Authority, Mission, and the Anglican Church in North America: Part I

By Robin G. Jordan

Due to several factors a number of African provinces have been highly successful in their evangelistic and church planting efforts. They are enjoying explosive growth. North American Anglicans look at these provinces and conclude that the strong leadership of the African bishops and the authoritarian organizational structures over which they preside are the reason for this growth. They further infer that if the new Anglican Church in North America adopts similar organizational structures, it will also experience a high growth rate.

If we look at the Episcopal Church in the second half of twentieth century and even earlier, we find that the primary cause for the Episcopal Church’s weak mission orientation and its consequent slow growth rate has not been structural. It has been attitudinal. This was particularly made evident during the Decade of Evangelism at the close of the twentieth century.

During this period most Episcopal clergy had a “maintenance mentality” They were preoccupied with maintaining the status quo, even though the status quo was no longer serving a useful purpose in furthering Christ’s Mission to a lost world. Keeping the program going as they had found it was what mattered most. It did not matter if people were not being evangelized, followed-up, nurtured in the faith, or trained in ministry. Clergy were willing to let the laity be passive recipients rather than active members of the church, as long as enough volunteers were available to keep the program going. The laity was content to be served rather than serving. This mind set dominated thinking at the parish, deanery, and diocesan levels.

Bishops were reluctant to sanction the planting of new churches when existing churches were struggling to survive. A bishop might see a need for new churches in fast growing areas of the diocese but the clamor for assistance from stagnant and declining churches kept him from responding to the need.

When the bishop of my former diocese launched a church planting initiative in the 1990s, one of the existing churches in one of the fastest growing areas of the diocese asked the bishop to not start any new churches in that area. It was afraid that a new church might attract its own members as well as newcomers to the area. The church had done very little to advertise its presence in the community, much less to actively seek to recruit new members. It had not even troubled to post “The Episcopal Church welcomes you” signs around the community with directions to the church’s campus. It had adopted the attitude that if people wanted to find an Episcopal church in the community, they could look in the telephone directory. The church’s campus was not located on a main street but a difficult to access side street and had no visibility. A number of the lay leaders of the church had come from a local Unitarian Universalist church and evidenced no interest in reaching the lost. The church had been served by a number of maintenance-minded clergy. The bishop decided against launch a new church in the area because it might further weaken the existing church even though a new church would have been much more effective in evangelizing the community.

Episcopal clergy generally were lacking in missionary zeal. Unlike the ministerial training schools of some denominations, Episcopal seminaries were not infusing in their graduates an enthusiasm for gospel work. Rather seminarians were acquiring a negative attitude toward evangelism and missions from their professors. Seminaries were not equipping their graduates to lead the local church in evangelism and missions, much less a diocese in the event they were elected a bishop at some point in their career. Training in church planting was non-existent.

In contrast, seminaries in the Southern Baptist Convention were not only equipping their graduates to lead the local church in evangelism and missions, but also they were training them in church planting. The planting of new churches was a denominational priority. Southern Baptist seminaries took pains to foster a lifelong enthusiasm for this task in its graduates, as well as to equip them for the task. In fostering this enthusiasm Southern Baptists had a decided advantage. Most of the seminarians came to the seminaries already enthusiastic about starting and pastoring new churches. As a part of their training seminarians were required to participate in new church plants in the vicinity of the seminary as well as encouraged to voluntarily do so. Completing a church planting internship also was a degree requirement.

During the first half of the twentieth century the two dominant theological schools of thought in the Episcopal Church were Anglo-Catholicism and Broad Church liberalism. Episcopalians of both schools developed their identity around the rejection of evangelicalism and with evangelicalism anything that was associated in their minds with evangelicalism. This included evangelism and the need for personal faith and conversion. Evangelism became a dirty word to Episcopalians. It was something that Southern Baptists and other evangelicals did but not Episcopalians.

Anglo-Catholicism maximized the importance of the sacraments and good works and minimized the importance of person faith and conversion. Broad Church liberalism emphasized Christian nurture over personal faith and conversion. A mixture of these beliefs, coupled with anti-evangelical identity, came to typify Episcopal thinking.

If we look at the history of the Episcopal Church, we also discover that even before the twentieth century the Episcopal Church was not particularly noted for its missionary zeal. The Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and Presbyterians accompanied the settlers as they moved further and further west, traveling by horse and ox-drawn wagon. The Episcopalians waited for the steamboat and the railroads.

In the 1970s the Liturgical Movement fostered a recovery of the Holy Eucharist as a central act of Christian worship in the Episcopal Church. In 1979 the Episcopal Church adopted a new prayer book that stressed the centrality of the Eucharist. Between the Liturgical Movement and 1979 Book of Common Prayer regular weekly celebrations of the Eucharist became the norm in the Episcopal Church. It also became the expectation of Episcopalians. This made the task of planting new churches in the Episcopal Church more difficult. In the 1950s lay readers and deacons had been used to start new congregations. The expectation of regular weekly Eucharist celebrations put an end to this practice. It also made church planting more expensive. Priests required a stipend for their ministry. This meant that the diocese or a sponsoring church would need to include money for the stipend in its budget. In dioceses that had a maintenance mindset, there was often reluctance to expend money on new churches when existing churches needed it to keep their programs going. Maintenance-minded lay leaders also sat on the vestries of sponsoring churches and were reluctant to expend money on projects that did not benefit the church’s existing program. In a number of dioceses mission-minded bishops and diocesan conventions joined with like-minded clergy and vestries to plant new churches. My former parish, launched in 1985, was one of these churches.

By 1998 the gay rights agenda had come to the fore in the Episcopal Church. Bishops were ordaining openly gay and lesbian clergy. They were also sanctioning the blessing of homosexual couples. Theological diversity was increasingly espoused along with radical inclusivism in liberal quarters of the church. Calls for the tolerance of a wide range of diverse opinions in the church were followed by calls for tolerance of an equally wide range of religious beliefs outside the church.

Theological inclusivism and pluralism became accepted ways of thinking among liberal Episcopal clergy. Pluralism takes the position that the Christian faith is the Christian’s way to God. Other religions have equally valid ways to God for their adherents. A growing number of Episcopal clergy preached and taught some form of universal salvation. In many parts of the Episcopal Church, the exploration of alternative spiritualities, the delivery of social services, and social and political activism have replaced gospel work.

Theological inclusivism and pluralism are not confined to the Episcopal Church. They have also made inroads in the United Methodist Church, the United Presbyterian Church of the USA, and other denominations where liberalism had found its way into the seminary and into the parish church.

In an environment in which homosexual activity—regarded by the Bible as sin, rebellion against a holy God—is seen as a sacrament, a means of God’s grace; God is held to be so loving and accepting that no one may fear condemnation for what he has done in this life; and all religions are taught to lead to God, the proclamation of the gospel with its emphasis upon the gravity of human sinfulness, the need for a Savior, and the uniqueness of Christ are not only viewed as backward and old-fashioned but also as mean-spirited and intolerant. In this environment the attitude of our post-modern, post-Christian culture toward religion—that it is personal and therefore it is to be kept to ourselves and not to be imposed upon others—has also became the attitude of a growing segment of the Episcopal Church.

A pastor who adopts these views is not going to encourage the members of his congregation to become home missionaries wherever God has placed them. He is not going to urge them to make friends with non-Christians and other unchurched persons, to invest in these relationships, and eventually to talk with them about Jesus Christ. Indeed Jesus Christ no longer has a central place in the church.

In a diocese in which such views are dominant there may be some recognition of a need to plant new churches in order for the institution to survive. Closing dying churches and consolidating congregations may save the diocese money. However, maintaining the diocese requires a certain number of churches as a revenue base, necessitating the planting of new churches in high growth areas of the diocese where they have the best chance of thriving. In launching any new churches, what will receive the most emphasis is the Episcopal Church’s liberal ethos—its radical inclusivity, its tolerance of diverse spiritualities, and its humanitarian concerns. But the two most compelling reasons for planting new churches from a New Testament perspective—to glorify God and to reach a larger segment of the spiritually-disconnected and unchurched population with the gospel—will be missing. The new church plant will be a purely human endeavor. The most vital ingredient in any start-up, God himself, will not be there.

No particular structure can guarantee the success of the evangelistic and church planting efforts of a congregation, judicatory, or denomination. What is required to start a new church and reach the lost with the gospel are hearts and minds open to God and to his Word.

For about two years I was a part of a new church plant north of New Orleans, Louisiana. A group of local Southern Baptist churches had seen a need for a new church in their area and called a young pastor to start the new church. When I first became involved in the church, it was meeting in a fire station. When I relocated to western Kentucky, the church had bought a local café, converted it to a church sanctuary, office, and nursery, and grown to two services on Sunday morning. The young pastor who planted the church has started a second church in the area.

Hearts and minds open to God and his Word planted those two churches and are reaching the lost with the good news of Jesus Christ. God works in open hearts and minds to accomplish what he purposes. If a new church plant succeeds, if a lost soul accepts Christ, it is God’s doing and his alone. To him belongs all the credit. We are simply his instruments.