The Plight of the Small Membership Anglican Church in North America

By Robin G. Jordan

The original article, titled “The Small Membership Church and the New Settlement,” was posted on Virtue Online on 12/16/08. Most of what I wrote in that article continues to apply to the small membership Anglican church and the Anglican Church in North America today. Small membership churches have their drawbacks and limitations. They may not be as appealing as large membership churches. But they do have a place. All kinds of churches including small membership churches are needed to fulfill the Great Commission.

In this article I examine the standing of the small membership church in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and a number of related issues. A small membership church is a church with an average Sunday attendance (ASA) of less than 50 people. This size church does not fare very well under the provisions of the ACNA provisional constitution and canons.

Small membership churches desiring to affiliate with the new province must join with an existing judicatory or a judicatory in formation. A group of small membership churches cannot be admitted to the new province as a new judicatory. It must amalgamate or merge with a group of at least 12 larger churches with an ASA of at least 50 people each. The two groups of churches must have a collective ASA of 1000 people. As I noted in my previous article, “A Further Look at the ACNA Canons,” these requirements for the admission of a new judicatory to the new province are higher than what have been the requirements for the admission of a new judicatory to a number of the Common Cause Partners.



Among the implications are that small membership churches are going to experience in the new province that same kinds of conditions that are compelling clergy and congregations to leave the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church. They are always going to be in a subordinate position with whatever school of thought that dominates the judicatory seeking to coerce them into acquiescing to its theological beliefs and to impose upon them pastors who subscribe to these beliefs. A few small membership churches may be fortunate enough to unite with a group of larger churches with which they share theological affinity. Most will not.

The Anglican Church in North America is based upon theological affinity only in so far as the theological streams represented in the new province are theologically conservative. The ACNA provisional constitution and canons, however, fail to take this principle an important step further and to create theological affinity-based convocations of clergy and congregations as the constituent judicatories of the new province. The creation of such affinity-based convocations would seriously reduce the possibility of theological conflict. It would provide each theological stream with its own enclave in the new province, an enclave that is not confined to a particular geographic territory but covers the entire territory of the new province.

The theological streams represented in the new province have disparate and often conflicting theological beliefs. Under the ACNA provisional constitution and canons they are thrown together to compete for hegemony in the existing and forming judicatories of the new province. Of the former Common Cause Partners only three of the breakaway Episcopal dioceses and Forward in Faith North America (FIFNA) are theologically homogenous. They are exclusively Anglo-Catholic. It is a formula for power struggles and serious theological disputes.

There is a naïve assumption that since the Anglican Church in North America is made up of theological conservatives, clergy and congregations will not experience the kinds of problems that they experienced in Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church. The formation of the new province has not eliminated disagreement in opinion on doctrinal and other matters and the potential for quarrels caused by this disagreement. Anglo-Catholics, charismatic evangelicals, and confessional evangelicals have different theological views of salvation, grace, justification, works, the gravity of sin, the place of the Bible in the Christian faith, the Church, the sacraments, ordination, apostolic succession, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit. The threat of liberalism is not present in the new province to divert their attention from their theological differences.

The ACNA provisional constitution and canons offer few guarantees and safeguards for the small membership churches. They do not protect small churches from the kinds of abuses that they have been forced to endure in The Episcopal Church and in the Continuum. Some but not all are guaranteed congregational ownership of church property. As previously noted, they cannot affiliate with the new province as a part of a cluster of small membership churches. They must join an existing ACNA judicatory or unite with a network of larger churches seeking admission to the new province.

Clergy and congregations in the new province are at the mercy of whatever judicatory they join. This is especially true in the case of small membership churches. The ACNA constitution and canons make no provision for the transfer of clergy and congregations from one judicatory to another in the event that they find themselves in a judicatory with which they have no real theological affinity or that the judicatory which they joined undergoes a change in theological climate. In cases of severe theological incompatibility their only option is to withdraw from the new province. They cannot transfer to a more theologically congenial judicatory, one that suits their theological disposition, and remain an ACNA affiliate.

The larger churches in each judicatory can be expected to control the selection of the bishop of the judicatory and to dominate its decision-making bodies. They are likely to shape the doctrine and worship of the judicatory. The members of small membership churches will, to a large extent, be second-class citizens in the new province.

Another group of churches that will be adversely affected under the ACNA provisional constitution and canons are what are sometimes called “churches without walls”—house churches, home fellowships, and cell churches. These churches have adopted an alternative model to the traditional parish church. They meet in private homes and other venues and often are targeted at unchurched population segments that the traditional parish church is not particularly effective in reaching and evangelizing. For example, the residents of multihousing, while they are not likely to attend a traditional parish church, will attend a house church established in the apartment complex in which they live.

In these alternative church models the church goes to the ministry focus group that it has targeted instead of expecting the missionary focus group to come to the church. The church may not have a weekend or Sunday worship service or gathering for the entire church. Rather it may have a number of meetings, each involving one section of the church, scattered throughout the week.

The recent announcements of a new era of evangelism and missions may be premature. The traditional parish church model that the ACNA provisional constitution and canons appear to favor is not known for its effectiveness in these areas. It is the church model with which the former Episcopalians of the Anglican Church in North America may be familiar. This, however, does not make it the most effective model for carrying out the Great Commission.

In Simple Church: Returning to God’s Process for Making Disciples (Nashville, Tennessee: B & H Publishing Group, 2006), Thomas S. Rainer and Eric Geiger point out a number of drawbacks of the traditional parish church model. The way a church is organized is inherited. “That’s the way we’ve always done things.” It is not thought-out. It is not designed with care. At some point in time it was thrown together and then became enshrined in tradition.

The programs and ministries are just plugged into the church calendar and brochure. They pull the church in different directions and compete for the resources of the church. Instead of having one focus the church has many focuses. Each ministry and each program has its constituency in the church and each constituency has its own vision of the church and its own priorities. The church’s programs and ministries may help people experience spiritual growth. They may not. They were not designed for that purpose.

Traditions of how churches in the church’s denomination always done things also keep the church from doing things more effectively. The church may have a particular ministry such as a men’s fellowship because all churches of the denomination to which it belongs have that ministry; it may have a women’s circle for the same reason. People go to a lot of meetings in traditional parish model churches so that the church may appear to be a veritable hive of activity. But this busyness is deceptive. Very few of these meetings are helping them to spread the gospel, to produce followers of Jesus, or to grow spiritually.

Rainer and Geiger advocate the streamlining of the church and its organization around “a straightforward and strategic process that moves people through the stages of spiritual growth.” If a ministry or program does not serve this process, it is eliminated. Proposed ministries and programs that do not serve the process are not adopted. The church has one focus—to make and to mature disciples.

In Mission Minded (Kingsford, New South Wales, Australia: Matthias Media, 1992, 2007) Peter Bold identifies two main goals of the mission-minded church—evangelism and edification. He identifies of a number of sub-goals under these main goals—raising awareness, initial contact, pre-evangelism, and evangelism under evangelism and follow-up, nurture, and training in ministry under edification. In planning towards mission, he points to the need to analyze all the activities of the church in relation to these goals and sub-goals. This analysis may reveal some dangerous holes that need to be plugged and some activities that may need to be pruned.

One of Bold’s examples of activities that may need pruning are four women’s groups, all of which are targeted at women in the same age range, and all of which consist of the same ten to twelve women in this age bracket. These four groups are actually one group meeting at different times of the week under different names for different activities. The group is not serving as a point of contact for women outside of the church or as a point of entry for these women into the church.

Redundant church groups and organizations made up of the same group of people are common in traditional parish model churches. The same group of women may form the altar guild, the flower guild, the women’s intercessory prayer group, and the needlepoint sewing circle. At the first glance it might seem that a church had a number of groups for women but a closer examination reveals that these groups are really one tight-knit group of women that, while it may occasionally adopt into the group a daughter or niece or sister-in-law of a group member, is generally not open to newcomers. If a second women’s group is established to incorporate newcomers into the church, the pastor can expect to hear an outcry from the first group who will loudly protest that the church has plenty of women’s groups.

Rainer, Geiger, and Bold point to a very important principle—how a church is organized should serve its function and not the other way around. The function of the church is disciple making (Rainer and Geiger) or gospel ministry (Bold). They are different terms for the same function.

The former Episcopalians that largely make up the Anglican Church in North America are bringing into the new province a lot of baggage that they should leave behind them in The Episcopal Church. Anglicanism in North America needs a fresh start—not a continuation of “business as usual.” The new province needs to be something more than a recreation of The Episcopal Church sans the liberals. If the Anglican Church in North America is truly to be a “mission-shaped” province, it must give proper recognition to the distinctive strengths and vitality of the small membership church instead of viewing the small membership church as The Episcopal Church has viewed this size church—a client or dependent of a judicatory that has surrendered its freedom of choice to the judicatory in exchange for a subsidy.

The Anglican Church in North America needs to take the important step of creating theological affinity-based convocations of clergy and congregations as the constituent judicatories of the new province. The ACNA needs to guarantee each theological stream represented in the new province a non-geographic enclave in the new province and freedom to establish and network churches throughout the entire territory of the new province and to develop and use its own Prayer Book or liturgy. In this way not only would the new province be organized on the basis of theological affinity but its judicatories would be also.

The Anglican Church in North America must establish guarantees and safeguards to prevent what happened in the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church from happening in the new province. Congregations should be guaranteed ownership of their own property and the freedom to select their own clergy and to choose their own Prayer Book or liturgy. The constituent judicatories should be free to elect their own bishop, according to their own canons and subject to confirmation of the bishop-elect by the other bishops in the province. Only if a constituent judicatory, after a specific number of attempts, fails to elect a bishop should the Province designate a bishop and then in consultation with the constituent judicatory. The Provincial Synod should have limited delegated powers with the constituent judicatories retaining all other powers. The Provincial Executive Council and the Presiding Bishop should be elected by the Provincial Synod and should perform only those functions specifically prescribed in the Constitution of the Province. The Provincial Executive Council should be subject to the direction of the Provisional Synod and the Presiding Bishop should have limited, clearly defined powers. Clergy and congregations should be free to transfer from one judicatory to another without forfeiture of pension contributions or congregational property. Clergy and congregations from existing judicatories should be free to form new ones that reflect their common theological beliefs.

The Anglican Church in North America needs to make room for other church models beside the traditional parish in the new province. This includes clusters of house churches, networks of home fellowships, and cell churches. Whether they adopt the traditional parish model or an alternative model, only churches organized around the Great Commission can expect to receive God’s blessing in the new province.

God is not building a new province in North America where Anglicans may turn their backs on the world and live their lives as if it does not exist. North America is the seventh largest mission field in the world. It is the world’s largest English-speaking mission field. North America is as much a part of God’s vineyard as any other mission field in the world. God established the Church of Jesus Christ to carry on the mission of his Son—to seek and save the lost. God is calling and sending new workers into the North American part of his vineyard because the old workers whom he called and sent there have not done what he called and sent them to do. Having shown themselves to be unfaithful, God is replacing them. We are the new workers. If we too prove to be unfaithful, God will also replace us.