The ACNA leadership '...embrace transparency?!' They've got to be kidding!!

By Robin G. Jordan

On the Anglican Church in North America website is posted a communiqué from the bishops of the ACNA to the rank and file of that ecclesial body. This communiqué was issued by the ACNA bishops following their recent meeting at Nashotah House. Also posted on the ACNA website are a summary of Archbishop Robert Duncan’s State of the Church address to the ACNA College of Bishops, a link to the full address, and summaries of the reports of various ACNA committees and taskforces. I posted the communiqué further down this page along with a link to the page on the ACNA website where the summaries are posted.

In the communiqué the ACNA bishops speak of embracing transparency. Secretiveness has become so much a part of the denominational culture of the Anglican Church in North America, I do not think that we can give any credence to this statement. A lack of openness and transparency characterized the ACNA leadership even before the ACNA was established. If the ACNA leadership was genuinely committed to openness and transparency, it would have established a website on which would be regularly posted the drafts of the ACNA Ordinal, the ACNA Catechism, and the ACNA Prayer Book as they were produced and where interested parties could examine these documents and make comments. This, however, is not the way the ACNA leadership operates.

At their recent meeting the ACNA College of Bishops revised and approved a 4.0 version of the ACNA Ordinal and two Holy Communion rites. Both the revised Ordinal and the Holy Communion rites should have been posted with the summary of the report of the relevant committee/taskforce. Links should have been provided to the full reports. This is what the ACNA College of Bishops would have seen was done if it was really committed to openness and transparency. Indeed the proposed revised ACNA Ordinal and the proposed Holy Communion rites and the full committee/taskforce reports should have been available to interested parties before the meeting. But as I have already noted, this is not the way the ACNA leadership operates.

I saw from the committee/taskforce report summaries that the Anglican Church in North America continues to have problems with congregations reporting statistics. It prompted me to wonder why a third of ACNA congregations are holding back this information.

I also saw that the Provincial Council has “expressed a determination to move towards geographical structures as normative and affinity structures as the exception.” This development, while not unexpected, is unfortunate. There has been a movement within the ACNA to organize the ACNA entirely into geographic dioceses and to eliminate affinity networks. A large segment of the ACNA is comprised of former Episcopalians who have no experience with any form of ecclesiastical organization other than the geographic diocese. They cannot envision a denomination organized in any other way. The ACNA also includes an influential, well-organized group of church leaders who hold a Catholic view of church order and who regard the geographic diocese as the normative judicatorial structure for a Catholic church.

When a denomination is organized into geographic structures, however, one group or party inevitably comes to dominate the life of the judicatory. In the Episcopal Church we have seen how the liberals have come to dominate the life of one diocese after another. Earlier in the nineteenth century the Anglo-Catholics would do the same thing. Congregations and clergy who do not belong to the dominant group or party in the diocese are marginalized. It can, as happened in the Episcopal Church in the nineteenth century, lead to fragmentation. Conservative evangelicals would leave the Protestant Episcopal Church in reaction to the growth and increasing influence of the Anglo-Catholic Tractarian-Ritualist Movement and form the Reformed Episcopal Church.

It also means that congregations and clergy that oppose women’s ordination may find themselves in a diocese that supports women’s ordination and visa versa.

As Lyle Schaller points out in his book Affinity Networks, affinity structures enable congregations and clergy with different theological outlooks to coexist in the same denomination. Affinity structures can be organized into geographic structures at the regional level. In a denomination with bishops an affinity network that is denomination-wide might consist of a cluster of regional networks and each regional network might in turn be organized into episcopal areas. Each regional network would have a regional bishop and each episcopal area would have an area bishop. The latter might also be the pastor of a local church.

At a time in which people are not giving to churches as much as they have in the past, the Anglican Church in North America need to be limiting the terms of its bishops. The ACNA also needs to be reviewing the duties and functions of bishops and developing and implementing policies and procedures for the periodic assessment of the performance of bishops and the removal of bishops performing below established standards. Whether a bishop remains in office should be contingent upon his performance.

It is noteworthy that the Anglican Church in North America is reappraising its relationship with  GAFCON and the Global South Primates. The ACNA has never fully embraced the tenets of orthodoxy that the Jerusalem Declaration identifies as underpinning Anglican identity. An element in the ACNA seeks to take North American Anglicanism in an independent, more Catholic direction. Rather than follow the lead of the Global South, this element aspires to establish the ACNA in a position of leadership in relation to the Global South and to influence the direction of global Anglicanism.

As for Archbishop Duncan's claim that the Anglican Church in North America is promoting a unified, biblical, orthodox Anglicanism, it is spurious. The Anglicanism that the ACNA promotes is not biblical or orthodox by the standards of the historic Anglican formularies or the Jerusalem Declaration. How Archbishop Duncan can claim it unites beggars the imagination.