Archbishop Essay Contest Winner
Every year, The Anglican House Media Ministry hosts a Summer Essay Contest. For this year, the Most Reverend Dr. Foley Beach, Archbishop and Primate of the Anglican Church in North America, invited entrants to “submit an essay telling how the church can effectively deal with controversial social issues of the day, while being true to the Gospel and remaining loving to the people.”
The contest was open to both lay and clergy participants. The clergy category was open to ACNA priests and deacons. The lay category was open to lay persons who were active members of an ACNA church.
Elizabeth (Libby) Demmon was awarded third prize in the contest for her essay, The Kitchen Table as a Platform for Change: Fasting in an Age of Division.
LIbby has been a volunteer with Apex (the youth program) at Restoration Anglican Church in Arlington, VA as well as attending Corpus Christi Anglican in Springfield, VA with her family. She also did a follow up podcast with The Classic Anglican Podcast. Listen to the episode here.
Congratulations, LIbby!
Learn more about the contest and read all of the winning essays here.
Enjoy an excerpt from Elizabeth’s essay below:
The Book of Common Prayer (2019) contains this simple and oft overlooked statement: in addition to penitential seasons and special days of discipline, “every Friday of the year (outside the 12 Days of Christmas and the 50 days of Eastertide) are encouraged as days of fasting.” These days are to be marked by “reduced consumption…prayer, self-examination, and acts of mercy.” 2 The witness of the Anglican Church in North America can change dramatically if our kitchen tables are sparser one day a week. A fast will recommit our church to a posture of prayer, humility, repentance, and compassionate engagement with a world that is spiritually—and literally—hungry. The world will see a community of faith that is willing to make lasting lifestyle changes in response to what it cares about, and that will speak more powerfully than any post or placard.