Fish and Bread
Dona nobis pacem
- Jan 31, 2005
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Not necessarily.
Generally, modern Anglican belief and practice has three basic dividing lines or axises:
- high-church versus low-church
- evangelical versus anglo-catholic
- progressive versus conservative
They go together in almost any combination one can think of.
And it isn't always necessarily a 100% black and white choice between high church or low church and so on and so forth- parishes may be in the middle or have elements of both (Often described as "broad church")- in fact that's probably the vast majority of them. I wouldn't necessarily say that conservative parishes are necessarily more likely to be high church (Incense would be a high church thing).I remember sometimes there would be whole dioceses that would lean in certain directions. If I recall correctly, the diocese of Fort Worth (In Texas) used to be considered conservative and very Anglo-Catholic, and at one point even reached out to the local Roman Catholics about whether basically the whole diocese could be absorbed into the Roman Catholic Church as a unit and what that process would entail (Just preliminary feelers- didn't lead anywhere). I say used to be, because the bishops, priests, and majority of lay people may have actually left the Episcopal Church more or less as a unit and joined an Anglican church that isn't a formal part of the Anglican Communiom, like ACNA. Of course, a diocese or a parish can't leave a church in a technical sense- what's really happening in the eyes of the Episcopal Church is that the bishop and/or priests and/or parishioners are just all quitting, then the people who remain in the Episcopal Church in that area select a new bishop and carry on the diocese- but of course if 9/10ths of the clergy and people in your diocese leave, the remaining folks may have fairly different leanings in terms of practice and theology.
That's one of the reasons I have no idea what the diocese of Ft. Worth is like now. If they are the remnant of a lot of people leaving and joining ACNA (for example), that may have just left the progressives around and swung the diocese from the right to the left. They could have remained Anglo-Catholic and be progressive Anglo-Catholics now, or maybe they are progressive and broad church because most of the Anglo-Catholics there were also conservative and left (Maybe- I'm largely using this as an example or hypothetical. I'm not even sure Ft. Worth experienced a split. Its just useful to use what *may* have happened there to illustrate a point.).
One issue that looms on the horizon for ACNA and similar conservative churches that were formed by people who had to that point been Episcopalians is that ACNA nationally, for whatever reasons, has a stronger tilt in favor of evangelicals over anglo-catholics and possibly even low-church over high-church than the Episcopal Church does, and that makes some high-church Anglo-Catholics, who left the EC because they agreed with the low-church evangelicals about some issues like homosexuality, nervous because they are afraid that in the long run maybe the new churches may drift more evangelical amd low-church and make it hard for them to retain their high-church anglo-catholoc character in some way.
It sounds like you found a cluster of high-church ACNA parishes, though (Just going based on the incense, though, which isn't the only thing that goes into being high-churcg by any means. So I could be wrong).
Sometimes there are even entire Anglican provinces (national churches) that lean more one way or the other on these scales.
All of this is kind of "inside baseball", though. A lot of times people just attend whatever parish is closest to them, has the most convienent service/Eucharist/mass times, or is where they felt the most comfortable or edified, and have very little idea what any of these things mean, and/or don't care.
Sometimes you just go to the parish down the street because its down the street.
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I rather like that priest and thurifer. 
