GAFCON and the Future of Biblical and Reformed Anglicanism in North America

By Robin G. Jordan

The GAFCON Primates Council has released a public statement on its meeting in London this week. Among the developments reported in this communiqué was that the Council had unanimously elected ACNA Archbishop Foley Beach to that body, not a particularly surprising development in that Archbishop Beech’s predecessor was also a member of the Council. It does show the GAFCON Primates’ continued willingness to overlook what is happening in the Anglican Church in North America and to extend their unqualified support to the ANCA, a state of affairs that does not bode well for the future of Biblical and Reformed Anglicanism in North America.

Even before the formation of the Anglican Church in North America, during the days of the Common Cause Partnership, there was clear evidence that the leadership of what is now the ACNA were not fully in alignment with the Bible, the Anglican formularies, and the Jerusalem Declaration in their doctrine and practice. The evidence of this gap has become more undeniable since that time. The gap itself has also widened.

The GAFCON Primates, however, gave into persistent lobbying from the Common Cause Partnership and endorsed its formation of a new Anglican province in North America. They would subsequently recognize the ACNA as “a genuine expression of Anglicanism” even with its departures from the teaching of the Bible and the doctrine of the Anglican formularies, and the purely cosmetic nature of its affirmation of the Jerusalem Declaration.

The GAFCON Primates have continued to back the ACNA in spite of the exclusion of provisions from its formularies, which genuinely make room for differences in doctrine and practice in key areas between the different schools of conservative Anglican thought. They have turned a blind eye to the de facto ban on Biblical and Reformed Anglican doctrine and practice in the Anglican Church in North America.

The actions of the GAFCON Primates give the impression that they are unwilling to admit to having made a mistake in the case of the Anglican Church of North America. Their actions also suggest that their acceptance of the authority of the Bible and the Anglican formularies is not what it ought to be and falls short of full acceptance of these touchstones of authentic historic Anglicanism. Their commitment to the Jerusalem Declaration and their support of Biblical and Reformed Anglicanism and its adherents is open to question. Whatever is the truth of the matter, they certainly give this appearance. They have done nothing to change or dispel this impression.

The communiqué makes reference to the planting of 483 new congregations, which Archbishop Beech gave as evidence of the rapid growth of the Anglican Church in North America. Nowhere on the Internet does the ACNA, to my knowledge, make public detailed, reliable statistics on its new congregations. To evaluate Archbishop’s claim, we need at a minimum the following information.

1. The number of new congregations started annually from 2009 on.

2. The number of new congregations still in existence a year after their launch, two years, and so on.

3. The number of new congregations that have failed and how soon after their launch it was decided to discontinue the work.

4. The rate at which the new congregations are growing not in terms of average weekend attendance but the number of regular attenders worshiping with the congregation at the end of each year during the period from 2009 to 2015; the number of attenders who visited worship gatherings two or more times and then stopped coming; the number of regular attenders active in the congregation’s ministries, the attrition rate; the number of regular attenders contributing financially to the support of the new congregation’s work; the number of small groups, the size and duration of small groups, and the failure rate, and so on.

5. The demographics of the ministry target groups of the new congregations and the demographics of the actual population bases of these congregations.

6.The location of the new congregations—urban, suburban, university, rural, small town, etc.

7. Number of new congregations targeted at unreached, unengaged population segments; number of new congregations targeted at traditional Anglican/Episcopal constituencies.

8. The percentage of regular attenders in each new congregation who were believing Christians before they began to attend, the number of regular attenders in each new congregation who came to faith after they began to attend.

9. The number of adult baptisms.

10. The number of new congregations that were formed from former Anglican/Episcopal congregations, from core groups hived off from an existing ACNA congregation, and by other means (e.g. cold starts).

11. The specific beliefs and practices of clergy pastoring the new congregations in key areas:

• Revelation
• Holy Scripture
• Regeneration
• Justification
• Sacraments
• Baptism
• Lord’s Supper
• Apostolic Succession
• Bishops
• Church Government

This list is not exhaustive but it offers a good place to start. With this information we would have a much more accurate picture of the ACNA’s purported growth. I base this conclusion on my study of the literature and my experience in planting a new congregation in 1980s and in pioneering a number of new congregations since 2002.

This information I suspect would also strengthen the case of adherents of Biblical and Reformed Anglicanism for a separate parallel structure to the Anglican Church in North America, one which is faithful to the teaching of the Bible and the doctrine of the Anglican formularies and genuine in its affirmation of the Jerusalem Declaration.

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