WHAT WE BELIEVE

St. Aidan’s is a parish within the Anglican Diocese of Toronto. We are also part of the Anglican Church of Canada, which itself is a part of the larger Anglican Communion (present in over 165 countries around the world).

The Anglican Church of Canada has roots in the Church of England, which formed in the 16th century by breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church at the time of the Protestant Reformation. Anglicans are distinctive in our middle way, or via media, between Catholicism and Protestantism. We are both. Historically, Anglicans have believed that God reveals Godself to us through the ‘three-legged stool’ of Scripture, Tradition, and Reason.

We consider the Bible, or canon of Holy Scripture, to be comprised of the books of the Old Testament (the Hebrew scriptures we received from Judaism) and the New Testament (the scriptures that tell us about the life of Jesus and his followers in the earliest years of the Christian church).

Each week, we include in our Sunday services four Bible readings: Old Testament passage, Psalm (which we usually sing), New Testament passage (often from one of the Epistles), and Gospel passage (an account of the life of Jesus). We follow the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), which is a three-year cycle of Bible readings that we share in common with other liturgical denominations (such as Catholics, Lutherans, and Methodists). In our services at St. Aidan’s, we read the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) of the Bible in our worship services.

Anglicans are people of the Prayer Book. The cornerstone of Anglicanism around the world is the Book of Common Prayer, first compiled by Sir Thomas Cranmer in England in the 1500s. The Prayer Book has been revised over the centuries to be translated into many languages and shaped by the many cultural contexts in which Anglicanism is lived out around the world. At St. Aidan’s, we worship mainly using liturgies from the Book of Alternative Services, which was adopted by the Anglican Church of Canada in 1985. At times, we also include prayers from other corners of the Anglican Communion such as New Zealand, the United States, and Great Britain.

Anglicans around the world (and even just around Toronto) vary in everything from the formality of our worship and the style of music we include in our services, to more substantive theological issues about the nature of what happens when we share bread and wine at communion, to our policies about who we allow to be married and ordained. At St. Aidan’s, we support 2SLGBTQIA+ people being able to marry in the church, and we support the ordination discernment process being open to all people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.