This weekend (August 7 to 9) I am in Adelaide at a conference on 'Anglican Identity and Mission'.

The other speakers are the Rev Dr Martyn Percy from Cuddesdon College in England and the new Dean of Adelaide, Sarah Macneil.

It's been a challenging time preparing what to say on what has become more and more a controversial question in the world. Here's what I wrote by way of a short summary so they would know where I was coming from.

Nobody invented Anglicanism. It is the result of over 1500 years of ups and downs, challenges, opportunities and disasters. It is and continues today to be highly contested; especially now that Anglicanism is free from the Royal Supremacy of the Church of England and finds itself existing in diverse cultures and circumstances around the world. And now the Anglican Communion, (a kind of ecclesiastical version of the Commonwealth of Nations) is facing irrevocable change with the loosening of ties and divisions that are going to last, sadly.

All is not lost. There is a heart to Anglicanism even if there is fuzziness at the edges. Its identity is found firstly by being a church of Jesus Christ. Only by being his will we know who we are. And then there are historic characteristics that still work for us; the place of Scripture for all things necessary for salvation and freedom in adaption of church customs as expounded by Cranmer and then Hooker. As well as that, a message for the world of God's love for the unworthy.

In fact, surprisingly you can't go much past the Fundamental Declarations of the 1961 Constitution of the Anglican Church of Australia for a good centre for Anglican identity. All three of them.

And here they are.

# 1.

The Anglican Church of Australia, being part of the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ, holds the Christian Faith as professed by the Church from primitive times and in particular as set forth in the creeds known as the Nicene Creed and the Apostles Creed."

This says that we are historically Christian, part of the great church of Jesus Christ and hold the orthodox Christian faith as was held by the early church with full Trinitarian and Christological focus of the creeds.

# 2.

This Church receives all the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as being the ultimate rule and standard of faith given by the inspiration of God and containing all things necessary for salvation.

Here you see that Anglican identity is focused upon the notion of salvation and what necessarily follows from salvation, which is the standard of faith.

Scripture is the supreme authority, and in fact nothing can be ordered as necessary or as the faith not taught by it. Nor can anything be ordered which is against it. And yet Anglicans do not claim that Scripture tells us everything we are to do or believe about the world or even how to practise the Christian life and run our churches. Here there is a place for human thinking and for respect for what Christians have done in the past.

# 3.

This Church will ever obey the commands of Christ, teach His doctrine, administer His sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, follow His discipline and preserve the three orders of bishops, priests and deacons in the sacred ministry

This is a big ask. I always think this declaration reminds me of Joshua and the children of Israel in Joshua 27. "You cannot serve the LORD!"

What sort of church claims they will ever obey Christ's commands and teach his doctrine and observe his discipline? Yet how can any Christian church not be so committed.

You will notice that it's our identity to administer the two sacraments that Christ gave us as well.

The one thing that is missing is that when it talks about the three orders of bishop, priest and deacons in the sacred ministry. It doesn't say it's "his" orders. It is just "the" orders.

Anglicans disagree on this. The classical Anglicanism of the Elizabethan period like that of Richard Hooker and others thought that this order of church government was a providential provision of God in the history of the church. But they did not claim it was mandated by God for all Christians in all times. That's a very Anglican way to approach it, although some Anglicans do think more highly of it than that.

I wonder what you make of the Fundamental Declarations of our church? Because they are tucked away in our constitution, it is easy to overlook them and even regard them as not worth a great deal.

But I think in our modern day, they are not a bad place to start as to what we really are.