What does the future hold in store for the Anglican Church in North America?

By Robin G. Jordan

Joel Wilhelm who blogs at A Living Text in a post on his blog drew my attention to Andrew Atherstone’s review of the Nairobi Conference. It contains these observations:

Theological tensions were further exposed in a seminar on the complementary charisms of catholicism and evangelicalism by Gavin Ashenden (former chaplain of Sussex University, trained at both Oak Hill and Heythrop), an entertaining but provocative speaker whose comments demonstrated the chasm between the two movements. This is one of the biggest dilemmas for GAFCON – although overwhelming evangelical, how serious is it about bringing Catholic Anglicans on board? The North American contingent, in particular, is largely catholic, since so many evangelicals left the Episcopal Church in the nineteenth century. The Nairobi communiqué welcomes ‘all our different traditions’ (misleadingly caricatured as Evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, and Charismatics) as all committed to ‘a renewed Anglican orthodoxy’. But what does this mean in practice? Is it just a temporary alliance, co-belligerence against the common enemy of radical liberalism, or something more? The Jerusalem Declaration of 2008 famously affirms ‘justification by faith’ (as did the Council of Trent) but not ‘justification by faith alone’. Some Anglo-Catholics at Nairobi were unhappy that the public worship was not more catholic in flavour; but they admitted there are only two viable options as they face an insecure future, GAFCON or the Ordinariate.

Atherstone was part of the UK delegation to GAFCON 2, representing the Latimer Trust, an Anglican evangelical research institute, www.latimertrust.org.

Atherstone acknowledges publicly what one evangelical leader admitted to me privately after the Jerusalem Conference. The particular make-up of the Anglican Mission in America and the Common Cause Partnership presented a variety of problems.

Bishop of Fort Worth Jack Iker was one of the Anglo-Catholics who was not happy with the worship at the Nairobi Conference. He complained that the conference did not have daily morning prayer services and daily Eucharists.

Iker was not happy with the outcome of the Jerusalem Conference—the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration. He assured Anglo-Catholics that the Common Cause Theological Statement would guide the faith and life of the new Anglican province in North America, not the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration.

The Common Cause Theological Statement regards bishops as essential to the existence of the Church, an ecclesiological position over which Anglicans historically have been divided. The Common Cause Theological Statement recognizes two Anglican formularies—the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the 1661 Ordinal—as “a standard of Anglican doctrine and discipline” with the implication that other doctrinal and disciplinary standards exist. It recognizes 1662 Prayer Book, “with the Books that precedes it, as the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship.” Among the books that precede the 1662 Prayer Book are the unreformed Sarum Missal, the partially reformed 1549 Prayer Book, and the retrograde 1637 Scottish Prayer Book. The Common Cause Theological Statement equivocates in its acceptance of the authority of Anglicanism’s confession of faith—the Thirty-Nine Articles.

The Anglican Church in North America would adopt the Common Cause Theological Statement as the ACNA’s Fundamental Declarations and would relegate its affirmation of the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration to the preamble of its constitution where it is purely incidental to the narrative describing the establishment of the ACNA. At the first Provincial Council meeting the Anglo-Catholics threatened to withdraw from the alliance of conservative entities that established the ACNA if the language of the proposed Fundamental Declarations was changed. They would only agree to one correction.

The inaugural Provincial Assembly was carefully orchestrated and debate kept to a minimum. Archbishop Robert Duncan repeatedly interrupted the proceedings to tell the delegates that speakers were waiting to address them. The proposed constitution and canons would have been ratified by acclamation but for some last minute amendments that the Governance Task Force stressed were needed.

The ACNA constitution makes the Provincial Council the governing body of the province. However, the College of Bishops is actually running the show. The College of Bishops has not only usurped the authority of the Provincial Council in the governance of the province but has also arrogated to itself powers that the constitution does not give to the College or recognize the College as having. The College of Bishops is dominated by Anglo-Catholics.

Joel also in the same post drew my attention to an observation that Lee Gatiss makes in his review of the Nairobi Conference:

As for GAFCON, it contains its own fault lines and failures. The place of Anglo-Catholics within the broader movement may prove in the future to be problematic (and I spent many hours trying to negotiate some of this territory, with some friendly Anglo-Catholics who were kind enough to give me a great deal of their time). Some delegates expressed concern that justification by faith alone was not asserted clearly and unambiguously, and one senior Archbishop admitted that our fellowship may not be entirely gospel-focused, yet.

Lee Gatiss is the director of the Church Society. The Church Society was one of the first organizations to draw attention to the fact that the Jerusalem Conference in the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration did not clearly and unambiguously affirm the New Testament and Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone in Christ alone in its document. It is the gospel of justification by faith alone in Christ alone that Anglicanism’s confession of faith, the Thirty-Nine Articles, was intended to preserve.

Gatiss reports that at least one senior Archbishop acknowledged that the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans is not entirely focused on the gospel. In a number of articles I have pointed to my readers’ attention that this is a major challenge facing the Anglican Church in North America. Only a small number of congregations and clergy in the ACNA are gospel-centered. The strong influence of Anglo-Catholicism in a variety of forms is a major contributing factor to this lack of focus on the gospel. However, it is not the only contributing factor.

The ACNA is made up of a substantial number of congregations and clergy that were originally part of the Episcopal Church. These congregations and clergy do not have the furtherance of the gospel in their DNA. Indeed they do not even have a clear idea of what the gospel is. The focus in the Episcopal Church, even in liberal churches, is on the weekly celebration of the Eucharist. The weekly eucharistic celebration is also the focus of many ACNA parishes and missions. A sacrament has replaced or supplanted the gospel. In churches that are gospel-centered the service of the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion is seen as making the gospel visible in the meal celebrated to commemorate everything Christ did for us on the cross and to quicken, strengthen, and confirm our faith in Him. This is not the understanding of the Eucharist in those churches where the weekly eucharistic celebration is the focus.

The ordinal and the eucharistic rites that ACNA College of Bishops has endorsed shift the focus even more on the sacrament and further away from the gospel. Where the sacrament is the focus, the likelihood that “a different gospel” (not the gospel of the New Testament, of justification by faith alone in Christ alone) is preached and taught is quite high. In The Way, the Truth, and the Life: Theological Resources for a Pilgrimage to a Global Anglican Future Anglo-Catholicism is identified along with liberalism as one of two major challenges to the authority of the Bible and the Anglican formularies in our time (p. 32). It is a serious challenge. It is not something that can be taken lightly or dismissed altogether. People’s souls are stake.

When I read Douglas Bess’ book, Divided We Stand: A History of the Continuing Anglican Movement, I was struck by the similarities between the Anglican Church in North America and the Continuing Anglican Movement. Conflicts over theology, governance, and leadership followed closely upon the heels of the 1977 meeting in St. Louis, Missouri. The first Anglican Church in North America would split apart even before its constitution was ratified. The Anglo-Catholic bishops and Anglo-Catholic doctrine, order, and practice would emerge the victors. The victory, however, was Pyrrhic. The result today is a fractured movement, feuding bishops, numerous tiny jurisdictions, and very sick and dying churches.

Churches that are not centered on the gospel and which do not plant churches centered on the gospel eventually disappear as the segment of the population from which their membership originally came disappears. This is what has happened to the Continuum. This is also the story of the Roman Catholic Church in areas in which the Roman Catholic population is declining. Parish churches and parochial schools are being closed and the property sold off.

Churches that are not gospel-centered grow only as long as the population segments forming their traditional constituencies grow. If these population segments cease to grow or, as what has happened in recent years, come to regard church attendance as irrelevant to their lives, such churches are in serious trouble. They plateau and then decline.

I generally do not make prognostications about the future of ecclesiastical organizations. However, under its present College of Bishops, dominated by Anglo-Catholics, the Anglican Church in North America, I am convinced, is following in the footsteps of the Continuum. Unless the new churches that the ACNA is planting are centered on the gospel and the churches they in turn plant are gospel-centered, the ACNA will shrivel up and die as the Continuum is in the process of doing.

This is one of the reasons that the provisional ACNA ordinal and the trial ACNA eucharistic rites should be withdrawn, the daily office rites evaluated and modified, and the Liturgy and Common Worship Task Force replaced. It is not the only reason but it is a very important reason. Dioceses and networks in the Anglican Church in North America should also give consideration to evaluating their present bishop(s) as to how much they are actually serving the cause of the gospel in their judicatory, calling for their early retirement in the event they are not truly serving the gospel, (and, if necessary, removing them), and replacing them with men who are genuinely committed to the furtherance of the gospel. These measures seem to be drastic but unless they are taken, the ACNA cannot hope to have a bright future. Indeed the ACNA cannot hope to have a future at all.