The Unmaking of the Classical Anglican Prayer Book

How the Anglican Church in North America Is Creating Obstacles to Its Own Growth - Part 7

By Robin G. Jordan

For those who are not familiar with the history of the Book of Common Prayer, the classical Anglican Prayer Book is not the 1549 Prayer Book, the 1928 American Prayer Book, or the 1959 Canadian Prayer Book. It is the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, which is essential Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s reformed Anglican liturgy of 1552. This liturgy would live on to become the Elizabethan Prayer Book of 1559, the Stuart Prayer Book of 1604, and eventually the Restoration Prayer Book of 1662. It is this Prayer Book along with the Articles of Religion of 1571 and the Ordinal of 1661, which constitute the doctrinal standard of reformed Anglicanism.

In our examination of the growth barriers that the Anglican Church in North America is imposing upon itself, its judicatories, and its local congregations, we have so far looked at four main areas where the ACNA is erecting these barriers—doctrine, governance, clergy, and discipline. In the seventh and eighth articles in the series we are going to take a look at the fifth main area—worship. In this article we will examine the process that has so far been used to date to develop rites and services for use in ACNA churches. We will look at how the process itself and the doctrinal content of the rites and services developed through this process contribute to the erection of growth barriers.

During the Common Cause Partnership phase of the Anglican Church in North America a Prayer Book and Common Liturgy Task Force was established to develop rites and services for the new denomination and ultimately its own Book of Common Prayer. Under the provisions of Canon I.4 this task force was continued as a committee of the ACNA “until further action of the [Provincial] Council, which shall have authority to end or alter the same and to appoint such other committees and task forces as deemed necessary.”

The composition of the task force has changed over the past five years. Among the notable changes is that theologian J. I. Packer left the task force due to apparent health reasons.

An examination of the task force’s initial report, the so-called ACNA “theological lens,” and the rites and services that it has drafted to date suggests that Packer’s views did not carry any weight with the task force. He exercised little if any influence upon its decisions.

The 2014 members  roster of the Prayer Book and Common Liturgy Task Force consists of two ACNA bishops—William Thompson and Keith Ackerman—and five members of the ACNA clergy-- Darrell Critch, Eric Dudley, Chip Edgar, Martha Giltinan, and Arnold Klukas.

William “Bill” Thompson is the retired Bishop of the Diocese of Western Anglicans and the longtime chairman of the task force. My Google search produced only references to a four-decade long pastorate at All Saints Anglican Church in Long Beach, California and the announcement of his retirement due to ill-health. His chief qualification for the job of chairman appears to be his dedication to the task of producing a liturgy and Prayer Book for the Anglican Church in North America. Another qualification at least from the perspective of the College of Bishops may be his willingness to consult his fellow bishops and not to strike out on his own.

Keith Ackerman is the retired Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy and the current Bishop Vicar of the Diocese of Quincy (Southern Cone). He is currently serving as interim vicar of St. Timothy's Anglo-Catholic Church in Ft. Worth, Texas, and assisting Ft. Worth’s Bishop and fellow Anglo-Catholic Jack Iker in his episcopal duties. Ackerman is the current president of Forward in Faith North America, a leading Anglo-Catholic, and a fervent advocate for “Catholic doctrine, order, and practice.” He holds a master of divinity and a doctorate of divinity from Nashotah House, an Episcopal theological seminary historically associated with the Anglo-Catholic Movement.

Darrel Critch is the Rector of the Church of the Good Samaritan in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada; the Director of the Anglican Network in Canada; a member of its Council; and its Territorial Archdeacon of Eastern Canada. He holds a master of divinity from Nashotah House. 

Eric Dudley is a former Episcopal priest. In an interview with PBS’s Kim Lawton in 2008 Dudley describes John Wesley as major influence upon his thinking and goes on to describe Anglicanism as a marriage between Protestantism and Catholicism. While he started St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Tallahassee, Florida in 2005, he did not start from scratch. He began the new church with 700 members of his former Episcopal parish and a group of 10 families purchased the International Church of Christ complex in Tallahassee for the use of the new church at the very outset. My Google search also produced references to the Ancient Future worship renewal movement, traditional worship, traditional music, and the video, “The Nuts and Bolts of Anglican Liturgy,” in association with the name of Eric Dudley.

Chip Edgar is also a former Episcopal priest. His theological education includes the School of Theology at the University of the South. This school, according to its own website, is associated with the High Church tradition in the Episcopal Church. He is a priest in PEAR-USA, a regional leader of its Southeast Network, and member of its Mission Council. He launched the Church of the Apostles in Columbia, South Carolina in 2004 with a core group of 75 people and a budget of $300,000. The Church of the Apostles uses the 1979 Prayer Book.  

Martha Giltinan is an Assistant Professor of Pastoral Theology at the Trinity School for Ministry. Among her speaking topics are worship and liturgy. My Google search produced two videos, “Using the Prayer Book at Home,” and “Worship.” She wrote “A Robust and Theological Ecclesiology” and “Art Review: Art and Theological Reflection in the Midst of Chaos.” She is credited with the new stained-glass windows at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Ayer, Massachusetts. She conducted a workshop, "Ars est celare artem – 'To conceal the art is the art,'" for the 2011 Anglican Worship conference. Giltinn was a speaker at the Ancient Evangelical Future Conference 2013. She was a workshop leader at the 2011 AMiA Winter Conference: Anglican Worship: A Conversation on Liturgy, Formation, Mission & Art.

Arnold Klukas is a former Episcopal priest with a doctorate in medieval architecture. This 2001 article, “Rector combines spirituality with his doctorate in medieval studies,” offers some insights into his liturgical views when he was an Episcopal priest.  He is presently a Professor of Liturgics and Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House. He wrote the preface to John Julian's Elements of Offering Principles, Practices and Pointers on Anglican Liturgy.

This is the panel of “experts” that has been assembled to provide the ACNA with a liturgy and a Prayer Book. It is dominated by clergy who are traditionalist Anglo-Catholics or came to similar opinions by a different route.

Conspicuously absent from the taskforce are any representatives of the following groups: (1) the laity, in particular lay people involved in pioneering new churches; (2) clergy and other gospel workers involved in planting new churches, especially those planting new churches from scratch; (3) experts in church planting, cross-cultural missions, evangelism, and missiology; and (4) conservative evangelical Anglican Christians particularly those “who desire to maintain the reformed, protestant and evangelical character of the Anglican Church” and who are committed to defending and advancing “the protestant and reformed principles of the Anglican Church based on Holy Scripture and as set out in the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles” (The preceding description was taken from the Anglican Church League’s statement of purpose and policy objectives. )

The Prayer Book and Common Liturgy Task Force appears to work in close consultation with the College of Bishops based upon its reports. No reference to consultation with other groups, except the churches selected for early trials of draft rites and services, is found in these reports.

Considering that biblical orthodoxy, church planting, evangelism, and a united denomination are supposed to be high on the ACNA’s list of priorities, one would have expected the impaneling of representatives of these four groups for the purpose of examining draft rites and services and recommending changes or even a complete redraft would be a major part of the process. This appears not to be the case and for that reason the process must be considered to be fundamentally flawed.

Canon II.2.1 states:

The Book of Common Prayer as set forth by the Church of England in 1662, together with the Ordinal attached to the same, are received as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline, and, with the Books which preceded it, as the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship. Until such time as a Book of Common Prayer for use in this Province has been adopted, all authorized Books of Common Prayer of the originating jurisdictions shall be permitted for use in this Church.

The provisions of this canon recognize the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as “a” doctrinal and disciplinary standard, thereby implying that other doctrinal and disciplinary standards exist and are worthy of ACNA recognition. One of these standards, it may be hazarded, is the standard of doctrine to which Tractarian John Henry Newman appealed in Tract 90, a standard which E. A Knox in his critique of Tract 90 describes as a standard that is not in existence but is an ideal that has to be discovered.

The provisions of Canon II.2.1 further recognize the 1662 Book of Common Prayer to be one of a number of books that form the standard of the Anglican worship tradition. This standard is a broad one: It includes all the books that preceded the 1662 Prayer Book. Among these books are the 1637 Scottish Prayer Book; the 1604, 1559, and 1552 family of Prayer Books to which the 1662 Prayer Book belongs; the 1549 Prayer Book; the Medieval Catholic Sarum Missal, and other pre-Reformation service books.

The ACNA Prayer Book and Common Liturgy Task Force has so far produced an Ordinal, trial services of Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Holy Communion, and proposed rites for the Admission of Catechumens, Baptism, and Confirmation. The ACNA College of Bishops has endorsed the Ordinal and the trial services of Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, and Holy Communion and is poised to endorse the proposed rites for the Admission of Catechumens, Baptism, and Confirmation.

The College of Bishops has claimed for itself final authority in the matter of the doctrine and worship of the denomination. However, the ACNA constitution does not grant final authority to the College of Bishops in these matters or recognize that authority as inherent in the episcopal college. It gives such authority to the Provincial Council, which it designates as the governing body of the ACNA and empowers to make canons for the ordering of the denomination (Article V). They include canons related to doctrine and worship.

The ACNA constitution envisions for the College of Bishops a much more limited role—propagating and defending the faith and order of the Church and serving as a visible sign and expression of its unity. This entails the preaching and teaching orthodox biblical Christianity and reformed Anglicanism from the pulpit and lecture platform and in publications and videos. It further entails ordaining and licensing clergy who subscribe to the beliefs and practices of orthodox Biblical Christianity and reformed Anglicanism and exercising reasonable oversight and discipline to ensure that the clergy whom they ordain and license uphold these beliefs and practices. It also entails leading the clergy and congregations within their jurisdiction in spreading the gospel, reaching and engaging the unchurched, forming them into Christians, and enfolding them into churches.

Only in so far they themselves uphold the beliefs and practices of orthodox Biblical Christianity and reformed Anglicanism can the ACNA bishops be viewed as serving as a visible sign and expression of church unity.

I am using the term “reformed Anglicanism” to distinguish authentic historic Anglicanism from unreformed Catholicism and to emphasize its reformed character. Anglicanism is reformed in its emphasis on the Bible, in its confession of faith—the Articles of Religion, in its vernacular worship, and in its recognition of the supremacy of the magistracy in the government of the Church.  

In the sixteenth century Swiss reformed churches the magistrates of the particular Swiss city-state exercised supreme authority over the Church within their jurisdiction with the pastors of the Church serving as their conscience. The exception was Geneva. In the reformed Church of England this supremacy took the form of the royal supremacy with the English monarch in the role of magistrate.

In the twenty-first century, in which Church and state are separated in almost all Anglican Provinces (the exception being the Church of England) a representative governing body of clergy and laity exercises supreme authority over the Church in place of the English monarch. This synodical form of church government is consistent with the reformed character of Anglicanism whereas the prelatical form of church government seen in the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches and associated with unreformed Catholicism is not.

Anglicanism is catholic in that it upholds the teaching of the three catholic Creeds and the first four Ecumenical Councils of the early church. It recognizes their teaching as having “provided a ‘rule of faith’ derived from Scripture.” In their examination of how Anglicanism is catholic in The Way, the Truth, and the Life: Theological Resources for a Global Anglican Future, the GAFCON Theological Resource Group makes this important point:

While honouring the Creeds, Anglican orthodoxy also upholds the substance of the Protestant confessions, recognizing that they contain key insights into the truth of the gospel. In particular, it offers the Articles of Religion as an abiding contribution to the wider Christian church, and claims them as normative for its members

I have avoided the term “reformed catholicism” since those who champion unreformed Catholicism in the ACNA have appropriated this term and apply it to a body of beliefs and practices that are far from reformed. Reformed Anglicanism has historically viewed a number of these beliefs and practices as innovations or corruptions and “contrary to God’s Word written” or “repugnant to the Word of God.”

In the role that the constitution envisions for the College of Bishops, the part the ACNA bishops would play in the issuance of doctrinal statements and the development of worship resources is advisory. The College of Bishops would critique drafts of these documents at their various stages and offer recommendations. Individual members of the episcopal college would participate in the drafting of such documents.

The College of Bishops is not envisioned as having a veto over the final product. The most it could do is withhold its endorsement of that document.

Under the provisions of the ACNA constitution the enactment of such a document in the form of a canon would be required to give it force of law and to make its acceptance compulsory. The ACNA constitution do not grant to the College of Bishops the power to issue decrees that are binding upon the denomination, its bishops, other clergy, and congregations. Nor do they recognize the College of Bishops as possessing this power by nature.

From the perspective of orthodox Biblical Christianity and reformed Anglicanism the College of Bishops has not shown itself capable of collectively fulfilling the limited role that the ACNA constitution envisions for it. The ACNA may have bishops who faithfully uphold the beliefs and practices of orthodox Biblical Christianity and reformed Anglicanism within the confines of their dioceses. However, ACNA’s episcopal college as a body has not evidenced any commitment to such beliefs and practices. Indeed it has taken steps to exclude them from the denomination.

The College of Bishops has endorsed To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism and Texts for Common Prayer. Both of these resources are unreformed Catholic in their doctrinal content. To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism permits the teaching of Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic doctrine in the ACNA. Texts for Common Prayer mandates or permits the use of unreformed Catholic practices in the ACNA. A number of its rites and ceremonies may be used to teach Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic doctrine in the denomination. Neither resource extends a similar license to the teaching of reformed Anglican doctrine or the use of reformed Anglican practices.

Some ACNA leaders may argue that the Anglican Church has moved on since the sixteenth century. Twenty-first century Anglicans are more broad-minded, enlightened, and tolerant than the architects of the English Reformation and the Elizabethan Settlement. Reformed Anglicanism and the classic formularies reflect the preoccupations of the sixteenth century English Church.

They may go as far as accusing reformed Anglicans as seeking to put the Anglican Church in a deep freezer and to keep the Church frozen in the sixteenth century. (They themselves are open to the accusation of seeking to return the Anglican Church to the superstition and error of the pre-Reformation Medieval Catholic Church.)

Interestingly Episcopalians championing liberalism make the same arguments. It shows that some leaders in the ACNA are not far removed in their views from their liberal counterparts in the Episcopal Church.

The acceptance or tolerance of the unreformed Catholicism of To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism and Texts for Common Prayer is the shibboleth that distinguishes those that the ACNA wishes to welcome from those that the denomination desires to turns away. Only folks who are willing to fully embrace unreformed Catholic beliefs and practices or to put up with these beliefs and practices and not push their own are received with pleasure. Members of the ACNA who are orthodox Biblical Christians and reformed Anglicans and who became a part of the ACNA before these barriers were erected are discovering that they are personae non gratae.

 While no formal steps have been taken to eject them, the College of Bishops’ endorsement of To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism and Texts for Common Prayer leave them with few options. In the case of the laity they can acquiesce to the unreformed Catholicism of these documents and in the case of clergy they can, like the Vicar of Bray, fundamentally change their principles to remain in ecclesiastical office as external requirements change around them. If, however, they are unwilling to abandon their convictions, their only remaining choices are to find another denomination or to form a denomination of their own.

Once these documents are given the force of law by canon and acceptance of the beliefs and practices that they sanction or countenance is made compulsory, clergy who are orthodox Biblical Christians and reformed Anglicans will no longer be able to openly share their convictions with others or practice what they believe. If they fail to conform to the unreformed Catholicism of the documents, they will be subject to disciplinary action under the provisions of Title IV of the ACNA canons, having signed the declaration required in Canons III.3.2, III.4.3, and III.8.5.

History is said to repeat itself. The Great Ejection that followed the adoption of the 1662 Act of Uniformity comes to mind. The Church of England lost some of its best and brightest ministers. They included Richard Baxter, Edmund Calamy the Elder, Simeon Ashe, Thomas Case, John Flavel, William Jenkyn, Joseph Caryl, Thomas Brooks, Thomas Manton, William Sclater, Thomas Doolittle and Thomas Watson.

Considering the general attitude of the College of Bishops, some bishops can be expect not to wait for the passage of a canon formally authorizing the use of To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism and Texts for Common Prayer or an expanded version of that service book and establishing their unreformed Catholicism as the official doctrine of the ACNA. In their minds the endorsement of the College of Bishops carries enough weight to vigorously push the use of these formularies (not be to confused with the classic Anglican formularies) and the acceptance of their doctrinal content in the churches under their jurisdiction. 

In failing to encourage the development of a more comprehensive liturgy and a more comprehensive Prayer Book, the College of Bishops is placing a ceiling on the growth of the Anglican Church in North America. The bishops are limiting the denomination’s population base to the segment of the general population that finds its unreformed Catholic doctrines and practices to be congenial. This population segment is not particular large. In some regions it is quite small.

If the College of Bishops is banking upon taking advantage of the penchant of some Millenials for liturgical or traditional churches, they need to consider the following pieces of information:

(1) Most of the Millenials who have not joined the nones and are attending a church are not attending a liturgical or traditional church. Missiologist Ed Stetzer’s research does not support the claim that large numbers of Millenials have been attracted to liturgical or traditional churches.

(2) As a generation known for checking the facts, Millenials are not going to accept the word of ACNA clergy and catechists regarding what the Bible teaches. They are going to check for themselves. They are also going to compare what the ACNA teaches with what other denominations teach.

Among Millenials who value orthodox Biblical Christianity, the ACNA is going to develop a reputation of teaching something other than orthodox Biblical Christianity. They are going to steer clear of the ACNA.

(3) Only a few Millenials are going to buy into the fantasy that the Anglican Church in North America brings together three divergent theological streams in one denomination. As the direction in which the College of Bishops is taking the ACNA becomes clearer to more people, it is going to become increasingly harder to maintain that fiction. Millenials are a generation that values authenticity. They are not going to react well to the discovery that they have been misled.

The College of Bishops needs to take a hard look at its own policies as well as the process for the development of a liturgy and a Prayer Book to which it has given its support.

In the next articles in this series we will continue our examination of how the Anglican Church in North America is erecting barriers to its own growth in the area of worship. We will be looking at the rites and services that the Prayer Book and Common Liturgy Task Force has developed  to this point and the ways that these rites and services are going to hamper the ACNA’s expansion of its population base and its maintenance of healthy, long-term growth.

See also
The ACNA Disciplinary Canons: A Time Bomb Waiting to Explode 
An ACNA Church in Your Area? Maybe? Maybe Not!
Episcopacy Out of Control in the Anglican Church in North America
Introducing the ACNA's High Church Party

“But Are They Bible Christians?”

How the Anglican Church in North Americ Is Creating Obstaclesto Its Own Growth – Part 1