Introducing the ACNA’s High Church Party

How the Anglican Church in North America Is Creating Obstacles to Its Own Growth – Part 3

By Robin G. Jordan

The typical Anglican Province has a Provincial Assembly or its equivalent which plays a significant role in the governance of the province. This body is made up of the bishops of the province and clergy and lay delegates from its dioceses. Among its usual functions are to amend the constitution of the province, make canons for the province, create new dioceses and missionary districts, approve the budget of the province, elect a Provincial Council or its equivalent, give directives to the Provincial Council and oversee its work. It may be recognized in the constitution of the province as the supreme authority of the province. Its functions may include the election of the metropolitan of the province if the province has a metropolitan. 

The Provincial Council or its equivalent typically carries on the work of the Provincial Assembly or its equivalent between its meetings and makes recommendations to the Provincial Assembly or its equivalent. It implements the budget of the province and coordinates the work of the province’s administrative organs. It cannot, however, amend the constitution or make canons. It is accountable to the Provincial Assembly or its equivalent, which can review its decisions and modify or reverse them.

The exact power-sharing arrangement between the Provincial Assembly or its equivalent, the Provincial Council or its equivalent, and the College of Bishops or its equivalent varies from province to province.

This description of the form of government in the typical Anglican Province is a reasonably accurate one. It shows that this form of government is essentially synodical, not prelatical as in the Roman Catholic Church.

The Anglican Church in North America departs from this model. Its form of government is closer to that of the Roman Catholic Church.

The ACNA has a Provincial Assembly but its powers are negligible. Under the provisions of the provincial constitution the Assembly is empowered to ratify changes to the constitutions and canons and to make recommendations. This is the extent of its role in the governance of the province-in-formation.

The Assembly cannot modify the constitutional and canonical changes submitted to it for approval. The Assembly can only accept proposed changes adopted by the Provincial Council or reject them and send them back to the Council. It is a process reminiscent of the legislative process in number of former European colonies in Africa in the days leading to independence.

The Assembly’s advisory function is limited by the lack of a mechanism to appoint commissions, committees, or task forces to investigate or study matters of concern to the delegates to the Assembly and to report their findings to the Assembly with their recommendations.

The Archbishop or his designee is the presiding officer of the Assembly. This enables whatever faction or party to which the Archbishop or his designee belongs to set the agenda for the meetings of the Assembly and to control what happens at these meetings.

The ACNA’s most recent Provincial Assembly lasted four days. An hour and a half late on a Friday afternoon was devoted to the Provincial Assembly Delegates Meeting. For most of the four-day Assembly the delegates’ time was occupied by bible studies, eucharists, speakers, and breakout groups. In this hour and a half the delegates were expected to propose recommendations, consider their merits, and make decisions about them, as well as to weigh the proposed constitutional and canonical changes presented to them for ratification and to approve or reject them.

In allotting such a brief span of time to the meeting, it is quite evident that ACNA leaders had no intention of permitting the delegates to do anything more than formalize what they themselves had already decided upon. To my knowledge the delegates have not to date rejected anything presented to them for ratification.

The Provincial Assembly is modeled upon the annual Winter Conference, a non-deliberative assembly of the Anglican Mission in America. It also bears resemblance to the consultative assemblies that the Pope, archbishops, and bishops of the Roman Catholic Church convene from time to time. The delegates to these assemblies are appointed not elected and are largely clergy and religious. These assemblies have no power to legislate unless this power is specifically granted to them and then it is limited to legislating on specific matters. Any legislation adopted by these assemblies must be approved by the authority that convened the assembly.

The official governing body of the Anglican Church in North America is its Provincial Council. The Council consists of a bishop, a clergy representative, and two lay representatives from each diocese. The term of office of Council members representing dioceses is five years. Council members serve staggered terms and are re-eligible for appointment or election to a second five year term. They may not serve more than two terms in a row. This includes bishops. The provincial canons make no special provisions for bishops who are the only bishop in their diocese—an oversight that has never been corrected. They must step down after two five-year terms on the Council.

The staggering of terms prevents any sweeping change in the membership of the Council and precludes any possibility of the Council’s introducing meaningful reform. It enables one faction or party to dominate the Council.

The Council may also co-op six additional members. This permits any faction or party dominating the Council to strengthen its hold on the Council. It can also permit the tipping of the balance between the number of clergy and the number of lay persons in the Council. Considering the proportion of lay persons to clergy in the denomination, one would expect the Council to reflect that proportion.

Individual members of the Provincial Council may not draft proposals for changes in the constitution and canons and submit them to the Council. The drafting of such proposals is the special responsibility of the Governance Task Force, a panel of so-called “experts,” the bishops, other clergy and lay persons that make up this task force. How this task force is selected and how often its members are rotated is not detailed in the provincial canons.

From what I gather the drafting of these proposals involves frequent consultation with the Archbishop and other members of the College of Bishops. Several members of the College of Bishops, as I have already noted, serve on the task force. They presently include former Archbishop Duncan. While the Governance Task Force may formally present a proposal, the idea for the proposal has in all likelihood originated with the Archbishop or one of the other bishops.

In addition to drafting proposed changes to the provincial constitution and canons, the Governance Task Force has prepared a model diocesan constitution and a set of model diocesan canons. These documents combine provisions taken from one or more governing documents of dioceses of the Episcopal Church with provisions peculiar to the Anglican Church in North America. What is notable about these model diocesan governing documents is that whoever prepared them grossly misinterprets the provincial constitution, applying to the judicatories of the ACNA provisions that clearly and undisputedly apply to the denomination. If a diocese-in-formation adopts the same model diocesan governing documents without any changes, it would surrender a number of its reserved or residual powers to the denomination. In the event the see fell vacant, they would permit the College of Bishops to appoint at the request of the standing committee an acting bishop to be in charge of the diocese until a bishop can be elected. (The Diocese of Western Anglicans does not have this provision in its diocesan constitution.) They would require the standing committee of the diocese to obtain the permission of the Archbishop before it could declare the see to be vacant in the event of the prolonged absence or incapacity of the diocesan bishop. They would also permit the Archbishop to intervene in “the relationship between a vestry and a congregation.” In the last two cases the relinquishment of these powers to the denomination represents a significant loss of diocesan autonomy.

The Governance Task Force has also sent representatives to advise constitutive bodies drafting the constitution and canons for a diocese-in-formation. The provincial canons relating to the form of government of dioceses in the Anglican Church in North America anticipate the imposition of greater uniformity upon the provisions of governing documents of the dioceses at a future date. Representatives of the Governance Task Force taking part in meetings of constitutive bodies developing governing documents for dioceses-in-formation have consistently discouraged the inclusion of provisions placing term limits on bishops (i.e. mandatory retirement ages, specific terms of office), telling these bodies that the Provincial Council would not approve governing documents containing such provisions. This does not appear to be motivated by a desire for greater uniformity of the provisions of dioceses’ governing documents so much as adherence to a particular view of the role of bishops and episcopacy.  It points the Governance Task Force being a major locus of influence of the High Church party in the ACNA.

Discernible in the proposals that the Governance Task Force has drafted to date, including the proposed constitution and set of canons that the Common Cause Governance Task Force, the predecessor of the present Governance Task Force, drafted, is the influence of a particular special interest group in the Anglican Church in North America. This special interest group appears to be motivated by the desire to control the legislative process and have that process serve its purposes. It is elitist in its outlook and evidences a basic distrust of the laity as a whole. It appears to be willing to trust only select individuals, those whom in its estimation qualify as “experts” or support its vision and goals for the ACNA or are sympathetic toward them.

The members of this special interest group may be described as the High Church party due to their particular views of the role of bishops and episcopacy. They are prelatical in their understanding of episcopacy. They appear to subscribe to modern-day version of the Caroline High Churchmen’s doctrine of the divine right of bishops, a doctrine that was a major cause of controversy in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and which divides Anglicans to this day. (The English Reformers did not find any mandate for episcopacy or any other form of church government in the Bible.) They also appear to have been strongly influenced by Roman Catholic views of ecclesiology, episcopacy, and apostolic succession.

Some members of this special interest group are traditionalist Anglo-Catholics; others came to their conclusions by a different route. Bishop Keith Ackerman may be expressing one of the views of this special interest group when he describes bishops as the governors of the Church.

Former Archbishop Robert Duncan is himself a member of this special interest group. Duncan has advocated what he describes as “regression.” When faced with a crisis like the one the Episcopal Church’s election and consecration of an openly gay bishop precipitated, Duncan maintains that an appropriate response is to return an earlier stage in the life of the Church, to revert to older and more authoritarian ways of doing things. This appears to include a reversion to the practices of unfettered episcopacy, to the ways that the lordly prelates of the Medieval Catholic Church had ruled their provinces or dioceses. These pre-Reformation archbishops and bishops had governed their sees in the manner of the feudal lords that they were.

In his Opening Address to the Inaugural Provincial Assembly in 2009, then Archbishop-Elect Duncan revealed his impatience with the synodical form of church government and his own preference for a more authoritarian form of ecclesiastical governance. In an earlier statement in support of the proposed constitution and canons Bishop John Rodgers, then a senior bishop of the Anglican Mission in America but now an assistant bishop of Duncan’s own diocese, had expressed similar impatience with how deliberative church assemblies conducted their business, in particular the length of time they took in weighing the merits of various courses of action, and how undesirable proposals might find their way to the floor and be adopted and desirable proposals might be watered down and even killed.

When people came forward greet him at one of the services at the Inaugural Provincial Assembly in Bedford, Texas in 2009, Archbishop –Elect Duncan extended his hand for people to kiss his archiepiscopal ring. Visible delight was on his face. Duncan’s behavior was very revealing into how he saw his new office.

Kissing a bishop’s ring is a Roman Catholic practice. In the Roman Catholic Church laypersons and inferior clergy are by custom obligated to kiss the bishop’s hand, that is, his episcopal ring. Roman Catholics at one time believed that an indulgence of 50 days resulted from this act. Some Roman Catholics still claim that if the ring is viewed as an object of piety, an indulgence may be received since kissing an object of piety carries a partial indulgence. The reformed Church of England rejected whole idea of indulgences “as repugnant to Scripture.”

Duncan’s subsequent creation of an Archbishop’s Cabinet, an administrative organ that is typically found in Roman Catholic archdioceses and for which the constitution and canons make no provision points to the strong influence of Roman Catholic ideas upon his thinking.

During his term of office as Archbishop Duncan displayed a flagrant disregard for constitutionalism and the rule of law and made a number of appointments that he had no authority to make under the provisions of the constitution and canons. He would appoint a longtime friend, Bishop Don Harvey, as Dean of the province. The Governance Task Force would subsequently propose canonical changes regularizing this appointment. His last appointment was to give the position of vicar-general of the Diocese of Western Anglicans to Bishop Frank Lyons, another assistant bishop of his own diocese. The provincial constitutions and canons contain no provisions authorizing the Archbishop to take over a vacant see in the event of the prolonged absence, death, incapacity, or incarceration of its ordinary and to appoint a vicar-general for that see. The canons do, however, recognize the standing committee of a diocese as its ecclesiastical authority in the event the see falls vacant.  The constitution and canons of the Diocese of Western Anglicans contains no provisions giving authority to appoint a vicar-general to the Archbishop in the event the see falls vacant nor do they contain any provision authorizing the diocese's standing committee to request such an appointment. Under the provisions of the provincial constitution a diocese retains all powers that are not prohibited to it by the constitution and which it has not relinquished to the province.

None of these appointments are justifiable on the grounds that a particular set of circumstances necessitated the appointment. The College of Bishops could have elected a Bishop for Special Missions to assist the Archbishop in his duties and responsibilities. This would, however, entailed the College of Bishops choosing Duncan’s assistant, not himself. The College of Bishops could have held a special meeting for the purpose of electing a new Archbishop and then elected a new bishop for the Diocese of Western Anglicans at its regular meeting. Under the provisions of the governing documents of the Diocese of Western Anglicans, its House of Delegates could have elected a bishop and submitted the name of the bishop-elect to the College of Bishops for confirmation. The proposed change to the provincial canons requiring a diocese to obtain the permission of the College of Bishops in order to elect a bishop, if it was adopted by the Provincial Council and ratified by the Provincial Assembly, is not yet in force.

These appointments were more than a quick and easy way to solve a problem. They suggest that Duncan views the office of Archbishop as possessing broad reserve or discretionary powers, a view of the archiepiscopal office that is not recognized by the provincial constitution and canons. They also suggest that members of the College of Bishops, the Governance Task Force, and the Provincial Council share this view. Like Duncan, these individuals do not appear to value constitutionalism and the rule of law.

One also cannot rule out the very likely possibility that former Archbishop Duncan was expecting the Diocese of Western Anglicans to defray the expense of Bishop Lyon’s rather hefty compensation package and even hoping that the Diocese of Western Anglicans might nominate him as the sole candidate for the office of bishop of that diocese. This might especially be the case if Duncan and the other members of the College of Bishops did not like the candidates for the office of bishop that the diocese had nominated and were faced with a difficult task of choosing between them and the prospect of rejecting of the whole slate of candidates.

In the next article in this series we will complete our examination of the form of church government in the Anglican Church of North America and how it operates and look at how this particular form of church government and its way of operating is creating obstacles to the expansion of the province-in-formation’s population base and its maintenance of healthy, long-term growth.

See also

"But Are They Bible Christians?"

How the Anglican Church in North America Is Creating Obstacles to Its Own Growth - Part 1