St John’s Anglican Church - Doonside

Pastor - Rev. Jerryl Lowe
Corner Cameron Street and Hillend Road
Doonside NSW 2767

Our Purpose as our Church

We unashamedly follow the Anglican pattern of ‘liturgical’ worship expressing such worship of God in a ‘form’ or ‘order’ that seeks to be obedient to the plain teaching of Scripture.

We use a slightly modified form of Morning Prayer from An Australian Prayer Book (AAPB) together with An Other Order of Service and the First Form of the Service of Holy Communion from the same Book.

We ‘meet’ or ‘assemble’ to firstly ‘honour’ God in our corporate worship of Him. He is to be at the centre of our thoughts in such worship; we meet primarily to greet God, not one another.

Three important consequences follow subsequently as a result of our public worship. We grow in our understanding of God / godly living; we greet and serve one another as Christ’s body, and we go into all the world to proclaim the gospel.

We believe that such a ‘pattern’ is not only honouring to God, but that it also serves to protect the Church from the encroachment of heresy and error.

The immense benefit of biblical liturgical worship is its capacity to express and maintain a ‘balance’ of biblical teaching that maintains correct doctrine (or belief), not only containing those elements of penitence, praise, prayer and proclamation of God’s Word, but doing so with regular expression of ‘balanced’ prayers and exhortations that prevent us from forming incorrect biblical thinking.

Our teaching of God’s Word follows the example of that doctrine or belief that is expressed in the theology of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (BCP), and the further teaching of our Reformers as expressed in the Book of Homilies.
Consequently, our understanding of God’s grace (the mercy of God whereby He forgives us sins through Christ) is never detached from a life that seeks to obey God’s holy will, expressed in its completion in the gospel of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.

The Collects (prayers) of BCP/AAPB not only excel in a beauty of expression which is memorable and easily retained with repetition, but they also excel in a beautiful symmetry of balanced biblical truth that assists the Church being ‘catholic’ ie., the ‘true’ Church in contrast to those that hold heretical opinions.  

We believe that current experimentation in ‘contemporary’ styles of services (mostly ‘off the cuff’, unprepared) are usually devoid of balanced biblical content and are in serious danger of conveying theological error, both in our understanding of God and salvation.

It is because we believe that our Anglican Liturgy provides us with such a ‘feast’ of biblical truth in its public worship of God, that we invite you to shun modern trends, and to “contend for (preserving) the faith once for all committed to the saints - God’s people”. (Jude 3) I

If you share these ideals, come and join us in public worship –
you would be made most welcome.

Will the Church be Saved?

In Matthew 25 Jesus tells His listeners the ‘The Parable of the Ten Virgins’. It is a parable that needs to be very seriously pondered by the Church today!

Archibald Alexander, the Principal of Princeton Theological Seminary in the USA said about this parable, “all my experience and observation lead me to believe that, in our day as well as in former times (and he could have said – and in ‘future’ days), the ‘foolish’ virgins constitute a full half of the visible Church.” p.288 ‘Thoughts on Religious Experience”.

Henry Alford, the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral in the UK, preached on the same parable. His words on that occasion highlight the great seriousness of the words of Jesus with respect to those who profess to be members of God’s Kingdom, who await the return of Jesus Christ with their lamps burning. Drawing his congregations attention to the behaviour of the five foolish virgins recorded in Matthew 25 Alford says, “ The one party (the five foolish) thought within themselves, if they thought at all, that the lights once kindled would always burn; once converted to God, once the religious profession put on, once come out of the world, all was well… Of all the follies in religion, the first is that to which our Lord here would have our attention more especially directed: the folly of thinking , that because the lamp of God’s Spirit has been once lit within us, it will always burn on, without care or nurture. That is folly of the most fatal kind  .. remember, that all through the Christian’s life, the outwards influence of the world, the inward temptations of the flesh, the spiritual attacks of the Devil, are ever working  to extinguish the light which is kindled within us; that to maintain that light is a struggle  against nature, against habit, against inclination.

How then can it be maintained without continued conflict and effort? How, without daily application to the source of all grace? Foolish indeed then is that Christian, however earnest, however thoroughly convinced of sin and righteousness and judgement by the Spirit’s inner agency, who does not make every provision and value every opportunity to keep alive the work once begun…. And wise indeed is that Christian.. to whom all means and opportunities of grace are precious; who does not say within himself, “Once the Lord’s always the Lord’s”, but prays and strives and presses onwards  .. that he may at any moment rise and trim his lamp, and go worth with joy to meet his Lord”.

Alexander and Alford were drawing to the attention of those who professed to be Christians,  the reality of Satan’s spoiling of the Church; Satan causes ‘half’ of the Church to be ‘asleep’; they are neither alert nor vigilant about their salvation and “the door will be shut”!

I believe the Church today needs a radical reappraisal of its doctrine of salvation! Christian believers must begin to take ‘obedience’ to the gospel seriously; very seriously indeed! Now, in saying such things I am very likely to be misunderstood and accused of teaching salvation by obedience. I am teaching no such thing! But because the Church has been saturated in recent decades by very ‘superficial’ teaching about salvation; ‘abbreviated teaching’, ‘short-cut’ Christianity;  ‘popular teaching’, because it gives us a good excuse to play down obedience and to ignore our Christian duty, what I am saying sounds very unorthodox indeed! If you understand me to be saying that much of our current Church teaching runs counter to the teaching of the protestant Reformation and our Anglican heritage, then you are hearing exactly what I am saying!
Listen to a few brief snippets of Cranmer’s teaching on the doctrine of salvation. “No man should think that he has a living (true) faith which Scripture commands, when he lives not obediently to God’s laws”
“Let us therefore, Christian people, try and examine our faith, what it is: let us not flatter ourselves, but look upon our works, and judge of our faith, what it is .. your deeds and works must be an open testimonial of your faith; otherwise, your faith, being without good works, is but the devil’s faith, the faith of the wicked, a fantasy of faith, and not a true Christian faith.”
At the conclusion of the Homily we read these words,
‘And travailing continually during your life thus in observing the commandments of God, (wherein consists the pure, principal, and direct honour of God, and which, wrought in faith, God has ordained to be the right trade and path-way unto heaven;) you shall not fail, as Christ has promised, to come to that blessed and eternal life, where you shall live in glory and joy with God forever.’

Members of the Anglican Church in Australia are meant to give their assent (agreement) to the doctrine or teaching expressed in the Book of Common Prayer (1662). What is its teaching concerning how men and women are saved from God’s coming judgement? In answer to that question let me quote directly from Cranmer’s Homily on Justification (justification means God’s acceptance of us as forgiven) where he says that the apostles taught,
“three things which must go together in our justification; upon God’s part, His mercy and grace; upon Christ’s part, justice, that is, the satisfaction of God’s justice, or the price of our redemption by the offering of His body and shedding of His blood with fulfilling of the laws perfectly and thoroughly; and upon our part, true and lively faith in the merits of Jesus Christ … out of which faith springs good works … and a life according to God’s commandments”.
Cranmer says, “three things which must go together in our justification”. In other words, Cranmer says that ‘justification’ is composed of three parts that must not be separated! Those parts have been separated! One gets the distinct impression that ‘works’ are ‘tacked on’ to our ‘justifying faith’, but they are in no way part of it or necessary to it!  While our works/obedience cannot save us, nor do they in any way contribute to our salvation, they are none the less a vital component of true justifying faith, as understood by the Reformers. Faith that rests on Christ for our atonement is relentless in its pursuit of obedience. Without the substitutionary atonement of Christ expressed in Scripture (and reaffirmed at the Reformation) we possess no hope of salvation; having this hope we must purify ourselves as He is pure! As Cranmer says in the Homily on Faith, “No man should think that he has a
living (true) faith which Scripture commands, when he lives
not obediently to God’s laws.”