The Anglican Church in North America—Part of the Solution or Part of the Problem?

By Robin G. Jordan

The 2008 Jerusalem Declaration upholds the historic Anglican doctrinal and worship standard of the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion and The Book of Common Prayer of 1662. These formularies set out the protestant and reformed principles of the Anglican Church, which are based upon the Scriptures. The Jerusalem Declaration recognizes this standard as underpinning Anglican orthodoxy. 

The GAFCON Resource Group in Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today, the official GAFCON commentary on the Jerusalem Declaration, emphasizes the Thirty-Nine Articles’ agreement with Scripture and their acceptance as constitutive of Anglican identity. It also emphasizes the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a true and authoritative standard against which other Anglican liturgies should be measured. While these liturgies may deviate from the 1662 Prayer Book’s language and structure, they should be close to its doctrine and liturgical usages.

In its affirmation of the historic Anglican doctrinal and worship standard of the Articles and Prayer Book, the 2008 GAFCON Conference seeks to contain if not undo the damage that the 1958 Lambeth Conference caused to Anglican orthodoxy with its endorsement of the Report of the Sub-committee on the Book of Common Prayer and its recommendations. Among these recommendations was that the provinces of the Anglican Communion abandon the Articles and the Prayer Book as Anglicanism’s doctrinal and worship standard. In place of this standard the Anglican provinces should adopt a common structure for the Holy Common service. Instead of being united by common doctrine and liturgical usages the Anglican Communion would be united by the common structure of the Holy Communion service.

The 1958 Lambeth Conference and the Report of the Sub-committee on the Book of Common Prayer were both an expression of theological and liturgical drift in the Anglican Communion and a contributor to that drift. The conference’s endorsement of the report would condone the drift and give impetus to it. With this endorsement and the subsequent drafting of a proposed common structure for the Holy Communion service the Anglican Communion descended into theological and liturgical chaos.

With the adoption of its first Book of Common Prayer in 1789 the Episcopal Church had already started down a path of deviation from the doctrine and liturgical usages of the 1662 Prayer Book. Its 1789 Prayer Book incorporated a modified version of the Prayer of Consecration from the 1764 Scottish Non-Juror Communion Office. The original version of this Consecration Prayer was a major deviation from the 1662 Prayer Book and reflected the doctrinal peculiarities of the Usager wing of the Scottish Non-Jurors.

Of the two wings of the Scottish Non-Jurors the Usagers were the most extreme in doctrine and liturgical usages. Among their doctrinal peculiarities was that they taught that Christ had offered himself for the sins of the world not on the cross but at the Last Supper.

With the adoption of a revised version of the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1804 the Episcopal Church had also started down the path of deviation from the doctrine of the Articles. This revision for a large part retained the doctrinal provisions of the original Thirty-Nine Articles. However, the Episcopal Church did not require its clergy to subscribe to these provisions. Already at this very early stage the Episcopal Church was displaying strong indications of theological and liturgical drift.

This drift did not come to fruition until the late nineteenth century. By that time liberalism and Anglo-Catholicism had become the major theological streams in the Episcopal Church. Anglo-Catholic churches were using The Anglican Missal in its various editions. Its conservative evangelical wing would break with the Episcopal Church over the doctrine of the 1789 Prayer Book and the growth of liberalism and Anglo-Catholicism. The only adherents of its revision of the Thirty-Nine Articles would succeed from the Episcopal Church and form their own denomination—the Reformed Episcopal Church.

The products of the Episcopal Church’s theological and liturgical drift are the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, and the Enriching Our Worship series, particularly Enriching Our Worship 1 with its gender-inclusive language and feminine imagery of God. With each liturgical book the Episcopal Church has moved further and further away from the doctrinal and worship standard of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

The Reformed Episcopal Church has joined the movement away from the doctrinal and worship standard of the Anglican formularies with its latest service books, which draw heavily upon liturgical material from the 1928 Prayer Book. The liturgies that the Anglican Church in North America has produced to date also continue the movement of the American Church away from this doctrinal and worship standard.

The doctrinal standard of the Anglican Church in North America is its catechism, which is a hybrid of Arminian and Anglo-Catholic theology with Anglo-Catholicism the stronger of the two theological strains, and which permits the teaching of Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic theology. Its worship standard is the 1662 Book of Common Prayer plus the whole raft of service books that preceded the 1662 Prayer Book from the 1637 Scottish Prayer Book to the late first century or early second century Didache. This standard includes the partially-reformed 1549 Book of Common Prayer and the Sarum Missal, a late Medieval Catholic Mass book, from which The Anglican Missal in its various editions takes texts and rubrics.

The Anglican Church in North America’s College of Bishops has endorsed the catechism and Texts for Common Prayer, a liturgical book containing an Ordinal and services of Morning and Evening Prayer and Holy Communion. The doctrine of the rites in Texts for Common Prayer is Anglo-Catholic and the ordination services and the services of Holy Communion in this liturgical book may be interpreted as teaching Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic doctrine.

By its endorsement of the catechism and Texts for Common Prayer the College of Bishops has shown that it does not affirm the Jerusalem Declaration whatever the preamble to the Anglican Church in North America’s constitution and the denomination’s website may say. The two forms for the service of Holy Communion do, however, use the common structure of the Holy Communion service that was the result of the 1958 Lambeth Conference’s Sub-Committee on the Book of Common Prayer’s recommendations. Rather than being a part of the solution, the Anglican Church in North America with this endorsement has become a part of the problem.

The College of Bishops, while it is willing to accept the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans' recognition and support of the Anglican Church in North America, is not willing to further FCA aims. I hope that the one-sidedness of the Anglican Church in North America’s relationship with the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans is not lost on FCA members outside of North America.

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