Christian Spirituality
St. Timothy’s is an Episcopal Church in the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina and part of the worldwide Anglican Communion. With Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, the Anglican Communion is considered one of the three historic Catholic churches of Christianity. There are 85 million Anglicans around the globe, two million of whom live in the United States.
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From its unique history, Anglicans have expressed a Christian spirituality distinctively their own. At its heart, Anglican spirituality involves an openness to God as expressed through shared prayer in the worship of a gathered community. To describe this, Anglicans often quote the Latin maxim, Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, which might looselybe translated, “praying shapes believing.”
It is in this way that Anglicans come to know God as an unstoppable force for love in the world. It is a love made visible in the magnificence of creation. It is a love made uniquely visible in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son. It is a love made further visible in all the ways in which we are empowered by the Holy Spirit to embody Jesus' love for others.
This prayer is centered in the Book of Common Prayer. The Prayer Book is not simply a book for private devotion (although many Episcopalians use it for that too). It is the foundation for our Sunday and daily worship. Drawing upon words and rituals that have fed Christians for nearly 2000 years, the Prayer Book guides us as a community as we listen to God’s Word proclaimed in Holy Scripture, as we sing God’s praises, and as we share the Eucharist, the sacred meal of God’s presence among us.
For Anglicans, Christian spirituality is something we do together. We are comfortable with questions. We acknowledge that we don't have all the answers. To help our spiritual search, we begin with God's guidance given in Holy Scripture, the wisdom of those who have gone before us, and our collective reason directed by the
Holy Spirit.
Building on this “cloud of witnesses,” we also read Holy Scripture confident that when we approach it prayerfully and humbly within the context of our community, God will open us to an even deeper experience of God’s purpose for us as we serve the world in five distinctive ways:
To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
To teach, baptize and nurture New Believers
To respond to human need by loving service
To seek to transform unjust structures of society
To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the Earth