The Curse of a Different Gospel

By Robin G. Jordan

I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel— not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed. As we have said before, so now I say again: If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed. For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ.

For I would have you know, brothers, that the gospel that was preached by me is not man's gospel. For I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ. Galatians 1:6-13 ESV

Over the past twenty-five years I have viewed with growing alarm and consternation the developments in the North American Anglican Church, in the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church and more recently in the Common Cause Partnership and the Anglican Church in North America. I have watched the Episcopal Church succumb to liberalism, modernism, pluralism, and post-modernism. I have seen the good news of salvation by grace and justification by faith replaced by a false gospel of radical inclusivity and universal salvation.

I was appalled by the indifference and even hostility of Episcopalians, clergy and laity, to evangelism and the planting of new churches in the Decade of Evangelism in the last decade of the twentieth century. During the Decade of Evangelism I came to the conclusion that a new Anglican province was needed in North America, a province that held and maintained the Protestant faith of the reformed Church of England and her formularies and had a real heart for the lost, a province in which Anglicans were ablaze with zeal for the gospel. Their fervor in its cause would match and even surpass that of the African churches. The establishment of a new province in the shadow of the Episcopal Church might cause the denomination to make a turnaround as has happened when vibrant new churches are established in the shadow of moribund older churches.

The passion of the newly formed Anglican Mission in North America for reaching “the unchurched and spiritually-disconnected,” evangelizing them, and enfolding them in new churches attracted me to that organization. My open sympathy for the AMiA would result in the demand for my resignations as the senior lay reader of the parish that I had helped to pioneer. I became involved in a short-lived attempt to plant an Anglican Mission church in my community. For a time I nurtured the idea of planting an Anglican Mission church myself.

Due to the skyrocketing cost of living in Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina I relocated to western Kentucky where I now live. I continued to entertain the idea of starting an Anglican Mission church but in my new community. When the Anglican Mission and the Prayer Book Society USA jointly released Services of The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 in Contemporary English, I purchased a copy of the trial services with that end in mind. I was disappointed to discover that the services were not what they had been represented to be—contemporary English versions of the services of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and that Bishops Murphy and Rodgers had endorsed the use of the services. This was the beginning of what would become a growing disenchantment with the Anglican Mission. My dealings with Pawley Island and Peter Toon would contribute to this disenchantment. The subsequent publication of An Anglican Prayer Book in 2008 and Murphy and Rodgers’ endorsement of its use added to my disillusionment with the Anglican Mission. The book clearly did not conform to the requirements for alternative rites and forms for use in the Anglican Mission as laid out in the organization’s Solemn Declaration of Principles. Their endorsement raised questions in my mind regarding the genuineness of the Anglican Mission’s commitment to the historic Church of England formularies as its standards of faith and worship. Rodgers’ public admission of a softening of attitude toward Anglo-Catholics following a meeting with leading Anglo-Catholics at Nashotah House, the growing influence of the Anglican Mission’s Anglo-Catholic wing in that organization, and the Anglican Mission’s acceptance of the Common Cause Theological Statement further added to my disillusionment.

The flawed provisional constitution and canons of the Anglican Church in North America, the even more flawed draft constitution and canons, and Rodgers’ defense of these documents may have been the last straw. My investigation into the sources of a number of provisions in these documents pointed to the Anglican Mission and to its sponsor, the Anglican Church of Rwanda. It revealed that the Anglican Mission’s own canonical charter as well as the Rwandan constitution and canons incorporated not only the language of the Roman Catholic Code of Canon Law but its doctrine, norms, and principles. These three documents were apparently the work of Anglican Mission Canon Kevin Donlan, a former Roman Catholic priest who studied canon law at Cardiff University. Donlan served on the GAFCON Theological Resource Group and the Common Cause Governance Task Force and is known for his strong Anglo-Catholic leanings. He recently presented the fourth global South encounter with a proposal for revamping Anglican ecclesiology. If this proposal were anything like the Anglican Mission’s canonical charter and the Rwandan constitution and canons, it would replace Anglican ecclesiology with Roman Catholic ecclesiology.

The Africans are susceptible to Roman Catholic ecclesiology and to prelacy due to the hierarchical structure of traditional African society with its kings or paramount chieftains and subordinate chieftains. A number of African provinces, including Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda, have adapted for their use Roman Catholic procedures for the selection and appointment of bishops and other Roman Catholic institutions. The strong role of the bishop in the African churches, which a number of North American Anglicans see as the solution to the problems of the North American Anglican Church, can be traced to these influences. It is not a particularly African institution.

The same North American Anglicans turn a blind eye to the history of abuses and injustices of prelatical episcopacy in the Church of England and to the role of the bishops in the developments in the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church. They prefer to blame the laity for these developments. They turn a deaf ear to those who draw to their attention that the Africans have yet to learn the distinction between episcopal authority and episcopal tyranny. They bring to mind the observation “Those who ignore the mistakes of the past are bound to repeat them.”

The Africans have incorporated a number of safeguards and checks and balances into their constitutions and canons. The Anglican Church in North America and the Anglican Mission have disregarded the need for such provisions.

The present drift of these two bodies toward Roman Catholic ecclesiology as well as Roman Catholic doctrine and practice is a continuation of the Episcopal Church’s drift in the nineteenth and twentieth century in the same direction. However those who favor this retrograde movement may justify it, this regression to unreformed Western Catholicism represents a counter-Reformation in North America, and threatens the very survival of authentic historic Anglicanism not only on the North American subcontinent but also in other parts of the world.

What are at stake are the authority of the Bible and the gospel of grace, not just an identity and a tradition. The English Reformers recognized this fact in the sixteenth century. It is time for us to recognize it in our own day. We cannot go on pretending that there are no serious differences between Protestant Anglicans and Catholic Anglicans and our differences do not matter. They matter very much. They affect not only our understanding of authority but also our understanding of salvation. We cannot gloze over them as the liberals sought to do in the last century. They mean the difference between eternal life and a godless eternity.