The Anglican Church in North America: The Next Five Years

By Robin G. Jordan

If you are a clergyperson or layperson in the Anglican Church in North America and have been feeling uneasy about the direction in which the denomination is heading, you have every reason to feel that way. The direction of the Anglican Church in North America is clearer now than it have ever been. If you have harbored any hope that that the new Archbishop Foley Beech might be a reform Archbishop, his recent interview with Jacob Stubbs should have deflated that hope.

In that interview Archbishop Beech demonstrated that he clearly understood a main part of the job description of Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, that is, portray the ACNA in the most positive light that he can. Beech showed himself as adroit at ducking potentially controversial issues and redirecting the conversation to less controversial subjects—those about which he preferred to talk. His responses, like those of his predecessor, did not reveal a great deal about his own position on sensitive issues except where his position is already known. A number of his answers were a little too pat.

The College of Bishops elected Beech because its members recognized Beech for what he is—a “company man,”  a “yes man,” someone who would not buck his fellow bishops and who would not try to take the denomination in a new direction. He could be relied upon to maintain the status quo.

Beech voted to endorse To Be A Christian: An Anglican Catechism with the rest of the College of Bishops. To Be A Christian: An Anglican Catechism teaches unreformed Catholic doctrine or permits its teaching. He is promoting the use of Texts for Common Prayer in his own diocese--the Diocese of the South. Texts for Common Prayer gives liturgical expression to unreformed Catholic doctrine and is open to interpretation as countenancing such doctrine. 

Over the next five years you can expect to discover if you have not discovered already….

If you….

• Don’t believe an unbeliever can have a vital faith before he is made regenerate by the Holy Spirit.
• Don’t believe that the gift of the Holy Spirit is given exclusively at baptism.
• Don’t believe that Christ offers himself for the sins of the world through the words and actions of the priest at the Eucharist.
• Don’t believe that “the Eucharist is the way by which the sacrifice of Christ is made present, and in which he unites us to his one offering of himself….”
• Don’t believe that Christ is substantively present in the consecrated bread and wine at the Eucharist. 
• Don’t believe that confirmation is a Biblical ordinance, much less a sacrament.
• Don’t believe that anyone can confer a special gift or grace by placing one or both hands on someone else.
• Don’t believe that anyone can be made a successor to the apostles by the virtue of his consecration as a bishop in a line of bishops going back to the apostles.
• Don’t believe that the Scriptures mandate a particular form of church government.

 You’re in the wrong church!

If you do…

• Believe that the Thirty-Nine Articles contains the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with the Word of God and is as authoritative as God’s Word for Anglicans today as in the past.
• Believe that any interpretation of the Thirty-Nine Articles must take into full consideration “its original historical context and the original intent of its authors.”
• Believe that we are justified by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
• Believe that only two sacraments are ordained by God—Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.
• Believe that the sacraments “are God-given signs sending signals about God’s grace” and which “must be received and responded to as such….”
• Believe that the sacrifice of Christ was his once-for-all death on Calvary, and does not in way continue into the present, and that in the Eucharist we not only do not repeat that sacrifice, but also we do not enter in any way into Christ’s offering of himself.
• Believe that the only sacrifice that may be viewed as a legitimate part of worship in the Eucharist is “the responsive sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise that faithful communicants offer after receiving the bread and wine.”
• Believe that “the only element in confirmation which is necessary is the candidate’s personal response of faith to his instruction in God’s word.”
• Believe that ordination is the public recognition of the calling and spiritual gifts of the ordinand, at which the ordinand is formally set apart as a minister of God’s Word with prayer and laying on of hands.
• Believe that bishops and presbyters are first and foremost ministers of God’s Word, belonging to the same order and differing only in the office that they execute.
• Believe that only those who teach what the apostles teach can be truly said to be successors to the apostles.

 You’re in the wrong church!!

However, you are in good company. The English Reformer did not believe what you don’t believe and believed what you do believe. Generations of reformed Anglicans did the same thing. A large number of reformed Anglicans do today. If they were in the Anglican Church in North America, they would be in the wrong church too.

What you see in the Anglican Church in North America is the result of Anglo-Catholic promotion of an unreformed Catholic identity for the Anglican Church and liberal promotion of the idea of a “continuously developing Anglican tradition,” an idea that Anglo-Catholics have also promoted. The theory of doctrinal development that dominates both Anglo-Catholic and liberal thinking is traceable to Tractarian-turned-Roman Catholic John Henry Newman.

Those who subscribe to the notion of the Anglican Church in North America as a model of a church in which three disparate theological streams—Catholic, Evangelical, and Pentecostal—flow together as one river have been strongly influenced by this idea. Upon close examination it is quite evident that unreformed Catholicism is the strongest of the three streams flowing in the Anglican Church in North America and the water of the other two streams has been diluted and polluted by this stream.

In the final analysis the three-stream topology does not accurately describe the Anglican Church in North America. Like Newman’s via media theory it provides a convenient screen for the unreformed Catholicization of the Anglican Church.

In the twenty-first century any church can identify itself as “Anglican.” Anglican has become a word to which whoever uses it can assign a meaning. It brings to mind this passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass:

 "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.
    Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't—till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "
    "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
    "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
    "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
    "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
    Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

The Jerusalem Declaration with its recognition of fourteen tenets underpinning Anglican identity was an attempt to rectify this problem. The 2008 GAFCON Conference that adopted the Jerusalem Declaration called for the formation of a province in North America for the federation then known as the Common Cause Partnership.

The jurisdiction that was formed—the Anglican Church in North America—has shown that this attempt was an abysmal failure. While affirming the Jerusalem Declaration on paper, the Anglican Church in North America has repeatedly demonstrated that it does not affirm in practice what the Jerusalem Declaration upholds. For the Anglican Church in North America “affirm” is a word like “Anglican”—it means whatever the Anglican Church in North America chooses it to mean.

Reformed Anglicans now in the Anglican Church in North America are clearly faced with a dilemma.

What would you do if you discovered that you were in the wrong church?