Can An Apple Tree Bear Oranges?

http://heritageanglicannetwork.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/can-an-apple-tree-bear-oranges/

[The Heritage Anglican Network] 5 Mar 2009--The ACNA Provincial Council meeting in Bedford, Texas has been moved up to June 22, 2009, and according to a recent announcement will be more like an AMiA Winter Conference than a TEC General Convention. It will be what I anticipated in my article, “The ACNA Constitution: What You See Is What You Get,” a carefully orchestrated media event at which those groups of churches wishing to become constituent bodies of the ACNA will be invited to ratify the seriously-flawed provisional ACNA constitution and to consider the ratification of an expanded version of the provisional ACNA canons. The provisional ACNA constitution’s Fundamental Declarations, like the Common Cause Theological Statement upon which they are based, give a token place to the Anglican formularies, to the Articles of Religion of 1571, the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, and the Ordinal of 1661. The form of church government embodied in the provisional ACNA constitution is not synodical but corporate, with most of the power concentrated in the small, clergy-dominated Provincial Council rather than the larger, more representative Provincial Assembly. The Provincial Council is comparable to a board of directors and the Provincial Assembly to a stockholders meeting. In the synodical form of church government commonly found in the Anglican Communion the Provincial Assembly would be the governing body and the Provincial Council would be its executive body, subject to its control and direction.

The provisional ACNA constitution’s corporate form of church government is analogous to TEC striping the General Convention of its powers and giving them to the Executive Council. The liberals in TEC would love to implement this kind of church government in TEC. It would give them absolute control of that church body and they could pick up the pace of reshaping it to their liking.