The Incompleteness of Anglicanism

Archbishop Michael Ramsey, 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, is certainly one of the patron saints around here, even if his picture isn't up on the side bar.
His book, The Christian Priest Today, has been an important book for me in considering my own sense of calling. He was also another "Barthian Catholic," which is one of the descriptors I would use for myself these days.
This year, I have had several opportunities to dip into his classic book, The Gospel and The Catholic Church. I was really prepared for it by reading Eastern Orthodox ecclesiology - thinkers like Zizioulas, Dumitru Stăniloae and Thomas Hopko - and have discovered that Ramsey speaks especially to many of my own concerns, with his dual commitment to Ecumenism and to the Catholic order of the Church.
Here is what Lord Ramsey had to say about the place of Anglicanism in the broader Church.

While the Anglican church is vindicated by its place in history, with a strikingly balanced witness to the Gospel and the Church, its greater vindication lies in its pointing through its own history, to something of which it is a fragment. Its credentials are its incompleteness.

Anglicanism is a mess, and it always has been. It is broken, but its brokenness also points to its vocation. What Anglicanism has to offer the wider Church is not just a slightly more liberal Catholicism, or a slightly more liturgical Evangelicalism. Rather, Anglicanism's gift is its peculiar witness to both the unity and the brokenness of the Church, and to the final hope that all who confess Christ may one day be one. And Anglicanism has the potential to stand as an authentic via media between Catholicism and Protestantism, not as a compromise, but as a bridge, calling the whole Church into a greater realization of the unity we have in Christ.