My Christian Larp

A sculpture outside St James' King Street, Sydney

In 2024 I developed an interest in Christianity (which I wrote about here). I read the Gospels three times. I read the rest of the New Testament once. I listened to a bunch of podcasts. I studied a bunch of websites. I read a couple of books. I bought some icons (of St Mary and St Olga) and tried praying in front of them. By 2025, after visiting a bunch of Orthodox churches and finding each of them focused strongly on specific cultural groups (Russian, Greek, Assyrian, etc), I developed the view that I should look into Anglo-Catholicism, which is a movement within the Anglican communion which emphasises a return to catholic practices and theology sans the Pope. The main draw card was ethno-cultural. It seemed to me that most churches revolve around ethnic identity so Anglicanism looked like a good fit. The experiment didn’t go well and perhaps I really should have known better, not least because when my interest in Anglo-Catholicism started I had a highly unusual dream wherein the Virgin Mary spoke to me and she said just one thing: “the Anglican church is a desert”.

Visiting Anglo-Catholic Churches in Sydney

Sydney has half a dozen or so churches that align with Anglo-Catholicism (at least that is my understanding). I visited most of them and my experiences were as follows:

The Logos According to the Gospels

A page from a medieval Bible: Johnbod

Until not long ago I thought I knew Christianity and had thoughtfully rejected it, then my podcast addiction led me to bump into information that suggested I knew nothing but shadows on a wall when it came to this important and complex religion. Because I regard myself as a truth seeker, and truly open-minded, for some months now I have been trying to unlearn my prior suppositions and learn what this religion actually is. An obvious starting point is the Gospels. I have relied on two translations, one is the New King James Version (NKJV) and the other is the Eastern Orthodox Bible (EOB). They are each translated from slightly different original manuscripts – the NKJV mostly derives from Greek manuscripts that were available in north-western Europe in the early 16th century, whereas the EOB is translated from different Greek manuscripts held in libraries in south-eastern Europe. In this post all of the quotes are from the text of the EOB.

The transitory world of men versus eternal life

A prominent theme in the Gospels is the juxtaposition between the everchanging worldly realm of men, of which death is an aspect, and that of God’s (Matt 16:23), which is associated with eternal life. The earthly realm is transitory (Luke 21:33), full of many distractions that are both pleasurable and unpleasurable (Luke 21:34), and it contains much evil (John 7:7). Whereas the realm of God has “many mansions” (John 14:2) but it “is not of this world” (John 18:36), even though it “is within you”, but it cannot be seen (Luke 17:21). Jesus explains (after exorcising a man) that it “is by the spirit of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you” (Matt 12:28), which suggests the kingdom is a state of being that can be experienced in this life. This experience starts as something small (like a mustard seed) but if the seed grows within the fertile soil of a human heart it (allegorically) “becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air can come and find shelter in its branches” (Matt 13:32).

Note that “kingdom of God” is not a literal translation from the original Greek. According to the EOB a more literal translation is “rule of God”, “ruling power of God” or “reign of God” (at xvi). This connotes an experience of God’s power, whereas “kingdom” is more suggestive of a physical place that is elsewhere.