Very few people become Christians by themselves.  Most people come to Christ through a friend, or through a Christian community to which they are exposed.  Even Paul was helped in his conversion by other Christians like Ananias (Acts 9:10-20).  Many Christians, after first dedicating themselves to Christ, continue to learn God's ways as part of a parish or other Christian community.  We belong so that we might come to learn what to believe and do.  In fact, the movement of the Spirit in our midst makes that continuing learning as essential part of discipleship.

In each case, God's Good News doesn't drop in our hearts out of the sky.  It comes to us through the worship and practice of a particular Christian tradition.  We come to God through being Anglicans.  Our worship is Anglican.  The way we understand the Bible, and the way we think about the sacraments, our prayer books, our views on ethical issues and theology, our views on who has authority in the church, all these things are Anglican.  Our culture as a community is Anglican. Many Anglicans began their walk with God when they were still babies, brought to church by their parents.  Before they even knew it, God was forming them into disciples as they grew up through the Anglican church. Others had to learn fast as adults.  Either way, it is simply part of who we are.  We all have a gender and a nationality that define our lives.  We say proudly, 'I am British or an Australian'.  Not just any kind of human being, but British, or an 'Australian'.  So too, we are not just any kind of Christian; we are 'Anglicans', and that too is a occasion for pride.

Most of the time we don't recognise how important this is.  It is like 'Palmolive' dish-washing detergent; we don't see it, because we 'are soaking in it'.  It's all around us. As Ashes to Fire unfolds in the weeks ahead, we will taking time to think more directly about what it means to 'be an Anglican', what our church teaches about Christian worship and living, about Anglicanism's strengths and weaknesses.  We will find much to give thanks for, and some things of which we might repent.  But whether are giving thanks or repenting, as we explore the traditions that make our Anglican Church different from other churches, we will come to understand ourselves better, and that is always a good thing.  

Discovering our identity by examining our past and exploring our present traditions can be difficult for Anglicans.  Of all the denominations we are perhaps the most diverse.  Our Church contains Christians more radical than many protestant denominations, and others more catholic than the Roman Catholics.  Some say that this is our special gift to the world-wide church, to hold together all the different ways of worshipping God in one body of Christians.   Its origins lay deep in our history.  During the Reformation in England, our ancestors in the faith made a conscious decision not to wipe away the good things of the past, nor to ignore the good things of the Reformation.  So we find ourselves today a church both Catholic and Reformed. 

On the one hand we claim to be a church possessing the catholic tradition and continuity from the ancient church, and our catholic tradition and continuity includes the belief in the real presence of Christ in the blessed sacrament; the order of the episcopacy and the priesthood, including the power of priestly absolution.  We possess various institutions belonging to catholic Christendom like monastic orders for men and women.

But our Anglican tradition has another aspect as well.  We are a church which has been through the Reformation, and values many experiences derived from the Reformation, for instance the open bible: great importance is attached to the authority of the holy Scriptures, and to personal conviction and conversion through the work of the Holy Spirit.
                       -Michael Ramsey (1904-1988), Archbishop of Canterbury 

As if this were not enough diversity, Anglicans have also always placed a high value on scholarship and learning.  We have been eager to explore the new insights which an intelligent reflection on Scripture and history can offer.  This desire to think is sometimes called 'liberalism'.

It is the glory of the Anglican church that at the Reformation she repudiated neither the ancient structure of catholicism, nor the new and freer movement.  Upon the ancient structure-the creeds, the canon, the hierarchy, the sacraments-she retained her hold while she opened her arms to the new learning, the new appeal to Scripture, the freedom of historical criticism and the duty of private judgement.
                                         -Charles Gore, (1853-1932), Bishop of Oxford

So we are a Church full of 'living stones'-rock solid in traditions, but open to new developments.  We are a Church, which perhaps more than any other, lives in the creative tensions between Catholicism and Protestantism, tradition and innovation.  Spend some time thinking about your parish, either alone or with some friends.  Try to identify where is it placed in these tensions; what is catholic, what protestant; what traditions do you retain, where have you 'opened your arms to the new learning'?