By Kit Carlson
For many years, I was a serious Anglophile. I loved being an Episcopalian, because we talked like Thomas Cranmer every single week (at least until the 1979 revision of the Prayer Book). I was obsessed with the Masterpiece Theater series on Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, and the connection between my local church and the its convulsive beginnings in the 15th Century was really powerful for me.
As I got older, I drifted in and out of churches. As a young 20-ish woman, there was nothing that spoke to me in most Sunday services. But on All Saints Sunday 1986, my husband and I wandered into Our Saviour Episcopal Church, just next to the Beltway in suburban Maryland. We had relocated to Silver Spring, I was pregnant with our first child, and I wanted to find a church we could settle down in as a family.
Our Saviour had a pipe organ. And a choir, one that needed a soprano. It worked for me. We joined.
Shortly after, something wonderful began to happen at Our Saviour. It had been founded in the late ’50s as a “white flight” church, spun off from another Our Saviour in the Brookland area of Washington when things began to “change” in the neighborhood. But as the 1980s turned into the 1990s, Our Saviour-Hillandale also began to change. Folks started showing up, immigrants from Africa and China and India and the Caribbean.
It was another connection to British history, its history of empire and of conquest. For if once the sun never set on the British Empire, then it also never set on Britain’s national church. There were Anglicans all over the world and as they moved to the United States, many of them made their home at Our Saviour.
Harwood Bowman, the founding rector, had planned for Our Saviour to be built next to the Capitol Beltway, then only a dream, because he wanted folks to come to Our Saviour from “all over.” Folks were definitely coming to the church from “all over,” from places Harwood had never imagined they might come, bringing their culture and customs with them. It became a Pentecostal church … not the kind that rolls around in the ecstasy of the Spirit, but a church that looks like the feast of Pentecost, when each person heard the good news proclaimed to them in their own language.
Through these changes, Our Saviour flexed, painfully at times, but accommodated the shifts. When I worshipped there last month, for the first time in years (and for the last time for me as a resident of Maryland …), it was very different and yet the same.
The congregation was more than three-quarters black. But not because the whites fled … the old-timers were still filling the same pews. The parish had just grown and changed along with them.
The Mother’s Union, another exported British tradition, had turned out to make a presentation. In their matching blue dresses and white hats, they claimed their pride of place as a force of feminine leadership. The sermon — preached by the new young assistant, who is also the parish’s pastor to its Latino congregation — was free-form, delivered from the aisle, and powerful. The music was traditional (with ALL the verses of St. Patrick’s Breastplate) and pietistic, with three hymns from LEVAS at communion, sung with great volume and joy. Some people waved their hands in the air. Others silently bowed their heads in prayer. It was my church. It was a homecoming.
Our Saviour is not a perfect parish. It has had its dissensions, its debates, its struggles over what is going on in the wider Communion and what is going on among its own members. But it is a community that has held together through those dissensions and struggles. It is Anglican in all the best definitions of that word … international, comprehensive, thoughtful, traditional, yet open to the leading of the Spirit.
I am proud to have called it my church home. It has made me the Anglican I am today.
The Rev. Kit Carlson, is the rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing, Mich. She was associate and interim rector at the Church of the Ascension in Gaithersburg, Md., for seven years.