By Robin G Jordan
At the heart of the Confessing Anglican movement is the
first Global Anglican Future Conference’s call to return to the Scriptures and
the classical Anglican formularies. These formularies are more than historic
documents. They set out where Anglicanism differs from some forms of
Protestantism on one hand and from Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism on
the other. They establish for the Anglican Church an identity that is
Protestant, reformed, and evangelical.
In North America this call has to a large extent gone
unheeded. While some clergy and congregations in the Anglican Church in North America
have heeded the call, the ACNA as a denomination has not. This has become
increasingly evident from the doctrinal statements that the ACNA has produced
to date.
Those on whose shoulders fall the burden of seeing that this
call is not ignored, however, flock to the gatherings of the Anglican Church in
North America when they should be keeping their distance from a denomination that
has shown in these documents that it really does not stand with the Global
Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. It is pursuing its own course, a course
that does not involve full adherence to the teaching of Scripture and the
doctrine of the formularies.
To make matters worse the ACNA is not content to pursue this
course alone. It seeks to dissuade the Confessing Anglican movement from
returning to the Scriptures and the classic formularies and to join it on the
same course.
In their failure to pull back from supporting the Anglican
Church in North America primates like Archbishop Iliud Wabukala are damaging
their own credibility. How can they champion the acceptance of the authority of
the Thirty-Nine Articles, maintaining that it is constitutive of Anglican
identity, and then attend the gatherings of a denomination that does not accept
the Articles' authority? They would decline to attend the gatherings of the Episcopal
Church on the same grounds. What prevents them from refusing to attend the ACNA’s
gatherings for this reason?
See also
GAFCON Chairman’s Participation in ACNA Archbishop's Investiture: What It Implies
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