The Hand Writing on the Wall

By Robin G. Jordan

The Anglican Church in North America shows no movement toward making any changes in its constitution and canons to make room for conservative evangelical Anglicans. Those who wish to find a place for themselves in the ACNA must do it on ACNA terms. This entails unreservedly subscribing to the unnecessarily partisan fundamental declarations in the ACNA constitution, receiving as true the Roman Catholic doctrinal positions embodied in its canons, and compromising their own beliefs.

It also means accepting the leadership of Archbishop Robert Duncan and others like him who, after foisting the present constitution and canons on the ACNA, pay no attention to the provisions of these documents and treat them as if they are mandate for them to do as they please. Archbishop Duncan has appointed a dean for the ACNA for which these documents make no provision, he has arrogated to himself powers that they do not give him, and he is talking of forming an Archbishop’s cabinet for which they also make no provision.

Joining the ACNA at this stage in its development is an endorsement of not only the doctrine of the ACNA but also of the conduct of its leaders, of their disregard for constitutionalism and the rule of law, and their penchant for authoritarianism and prelacy.

With the Anglican Mission choosing to accept ministry partnership with the ACNA rather than becoming a sub-provincial jurisdiction of the ACNA, a vacuum has been created in the power structure of the ACNA. The ACNA constitution and canons were largely drafted to accommodate the AMiA, which has the largest number of congregations and the most clergy and was making a hefty contribution to the ACNA budget. The Anglo-Catholic wing of the ACNA, represented by Forward in Faith North America (FIFNA) and the Anglo-Catholic dioceses, is poised to fill that vacuum. They can be expected to maneuver to gain hegemony in the ACNA and to shape the future of that body. Bishop Keith Ackerman has already called for a new Oxford Movement in the ACNA. Its vision for the future of the ACNA does not include a vibrant conservative evangelical Anglican wing.

Traditional evangelical Anglicanism does not at this point in time appear to have any future in the ACNA. The ACNA’s Anglo-Catholic wing is intent upon keeping it that way. Its vision for the ACNA’s future is a church that is not too different from the Protestant Episcopal Church before the more radical liberals and revisionists gained the ascendancy, a church in which Anglo-Catholicism was the dominant theological school of thought. It was a church that had room for congregations and clergy that espoused moderate Broad Church latitudinarian principles but gave way to the church’s Anglo-Catholic wing in matters of importance. It was a church from which the Anglo-Catholic wing had driven conservative evangelical Anglicans in the 1870s.

The present situation in North America has similarities with that in South Africa in the mid 1800s. The first Church of England service in South Africa was held in 1749. It was conducted by a British Navy chaplain. The British occupied the Cape in 1806. English settlers in South Africa formed congregations and built churches. In 1847 the Reverend Robert Gray was appointed the first Bishop of Capetown. In an article on the history of the Church of England in South Africa Stephen Hofmeyr recounts what happened:

“Gray was an admirable pioneer, but was authoritarian in temperament and Anglo-Catholic by conviction, determined to impose an Anglo-Catholic pattern and none other on the Church as he found it and as he wanted it to develop. His contemporary, A C Tait, Bishop of London, later Archbishop of Canterbury, commented in Convocation that, if Bishop Gray's power were equal to his will, he would drive away all those whose views were evangelical. Conflict duly followed, and Bishop Gray decided that the way forward was in a new denomination free from what he chose to call ‘the bands and fetters of the reformation’.”

Bishop Gray formed the Church of the Province of South Africa (now the Anglican Church of South Africa) in 1870. A number of congregations refused to leave the Church of England in South Africa. However, Gray put pressure on these congregations to join the CPSA until only one CESA congregation, Holy Trinity Church, Cape Town, was left. From this one church CESA grew to the almost 200 churches that it is today. South Africa became another part of the world where two separate Anglican churches exist in the same country.

The conservative evangelicals that were driven from the Protestant Episcopal Church in the 1870s formed the Reformed Episcopal Church. In time this church would grow to have branches in the United Kingdom as well as in Canada and the United States. But sometime in the twentieth century the REC lost its evangelical fervour and abandoned the Protestant and evangelical principles of its founders. It is no longer the bastion of the Reformation and reformed doctrine that it once was. It experienced an Oxford Movement of its own and has become Anglo-Catholic in doctrine and High Church in worship. It has become a church body in which conservative evangelical Anglicans no longer feel at home.

A real need exists for a new conservative evangelical Anglican body in North America. It must be thoroughly committed to spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ as it is set forth in the New Testament and the Thirty-Nine Articles; planting new conservative evangelical Anglican churches; recruiting training, licensing, supporting, and overseeing conservative evangelical Anglican pastors and other gospel workers; upholding the evangelical, Protestant, and Reformed faith of the post-Reformation Church of England and its formularies; and passing on to posterity the evangelical, Protestant, and Reformed heritage of the Church of England. It must offers a credible alternative to the Anglican Church of Canada, the ACNA, the Continuing Anglican Churches, and The Episcopal Church.

A number of conservative evangelical Anglicans are sojourning in non-Anglican churches where they are, due to their circumstances, not exercising the best stewardship of God’s manifold grace (1 Peter 4:10-11) as they might in the setting of an Anglican church. They are using what gifts they can where they find themselves but they would be able to make greater use of their gifts in a conservative evangelical Anglican church setting.

The Thirty-Nine Articles and The Ordinal of 1661 take the position that no man is permitted to take upon himself the office of public preaching or ministration of the sacraments before he has been called and appointed to fulfill this office. Since they have not been selected and called to this work by men entrusted with public authority in the Church to call and send ministers into the Lord’s vineyard, a number of conservative evangelical Anglicans find a lack of their acceptance as lawfully called and appointed by those among whom they would labor and their own scruples about presuming to exercise such ministry without being lawfully called and appointed a great hindrance to their exercise of gospel ministry and their establishment of new churches.



With the ACNA’s Anglo-Catholic wing preparing to launch a new Oxford Movement in the ACNA and to impose an Anglo-Catholic pattern on that body, conservative evangelical Anglican congregations and clergy in the ACNA need more than ever to network with each other and with conservative evangelical Anglicans outside the ACNA and outside of North America. Right now their position is a weak one. They are scattered and they are isolated. There, however, is strength in numbers. An individual stick is easy to snap in two. A bundle of sticks, with a cord tightly wound about it to hold the sticks together, is much more difficult to break.

Conservative evangelical Anglicans in North America need to keep an eye on two developments in the ACNA. They can expect to see a renewed effort to bring Anglo-Catholic Continuing Anglican bodies like the Anglican Province of America into the ACNA. FIFNA can be expected to reach out to traditionalist Anglo-Catholic congregations and clergy who do not avail themselves of Pope Benedict’s offer and become a part of a former Anglican personal ordinariate in the Roman Catholic Church, and to offer them a place in a traditionalist Anglo-Catholic enclave in the ACNA.

A second development is the growing pressure from some quarters of the ACNA to reorganize the ACNA on a more territorial basis and to drop its present organization on the basis of territory and/or affinity. This pressure appears to be coming from former members of the Anglican Church of Canada and The Episcopal Church who dislike parallel or overlapping episcopates. They favor the traditional organization of the ACNA into territorial bishoprics, which was how their former church bodies were organized. They even appeal to the traditions of the Church emphasizing the strictly territorial character of church organization forbidding separate ecclesiastical structures in the same place. In doing so they, of course, overlook that the ACNA shares the same territory not only with the Anglican Church of Canada or The Episcopal Church but also a number of Continuing Anglican Churches, Independent Catholic Churches, Lutheran Churches, and Orthodox Churches and the Roman Catholic Church. All these churches have bishops and these bishops have overlapping provinces or dioceses. In North America there is no single bishop in one single place but many bishops sharing the same space.

A part of the motivation for pressing for territorial organization of the ACNA is that this type of organization is traditional and it is to what its advocates are accustomed. They cannot think of organizing the ACNA in any other way. Their thinking is like the kind of plastic that you can bend into all kinds of shapes but it always snaps back into its original shape. A part of the motivation is the desire to establish the ACNA as “the” Anglican Church in a particular territory, replacing the Anglican Church of Canada or The Episcopal Church, and to get the ACNA, irrespective of its token adherence to the Church of England formularies and its eschewing of the Reformation and Reformed doctrine, to be generally accepted as the only genuine expression of Anglicanism in that territory.

For conservative evangelical Anglicans in and outside the ACNA this second development has at least two implications. The first is that conservative evangelical Anglican congregations and clergy in the ACNA may find themselves part of a diocese or other judicatory in which the bishop of the judicatory and most of the other congregations and clergy in the judicatory are not friendly or tolerant toward traditional evangelical Anglicanism and espouse beliefs and practices in conflict with it, in which their particular form of Anglicanism is viewed as authentically Anglican and classical evangelical Anglicanism is not. While the ACNA constitution and canons prohibit the ACNA from exerting any claim over the property of a congregation, they do not prevent a judicatory pressuring a congregation to put its property in a trust favoring the judicatory. They do not forbid judicatories from holding property in trust for a congregation. See Article XII of the ACNA constitution and Title I.6.6 of the ACNA canons. The ACNA constitution and canons contain no guarantees that conservative evangelical Anglican congregations will always be free to call conservative evangelical Anglican clergy! We have all seen what happened in The Episcopal Church where the church is organized on a territorial basis, how conservative congregations have been pressured into accepting liberal clergy, how congregations opposed to the ordination of women and practicing homosexuals have been forced to accept women clergy and practicing homosexual clergy. The ACNA constitution and canons have no safeguards to prevent something similar from happening in the ACNA, to keep an Anglo-Catholic bishop from imposing an Anglo-Catholic rector or vicar on a conservative evangelical Anglican congregation.

The second implication is that conservative evangelical Anglicans in and outside the ACNA need to network together now! They have already waited too long. Their window of opportunity is closing rapidly.

They need to remember the lesson of Daniel 5. Belshazzar gave a splendid feast in his palace during the siege of Babylon in 538 B.C, using the sacred vessels of the temple, which Nebuchadnezzer had brought from Jerusalem. In the same hour the fingers of man’s hand appeared and wrote opposite the lamp stand on the plaster of the wall of the king’s palace these word, “Mene, mene, tekel, upharson. The king himself saw the part of the hand that wrote. None of the wise men of Babylon could read the writing or interpret it for the king. The prophet Daniel was called to interpret its meaning. It prophesized the overthrow of Belshazzar and his kingdom. For Belshazzar, it was too late. The Meads and the Persians had blocked the flow of the water into the drainage canals of the city of Babylon and entered the city through where the drainage canals went under its walls. That very night Belshazzar, king of the Chaldeans, was slain, and Darius the Mead received his kingdom.



Conservative evangelical Anglicans in and outside the ACNA are under siege. They have been warned of their impending doom. Unlike Belshazzar, they still have a measure of time in which they can do something. But that time is running out. The sand in the top half of the hourglass is sinking lower while the sand in the bottom half is rising higher!

We are not wrestling against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places (Ephesians 6:12). We are valiantly fighting under the banner of Christ against sin, the world and the devil. We are contending for the truth of God’s Word and the good news of Jesus Christ. We are a Gospel Insurgency!

Conservative evangelical Anglicans not only need to network with each other, but they also need to establish their own enclave. In counterinsurgency one of the objectives is to deny the insurgents a base of operations, an area where they can regroup, re-supply, retrain and from which they can carry on their insurgency. Right now conservative evangelical Anglicans in North America have no base from which they can conduct their operations, from which they can go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature (Mark 16:15).

Now is the time for conservative evangelical Anglicans to form a Heritage Anglican Network in North America—a network that not only brings together conservative evangelicals, conservative evangelical congregations, and conservative evangelical clergy in and outside the ACNA but also creates an enclave for them outside of the ACNA and networks them with conservative evangelical Anglicans outside of North America. We must act before the little sand that we have left in the top half of the hourglass is gone. Already it has sunken even lower.