the questions here. I'm gonna ask this question. I am often confused for Presbyterian because the Presbyterian in my videos often gets to be the hero.

And people ask me why that is. And it's not because I'm trying to gain favor with my Presbyterian brothers. I'm not trying to win any points with them. In fact, the phrase superior theology was actually a joke against them because it was during my Thanksgiving episode where all of the denominations were saying what they give thanks for.