Christ the King in a Liminal Space

A Reflection for Our Patronal Feast Played in an Anglican Key 

Every parish in the Anglican tradition has a patron.  Most are named after saints whose holy lives shine as examples of Christian discipleship—St. Mary the Virgin, St. Luke the Physician, St. Peter the Fisherman.  Their feast days are firmly embedded in the sanctoral calendar.  Their stories can be read, their virtues emulated, their witness celebrated.

But Christ Church is in a category all its own.
Our parish bears the name of no mere saint, but of Jesus Christ Himself—our priest, our prophet, and our king.  We are named not after one who points to Christ, but after Christ directly.  And that makes the question of a “patronal feast day” uniquely complicated.

For churches named after saints, the Prayer Book calendar offers a clear liturgical celebration.  For Christ churches like ours, we must ask: When, exactly, do we celebrate our patron?  After all, nearly every feast in the Christian year is fundamentally Christological. Christmas, Easter, the Baptism of our Lord, the Transfiguration, Corpus Christi, Good Shepherd Sunday—each reveals Christ in a different light.  Any of these could, in theory, serve as our parish’s feast day.

Over our 49 years, Christ Church Kennesaw has chosen to keep the Feast of Christ the King as our patronal festival.  But this choice itself is an act of theological imagination, a choice to live in a kind of liturgical liminality—a space between the formal and the personal, the universal and the particular.

A Brief, Curious History of Christ the King

Christ the King is, historically speaking, something of a newcomer.  It does not come from the early Church or even the medieval West.  The Roman Catholic Church established the feast in 1925 through Pope Pius XI in response to rising nationalism, totalitarianism, and secularism in Italy, and the rise of the Fascist dictatorship of Mussolini in the consolidation of Italy. Its purpose was to remind Christians that no earthly ruler—no king, no government, no ideology—could claim absolute allegiance over the lordship of Christ. Eastern Christianity eventually adopted similar themes in the mid-twentieth century.

Anglicanism, however, never officially canonized the feast.  Some Anglican provinces use it informally. Others omit it.  The Feast of Christ the King, as many know it today, is actually a post-1970 liturgical development largely shaped by ecumenical influence and the Revised Common Lectionary—and while Christ the King appears in the Prayer Book twice, once in the Lectionary and once in the Collects, it is never referred to as a festival or feast.

So saying that Christ the King is our “patronal feast” is less a claim of official status and more a decision of the heart—a local choice to recognize Christ’s kingship as central to our identity, even if the wider Anglican tradition treats the feast as optional or variable.  In this sense, our patronal feast is both public and private, rooted and quirky, traditional and idiosyncratic.

And maybe that is exactly right.

The Liminal Identity of a Christ Church

Because we are named for Christ Himself, we inhabit a curious theological space.  Our life is shaped by the common prayer of the Episcopal Church, grounded in Scripture, tradition, and reason—but our patronal identity is inseparable from the deeply personal, almost mystical encounter with Jesus that each of us has.

Christ the King, then, becomes a doorway to reflect on that liminal space between: what the Church formally proclaims and and what you personally experience; between the faith of the whole Body and the faith that has shaped your soul.

Every one of us carries a private “patronal feast”—something in our spiritual life that illumines Christ for us in a way that may not be universally shared. For some, it is the Scriptures.  A line of the Psalms that became a lifeline in grief.  A parable that cracked open a new way of seeing God. A passage heard at a funeral or baptism that rooted itself in your heart.

For others, it might be sacramental encounter.  The quiet, steady healing of unction.  A moment at the altar rail.  A baptism that re-ordered your life.  A Eucharist where you knew, without doubt, that Jesus Christ was present for you.

For others still, it is contemplative practice—Centering Prayer, the Daily Office, morning devotionals with coffee in hand, a whispered “Lord Jesus Christ…” in a hospital waiting room.  These are our private feast days, the places where our spiritual lives are crowned in ways the prayer book never names but our hearts never forget.

Anglicanism: A Tradition Rooted and Spacious

One of the gifts of Anglican Christianity is how comfortably it lives in this liminal space.  We are neither confessional—requiring adherence to a rigid doctrinal formula—nor are we untethered from tradition.  We claim Scripture, Tradition, and Reason as our sources of authority, and our unity is found not in identical belief but in common prayer.

That means your devotion to silent contemplation is as Anglican as someone else’s love for choral Evensong, or the praise and worship music on the radio. Your trust in sacramental grace is as Anglican as another’s daily immersion in Scripture.  Your experience of a healing miracle belongs alongside someone else’s intellectual conversion fueled by the writings of N.T. Wright or Julian of Norwich.  We do not gather because we believe precisely the same things in precisely the same ways.  We gather because Jesus Christ—our priest, prophet, and king—has called us together, bound us in baptism, and fed us with His life.

So on this Feast of Christ the King—our chosen patronal celebration—we honor both sides of our Anglican life: the formal and the personal, the received and the experienced, the liturgical and the private.  Christ the King reminds us that all authority in heaven and on earth belongs to Christ—not to nation, tribe, ideology, or party.  But it also reminds us that Christ rules not only the cosmic order but the inner kingdom of the human heart.  And in that way, this patronal feast is perfect for us.

We honor Christ the King not just as an ecclesiastical observance, but as a spiritual mirror—reflecting the many ways Christ reigns in our lives, shaping and reshaping us through prayer, sacrament, Scripture, reason, and the quiet graces that no liturgical calendar could ever fully capture.

May this feast draw us deeper into the mystery of Christ’s reign—in the Church, in this parish, and in the private sanctuaries of each of our hearts.

Pax et Bonum!

Fr. Ben +