The Anatomy of Marginalization in the Anglican Church in North America

By Robin G. Jordan

The Anglican Church in North America’s College of Bishops has since its formation shown a consistent pattern of favoring the denomination’s Anglo-Catholic wing and unreformed Catholic teaching and practices over the denomination’s confessional Anglican wing and confessional Anglicanism. The College of Bishops has extended not only recognition and affirmation but also protected status to the convictions of the Anglo-Catholic wing.

The message that the College of Bishops is conveying is that it has no respect for the convictions of confessional Anglicans and ultimately for confessional Anglicans as Christians. The College of Bishops is essentially saying that confessional Anglicans and their convictions are not important enough in the scheme of things to be given even the slightest consideration.

Confessional Anglicans are as far as the College of Bishops is concerned nobodies—people of no importance. This is how the College of Bishops as a body perceives them.

Now the Anglican Church in North America’s Anglo-Catholic wing is supposed to be confessional Anglicans’ brothers and sisters in Christ, their partners and fellow workers in mission and ministry. This is what Archbishop Iliud Wabukala, GAFCON chairman, called them in his latest pastoral letter. But it is quite obvious that the denomination’s Anglo-Catholic wing do not see confessional Anglicans this way.

Treating the convictions of Biblically faithful Anglicans as not worthy of consideration is to marginalize them, to treat them as individuals of no worth. Whatever position confessional Anglicans may occupy in a particular diocese, network, or other para-church organization, the position that they occupy in the denomination is that of a marginalized group. There is no escaping this fact. Their convictions do not at the denominational level enjoy the recognition, affirmation, and protected status that the convictions of Anglo-Catholics and those who share their convictions do. By no stretch of the imagination can the Anglican Church in North America be regarded as genuinely comprehensive even where theologically-conservative Anglicans are concerned.

While it is possible for now for para-church organizations in the Anglican Church in North America to adopt a more confessional Anglican stance, the denomination’s governing documents do not contain any provisions that actually sanction such action. Here again we enter the murky realm of unwritten understandings which only bind those who chose to accept their terms. Adopting such a stance does not extend recognition and affirmation of the convictions of confessional Anglicans beyond the para-church organization adopting it. It certainly does not extend protected status to confessional Anglican convictions or to those who hold such convictions within the denomination nor reduce or eliminate the marginalization of confessional Anglicans. It is at best--as important as it may be--an inadequate measure.

The only way to extend recognition, affirmation, and protected status to confessional Anglicanism in the Anglican Church in North America and to lessen and ultimately end the marginalization of confessional Anglicans is to form a second province within the Anglican Church in North America—a province that in its teaching and practices is closely aligned to the Holy Scriptures and the Anglican formularies and which has its own rites and services, catechism, bishops, and synodical government. The alternative is to undertake a major overhaul of the denomination’s governing documents and other doctrinal statements and to replace a substantial number of its top leaders.

These actions would require the cooperation of the College of Bishops and the denomination’s Anglo-Catholic wing and consequently has very little likelihood of happening. They have no incentive to undertake such actions.  

Due to conditions in the Anglican Church in North America the formation of a second province within the denomination requires independent action. It is a reality that Anglicans whose convictions are confessional must face.

Confessional Anglicans must also go about establishing this second province in such a way that the College of Bishops and the denomination’s Anglo-Catholic wing will have no option but to accept its existence or reveal their true colors. Their acceptance of the second province would offer definite proof that they are confessional Anglicans’ brothers and sisters in Christ, their partners and fellow workers in mission and ministry, which Archbishop Wabukala would like us to believe that they are.