There comes a time when we discover that we can’t keep spending from the same bank account without putting any money back into it. But don’t worry, this isn’t a sideswipe at current U.S. fiscal policy, it is a comment on our society and the way we behave as a culture.

The point is simple; for generations we have been cashing checks on the Christian account without making deposits, either to grow, or even maintain the balance. To put it another way, the people of the West have been attempting to live according to the mores and standards of the Faith without actually being Christians. As an experiment this was always doomed to failure, not least because the standards in question are not part of some inexhaustible fund of common wisdom but have to be revealed and infused by God, all the while being learned by us.

This has been forgotten, along with the behavior it engenders, and the result is far from attractive. State-sponsored abortion and suicide, the disintegration of the family, a progressive cheapening and coarsening of life; all this and more as the values of Christian culture erode along with the belief that promotes them. In the words of His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah, of the Orthodox Church in America (OCA),

“We stand at a crisis which threatens to undermine the very basis of our culture… only by standing together, united by one Faith, one Heart, one Church, will we be able to withstand the onslaught of licentiousness... and fight against it. There is in materialism, there is in secularism only despair.”

We are against this despair and for its antidote, a wholesale return to the Faith, Heart and Church of Christendom, to that Catholicism which we believe to be our rightful patrimony as Anglicans. It is surely this Faith, which is whole, complete and entire, given to us by God Himself, that is the answer to the pressing evils of our age.

To that end this issue focuses on recent missionary initiatives, notably the recent communication from the Roman Catholic Church, the consecration of a new Bishop for Forward in Faith North America, and the start of ecumenical discussions with the Orthodox Church in America. But knowing that any attempt to convert the culture will fail unless we are converted ourselves, Forward in Christ also urges holiness of life patterned on the model of the Saints.

It is these, the holy men and women of God, who have stood for the light of the Gospel in their generations and whose witness has successively overcome the fiercest opposition. It will do so today; our task is to join them and ask for their powerful intercession as we work to bring the world to Christ.

This article is from Forward In Christ magazine, a bi-monthly subscription magazine providing in-depth commentary and perspectives on Anglicanism today. Subscription Information Link

Fr. Michael Heidt is a priest in the Diocese of Ft. Worth (ACNA) under Bishop Jack Iker. He is the editor of Forward in Christ magazine and is a frequent news writer.