Global South Primates' Show of Support for the ACNA Sends the Wrong Message

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