the anglican church with Rev. Ashley Mathews (ep 3, 22).

Anglicanism has little history in the Arkansas Ozarks. This is Baptist and Methodist country, shaped by circuit riders and farmer-preachers, later by the Southern Baptist Convention, and later still by the nondenominational churches that arrived as the corporations grew. The prayer book never made it up here. So a congregation that says the same creed every Sunday, kneels to confess, and comes forward every week to receive communion is a genuinely new thing in this place, except that nothing about it is new. The creed is older than the country. The prayer book is older than the state. Christ the King Anglican Church has spent four years in a rented fellowship hall off the interstate, and is now buying a building of its own. The only new thing is the address.The Rev. Ashley Mathews grew up Southern Baptist in a small Arkansas town, in a church where the school principal directed the choir. A turn toward faith at nineteen, at a Baptist Collegiate Ministry table in Mountain Home, set a direction she never left. She studied philosophy, then theology at a Presbyterian seminary in Atlanta, where she saw women teach the Bible for the first time. She found Anglicanism almost by accident, walking into a church in Little Rock precisely because she expected not to feel anything there, and was ordained a priest in the city that formed her. In 2022 she came home. In this conversation she describes the via media as a tradition built out of cooperation rather than victory, why she refuses to hear liturgy as a correction of the traditions people came from, and what it means to pastor a predominantly white, middle-class congregation in the most demographically layered city in Arkansas. She names her fear plainly: that a region growing this fast will come to believe its own affluence can save it, and stop extending one another the benefit of the doubt. And she offers wholeness as shalom, one integrated life, because Jesus didn't have a spiritual life and then the rest of his life. He just had a life.episode link:  https://www.theunderview.com/the-anglican-church-with-rev-ashley-mathews-christ-the-kingAbout the underview:The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness.Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewtheHost: @mikerusch