The Challenges Facing the Anglican Church in North America

By Robin G. Jordan

In the concluding paragraph of his article, “Anglicans Adrift: Back to Our Constitution,” Roger Salter gives a fairly accurate description of the present state of the Anglican Church in North America:

Unless Anglicanism diligently returns to its roots it will flounder and fail. It is a sorry and confused specimen at the present. We do not stand in need of the flummery of excessive ritual, clericalism, and "dressed up to the nines" bishops and their colorfully robed minions congregating around tables falsely called altars. Our dire need is for men of the Word and the historic faith who will administer the sacraments, ordinances, means of grace in a Scriptural and simple way, sharing humbly in the journey of the saints. Sacramentalism supplies an idolatry in rivalry to Christ. The Mass of Roman or Anglo-Catholicism supplants him, and reverencing "altar" and elements is to turn from God in Christ as surely as Israel committed idolatry with the brazen serpent. Episcopacy is the least needed accoutrement of Anglicanism - valued but not vital to its existence. The Gospel is the one thing essential and to that we should return with a will.

Salter does not mention the Anglican Church in North America by name. But the description he gives fits the ACNA.

What the North American mission field needed was a new Anglican province with a heart for the lost and a passion for the gospel. Instead it got the Anglican Church in North America.

When I read Ed Stetzer’s article, “Do Your Kids Know the Gospel?” I thought to myself how many kids in ACNA churches can answer questions like the ones Stetzer lists in his article:

·        What is sin?
·        Who is Jesus?
·        What did Jesus do?
·        Why do you and I need Jesus to save us?
·        How do we receive the salvation that Jesus offers?

How many ACNA churches are clearly and consistently communicating the good news of Jesus to the children in their congregations? How many ACNA churches are intentionally discipling them?

One of the reasons that more and more young people are joining the ranks of the Nones is that environments were not created in their churches in which they heard the good news of Jesus and in which they were invited to trust in him and his death on the cross for their salvation. They were not intentionally discipled.

This was a major problem in the Episcopal Church. I suspect that it is a major problem in the Anglican Church in North America too. The bulk of ACNA congregations and clergy come from the Episcopal Church. They brought many defective ways of thinking and doing things with them from the Episcopal Church.

With the emphasis that ACNA church websites place on the sacraments, it is reasonable to conclude that what children in ACNA churches are being taught is not the Bible story but some form of sacramentalism. The sacramental emphases of the ACNA’s “theological lens,” its ordinal, and Texts for Common Prayer reinforce this impression.

A major shortcoming of the Continuing Anglican Churches is that the sacraments have been emphasized to the neglect of the gospel. The teaching of a number of Continuing Anglican Churches differs very little from that of the Roman Catholic Church. These Continuing Anglican Churches have not produced new disciples and new churches. What they have produced is more and more bishops. The Anglican Church in North America appears to be heading in the same direction.

As the base of support of these Continuing Anglican Churches has dwindled so have the Churches themselves. The number of North Americans who are attracted to sacramental worship using the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican Missal, and the Sarum Missal has been steadily declining as ill-health and death takes its toll.

What is alarming is that the ACNA’s liturgical commission has adopted elements from all three service books into its eucharistic rites in Texts for Common Prayer and with these elements the sacramentalism and sacerdotalism of the Roman Catholic Church. The influence of this sacramentalism and sacerdotalism is discernible in the ordinal the liturgical commission produced and the College of Bishops approved. The Anglican Church in North America is making no effort to recover the gospel-centered worship of the 1552 and 1662 Prayer Books and to supplement it with new patterns of worship that are also gospel-focused. Its ordinal dilutes the emphasis of the 1662 Ordinal on the ministry of deacon, presbyter, and bishop as first and foremost that of ministers of the gospel.

As Damian Thompson points out in his article, “Lots of atheists, more Muslims, fewer Christians and Jews: this is the new America,” America is secularizing just like Europe. Churches in the United States and Canada are faced with the same challenge. They can be expected to respond in one of two different ways. One response is to face the reality of a changing world and to focus on the essentials—carrying out the Great Commission and living the Great Commandment. The other response is to pretend that the world is not changing and to carry on “doing church” the way it was done in the past. This may not be the way “doing church” was actually done at a particular time but how it is imagined to have been done. The Anglican Church in North America appears to be doing the latter.  Rather than engaging and reaching lost people, the ACNA is focusing upon churchgoers to whom this particular way of “doing church” may appeal.

At the opening of the Decade of Evangelism in the Episcopal Church in the closing decade of the twentieth century Morehouse Publishing published a book titled Leading Christians to Christ: Evangelizing the Church and written by Rob Smith, then mission development priest at Church of the Apostles, Coppell, Texas. Smith’s central proposition was that people were drawn to the Episcopal Church by its tradition and ambience.  Those drawn to the Episcopal Church in this way were resistant to the proclamation of a gospel that calls them to a personal faith. Among the consequences was that the centrality of Jesus was questioned. Smith believed that the Episcopal Church’s ambience had validity as an evangelistic tool. Using the rites of the church Episcopal clergy could help those drawn to the Episcopal Church in this way make the transition from nominalism to a personal relationship with Christ.

This approach to evangelizing the church will only work if the clergy themselves see the need for conversion and personal faith and the rites of the church are Scriptural in content and doctrine and embody an evangelistic spirit. See the Preface to Samuel Leuenberger’s Archbishop Cranmer’s Immortal Bequest: The Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England: An Evangelistic Liturgy.

The approach has its drawbacks. The practices that helped to create the ambience of the Episcopal Church in the closing decades of the twentieth century were not theologically-neutral. They were associated with doctrines that did not support the need for conversion and personal faith.

Smith lists a number of objections to the need for conversion and personal faith that Episcopalians typically raised at the time of the publication of his book. From a historical perspective these objections can be traced to a number of developments in the Episcopal Church. One development was the strong opposition in the fledgling province to the adoption of historic Anglicanism’s confession of faith—the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. The Episcopal Church’s General Convention would adopt a revision of the Articles in 1801 but would not require Episcopal clergy to subscribe to their doctrine.

A second development was the emergence of a High Church party in the Episcopal Church during the very earliest stages of its formation. Among the doctrinal peculiarities of the High Church party was its interpretation of the Prayer Book as teaching baptismal regeneration. It also took a sacramental view of confirmation. Even Evangelical Episcopalians would come to view confirmation as being an “apostolic ordinance” in contrast to the Articles which view confirmation as having “developed from a false understanding of apostolic practice.” Archbishop Cranmer, like Calvin, saw the value of confirmation as a catechetical rite and retained it in the Book of Common Prayer.

A third development was the negative reaction to nineteenth century revivalism in the Episcopal Church. This would influence Episcopal perceptions of evangelical churches and would lead to the formation of deep-seated prejudices against their beliefs and practices. This would in turn lead to the rejection of certain evangelistic methodologies due to their association with evangelical churches and eventually to the rejection of evangelism altogether in some quarters of the Episcopal Church.

A fourth development was the strong influence of the Anglo-Catholic and Broad Church movements upon the thinking of Episcopalians in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth century. The spread of ritualism and unreformed Catholic theology in the Episcopal Church, the General Convention’s rejection of their proposals for revision of the Prayer Book, and its hostility toward their association with evangelicals outside of the Episcopal Church would lead to the secession of the denomination’s conservative evangelicals in 1873 and the subsequent formation of the Reformed Episcopal Church. With their departure the Episcopal Church would move even further in the direction of developing an anti-evangelical and ultimately anti-evangelistic identity. Evangelicalism and evangelism would become strongly associated with each other in Episcopal thought.

While the Anglican Church in North America and the Episcopal Church may not acknowledge it, the ACNA is an offshoot of the Episcopal Church. The ACNA uses the Episcopal Church’s 1928 and 1979 Prayer Books and its 1982 Hymnal. The thinking in the ACNA is essentially the thinking in the Episcopal Church up to the time the more radical forms of liberalism came to dominate Episcopal thought. Members of the ACNA do not describe themselves as having left the Episcopal Church. Rather they describe the Episcopal Church as having left them. They see themselves as representing historic thinking in the Episcopal Church and see liberal Episcopalians as having departed from that thinking.

The developments underlying the objections to the need for conversion and personal faith in the Episcopal Church in 1990 are also developments affecting the Anglican Church in North America. Similar objections to this need can be heard in the ACNA in 2013.

The tradition and ambience of the Episcopal Church, in its traditionalist Anglo-Catholic and charismatic ACNA forms, is what a number of ACNA leaders are relying upon to draw people to ACNA churches.  As we have previously noted, people drawn to the Episcopal Church in this way were resistant to the proclamation of a gospel that calls them to a personal faith. The developments that have shaped the Episcopal Church also have shaped the ACNA. Indeed the Anglican Church in North America can be described as the Episcopal Church at a particular stage in its history with full rein given to a number of developments that were for one reason or another kept in check in the Episcopal Church.

The Anglican Church in North America in 2013, however, does not afford opportunity for the unhampered proclamation of the gospel any more than the Episcopal Church in 1990. The same dynamics that were at work in the Episcopal Church then are at work in the ACNA today. Indeed these dynamics may have become more pronounced in their operation due to the theological direction that the ACNA is taking, moving away from historic Anglicanism and toward Roman Catholicism.

Reliance upon a particular tradition and ambience to draw people to a church when those drawn by this tradition and ambience are resistant to the gospel’s call to conversion and personal faith does not serve the gospel. Indeed it undercuts the gospel.

Churches meeting in rented facilities and other non-traditional worship settings also are not very successful in replicating the ambience of the Episcopal Church. When I was an Episcopal lay reader in a storefront mission church in the 1980s an elderly woman explained to me why she had decided to attend my former parish church. She missed the candles, the flowers, the kneelers, the pews, and the organ. She needed them to worship God. They made her feel like she was in a real church.

What draws some people to a church repels others. Rather than eliminating or reducing cultural barriers to the gospel, churches that rely upon a particular tradition and ambience to draw people to them are raising and strengthening the cultural barriers the unchurched must cross to hear the good news of Jesus. This is assuming that if they cross these barriers, they are going to hear the gospel. The implication of what has been discussed so far is that such churches may be substituting a particular ecclesiastical culture for the gospel. They are not proclaiming the good news of Jesus but promoting their own way of “doing church.”

A particular tradition and ambience may appeal to only a tiny segment of the population. If a denomination is genuinely committed to fulfilling the Great Commission and engaging and reaching lost people, it should not allow such a tradition and ambience to dominate the worship of its churches. The designing of its worship resources should not be entrusted to those whose primary interest is not serving the gospel but promoting this tradition and ambience. Unfortunately this is what has happened in the Anglican Church in North America: the designing of its worship resources has been placed into the hands of those intent upon promoting a particular tradition and ambience.

These are just a few of the major challenges facing the Anglican Church in North America. Can you think of any others?