Anglican adaptation to pandemic disease: a historical perspective

Abstract

As churches navigate the “new normal” of hybrid/online worship and public health measures, history offers some resources that can help guide our thinking. Anglicanism has, from its birth in the sixteenth century, adapted to such epidemic challenges as sweating sickness, plague, smallpox, cholera, and influenza. Anglican theology favors corporate prayer (including dispersed, synchronous prayer) and encourages the idea of the sacramentality of the word. At the same time, it resists the idea of virtual sacraments apart from a physical gathering and rejects a eucharist at which only the celebrant receives the consecrated bread and wine. History rarely offers straightforward lessons, but it suggests that Anglicanism has sufficient resources within itself to sustain itself through even a prolonged pandemic.