The New ACNA Ordinal: Shadows of Things That Will Be or Shadows of Things That May Be?

By Robin G. Jordan

The Episcopal Church did not adopt the 1571 Articles of Religion, Anglicanism’s confession of faith, until 1801 and then the Episcopal Church did not adopt all of the Articles. The Episcopal Church also did not require its clergy at their ordination or at their installation to subscribe to the Articles as being agreeable to Scripture. A little over thirty years after the Episcopal Church’s adoption of its truncated, toothless Articles the Tractarian movement was making serious inroads among Episcopal clergy. The Ritualist movement would follow hard on its heels. By 1900 the Protestant Reformed religion that had been the faith of the Episcopal Church in its early years was not to be found in that denomination. The Romeward movement had replaced it with the corrupt false religion of the Church of Rome. Its adherents taught that Christ was substantively present in the eucharistic elements and the priest reiterated or represented Christ’s sacrifice in the Eucharist. They also taught that before a communicant might receive communion, he must first confess his sins to a priest and receive the absolution of the priest. The erroneous beliefs and practices that the English Reformers had disavowed and rejected in the sixteenth century had not only been revived but to them had been added new innovations in doctrine and worship borrowed from the Church of Rome.

It was hardly surprising that in this soil well manured by widespread disregard for the teaching of the Bible and the Reformation and slavish deference to the clergy, the weeds of liberalism and modernism would grow in rank profusion. People who have been taught to blindly accept the guidance of their priests in all moral and spiritual matters and to view one group of weeds as beneficial plants were not able to recognize a new group of weeds for what they were when they sprung from this soil, especially when their priests were cultivating this new group of weeds.

What has happened in the last forty years is that Episcopal clergy have broken away from the Episcopal Church, taking their congregations or part of their congregations with them. Most of them have not broken away to plant the wholesome, nourishing wheat of the Protestant Reformed religion of historic Anglicanism. Rather they have broken away to plant more weeds!

The Anglican Church in North America—one of the more recent groups of American clergy to break away from the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada—has produced a new Ordinal. This Ordinal, more than any previous American Ordinal, departs from the reformed ordination services of the classical Anglican Ordinal, incorporating the ordination practices of the corrupt false religion of the Church of Rome and with them the erroneous unscriptural doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church.

The historic Preface to the classical Anglican Ordinal has been changed to assert that since the time of the Apostles three orders of ministers have existed in Christ’s Church. In Worship in the Church of England (first published as The Book of Common Prayer, SPCK, 1946, 1959, and then as Common Prayer in the Church of England, SPCK, 1969), SPCK, 1982, p. 114, D. E. W. Harrison and Michael C. Sansom explain that the first evidence of the ministry of the Church consisting of a threefold order of bishops, presbyters, and deacons is the letters of Ignatius at the beginning of the second century and even then the differentiation between bishop and presbyter appears to have been comparatively recent. This differentiation is not made in the New Testament; it appears to have been unknown to Clement of Rome in AD 96. Harrison and Sansom stress:

There have not been three orders since the time of the Apostles and, even if we can trace the threefold order to the second century, it has to be admitted that, during the centuries, the orders have changed in character to a very considerable extent. None the less, it is not disastrously wrong, unless some attempt is made to argue that what we have now is what the Church has always practiced.

The new Ordinal’s Preface appears to do just that.

I examine the new Ordinal in detail in my article, “The 2011 Ordinal: A Foretaste of the New American Prayer Book.”

In Charles Dicken’s A Christmas Carol, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is visited on Christmas Eve by three specters in succession. Of these three spirits, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come is the most frightening in his aspects. Scrooge is given an opportunity to amend his ways and to change the future. The new Ordinal that Anglican Church in North America has produced is like that third spirit. It points a bony finger at what might be the Anglican Church in America’s future. Will the ACNA take warning from this new Ordinal and amend its ways? Let us pray that the ACNA does before it is too late.