"Tradition and the Anglican Patrimony"/The Secker Society

I would like to draw the attention of my readers, particularly those of the Anglican/Episcopalian faith, to an organization called The Secker Society. It is a fairly new organization named after the Most Reverend Thomas Secker, who from 1758 to 1768 was Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. At the time the Church of England had not yet established any bishops in the North American colonies. This created all sorts of problems for those seeking to spread the Gospel in North America. It was one of the most significant contributing factors, you may recall, to the tension between the Wesleys and the Anglican hierarchy that eventually led to the Methodist movement breaking away from the Church of England. Archbishop Secker was an outspoken advocate for the establishment of a North American episcopacy.

The mission of the Secker Society is to promote, in the context of the North American church, the Christian faith and worship, as expressed in the historic formularies of the Anglican Church that emerged out of the English Reformation and Restoration, including the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible, Old and New Testaments and Apocrypha, the Books of Homilies, etc., and with a particular emphasis upon the liturgy of the Restoration Prayer Book, a cause dear to the hearts of traditional Anglicans, low and high church alike.

Semi-annually, the Secker Society puts out an excellent publication entitled Renewal. I would encourage you to contact them about getting past copies which include some very well written and interesting articles on a number of fascinating subjects pertaining to their mission. I enjoyed each of them but was particularly impressed with a series of articles on the Protestant Bible by D. H. Graham which make clear the often misunderstood position of the Protestant Reformers regarding the deuterocanonical Scriptures, i.e., the Apocrypha.

Last summer I was contacted by an officer of the society who invited me to submit a contribution to the next issue of Renewal. I submitted a piece entitled "Tradition and the Anglican Patrimony" which was featured in the Summer/Fall 2013 edition. I have just been informed that this article is now available to read on the Secker Society's website. Here is a direct link to my article: http://seckersociety.com/tradition.htm


I would also encourage you to check out the rest of their website, the main page of which can be found here: http://seckersociety.com/home.htm. There is plenty of good material to be found there, including this excellent article by Jordan Lavender about the use of the Book of Common Prayer's Daily Offices in private devotional worship: http://seckersociety.com/dailyoffices.htm. I am told that the website is currently being redesigned and that even more material will soon be available there, so keep checking back.