FCA Chairman's Latest Pastoral Letter Ignores Widening Doctrinal Gap Between ACNA and FCA

By Robin G. Jordan

In his October pastoral letter FCA Chairman Archbishop Iluid Wabukula persists in ignoring the elephant in the FCA living room. One is hard put to see how he can keep pretending that the elephant is not there. It is a very large elephant. Its trumpeting is growing noisier and noisier. The louder it trumpets, the more determined he and other FCA leaders appear to ignore it.

Sooner or later, however, Archbishop Wabukala and the other GAFCON Primates will have to face up to the growing doctrinal disparity between the Anglican Church in North America and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, its failure to fully accept the Bible as a canon or rule of faith and life and the Anglican confessional formularies as its standard of doctrine and worship, and its deliberate exclusion of Anglican Reformed doctrine and practice from its own formularies. The elephant may have been easier to ignore as a calf. But now it is a full-grown bull elephant with tusks that can gore and feet that can trample.

Overlooked in his remarks about the Anglican Church in North America is that GAFCON called for the establishment of an alternative province to the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church at the urging of the Common Cause Leadership Council. It was not entirely a GAFCON initiative. The Common Cause Leadership Council lobbied GAFCON to take this action to give legitimacy to its own efforts to create an alternative jurisdiction to these two Anglican provinces.

Also not mentioned in the pastoral letter is that the Common Cause Leadership Council had signaled with its adoption of the Common Cause Theological Statement that the Common Cause Partners forming the alternative province were prepared to chart their own course. Upon returning from the 2008 Global Conference that adopted the Jerusalem Declaration, Common Cause Bishop Jack Iker in an interview stated:

“… while it is clear that there is no future in The Episcopal Church for traditional Anglo-Catholics, there will be a secure, respected place for us in the province being birthed. Our theological perspective and liturgical practices will be permitted, protected and honored. Our succession of catholic bishops will be secured.”

Bishop Iker further stated:

“It is important to remember that the direction of the province that is envisioned will be under the Common Cause Partnership, and for this reason, we must look primarily to the wording of Theological Statement agreed upon by Common Cause some time ago [emphasis added]. There are some slight differences in wording and emphasis in that document from the final statement that came out of the Jerusalem meeting. Suffice it to say that Anglo-Catholics in the future will continue to regard the 1662 Prayer Book, the 39 Articles, liturgical practices, and the Councils of the patristic church just as the Oxford Movement did under Pusey, Keble, and Newman, our fathers in the faith.”

The rest of the interview may be found here.

At the Provincial Council meeting held before the inaugural Provincial Assembly at which the final draft of the constitution and canons of the Anglican Church in North America was adopted, when CANA Bishop Martyn Mimms pointed to the need for changes in the proposed ACNA fundamental declarations to make them more acceptable to evangelicals, the Anglo-Catholic Council members essentially threatened to go their own way if any alterations were made to its provisions.

The only change Anglo-Catholic Council members would agree to was changing the date of the Thirty-Nine Articles from 1563 to 1571. Since the proposed ACNA fundamental declarations equivocated in their acceptance of the authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles, this change was purely cosmetic, even though the 1571 version of the Articles excludes the Lutheran view of the eucharistic presence.

Since that time it has become increasingly evident that a significant number of the ACNA bishops see the Articles as a historical document that they can do with what they wish. Bishop Iker’s statement that the direction of the new province would NOT be determined by GAFCON and the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans has proven to be the case.

Needless to say despite these developments Archbishop Wabukala and other FCA leaders cling to the mistaken belief that the Anglican Church in North America is walking in step with the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. It boggles the mind trying to make sense of their obstinate refusal to take notice of the widening gap between ACNA doctrinal positions and FCA doctrinal positions and the ACNA's exclusion of confessing Anglicans adhering to FCA doctrinal positions. If they have any concerns about developments in the ACNA, they have not expressed these concerns publicly in any meaningful way. FCA leaders have not given confessing Anglicans being frozen out  of the ACNA due to their full acceptance of the authority of the Bible and the Anglican confessional formularies any reason to believe that FCA leaders are cognizant of, much less sympathetic to their plight. 

Photo: thehindi.com