The Anglican Church in North America Needs a Fresh Start

By Robin G. Jordan

The Anglican Church in North America needs a new constitution and a new set of canons. It needs more than a superficial revamping of its organization and structure but sweeping changes affecting how it is governed, how its bishops are elected, how their election is confirmed, and how long they may serve, and under what conditions, and other areas of the life of the denomination.

Most importantly the Anglican Church in North America needs a new contractual agreement between its participating churches to form the basis of its new governing documents. The terms of this agreement need to be clear to all the parties so as to prevent the kinds of problems that arise from different interpretations of the agreement.

Among these terms should be the recognition that the Anglican Church in North America is a voluntary association. It is a creation of the churches forming it. It is organized to perform functions that the participating churches can do better collectively than they can individually. Denominational officials and bodies have no inherent authority of their own but exercise authority delegated to them by the participating churches. They are accountable to the participating churches.

The voluntary and subsidiary nature of the Anglican Church in North America has implications for its denominational organization and structure. The principal governing body of the denomination should be composed of the representatives of its primary stakeholders—the participating churches. The denomination’s consultative and executive bodies should be ancillary to this body.

The delegated nature of the denomination’s authority has similar implications. It means that denominational officials and bodies may exercise only the powers and prerogatives expressly given them in the denomination’s governing documents. They have no discretion in matters outside their purview and only limited discretion in matters within their purview.

Judicatories, the subdivisions of the denomination, are also voluntary associations, created by the churches participating in them. They, like denominations, are organized to perform functions that the participating churches can do better collectively than they can individually. Judicatorial officials and bodies, like those of the denomination, have no inherent authority of their own but exercise authority delegated to them by the participating churches. They are accountable to the participating churches.

The observations that I made about the implications of the voluntary, and subsidiary nature of the denomination and the delegated nature of its authority apply to judicatories.

In light of the range of convictions held by the churches participating in the Anglican Church in North America a crucial term of the agreement should be a strong commitment to make provision for the diverse convictions of the participating churches acceptable to those churches holding a particular set of convictions. What this would mean in practice is that the rites and services and the catechism of the Anglican Church in North America would have to reflect this range of convictions and not the particular set of convictions of one group of participating churches. It may be time-consuming but it is not impossible to do. The formation of affinity networks within the denomination is one approach with each affinity network producing its own rites and services and its own catechism.

Re-launches are not uncommon in church planting. Restarting a church is also one way of revitalizing a stagnant or declining church. Re-launching a denomination is not as dramatic step as it might sound.

The Anglican Church in North America was launched with unnecessary haste. A provisional instrument of governance could have been put together and more time taken to examine proposals for the new denomination’s doctrinal foundation and its organization and structure. The haste in which the denomination was launched had nothing to do with a rapidly closing window of opportunity. Common Cause Partnership leaders created a false sense of urgency in order to secure the adoption and ratification of the draft constitution and canons. They claimed that if the two governing documents were rejected or their adoption and ratification was delayed while they were subject to further scrutiny and revision, there would be no orthodox alternative to the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church in North America. This was patently untrue. Common Cause Partnership leaders also lobbied the GAFCON Primates to call for such an alternative. 

Interested parties were given a few short weeks to examine the two documents and recommend changes. It was insufficient time to thoroughly evaluate the provisions of the two documents and their ramifications, to hold a public discussion of the documents' strengths and weaknesses, and to offer alternative proposals. The apparent intention in keeping this period short was to prevent the development of organized opposition to the documents' provisions. What recommendations were made were for a large part ignored except when they concerned glaring mistakes made by the task force that drafted the documents.

The reaction of Bishop Jack Iker to a series of alternative proposals and the refusal of REC Presiding Bishop Royal Grote to pass the same proposals onto his fellow REC bishops showed that Common Cause Partnership leaders had come to agreement among themselves as to what would go into the constitution and canons of the new denomination. Iker demanded to know who authorized the proposals. Grote denied that he was the right person to contact. At the time he was communications director for the Reformed Episcopal Church and a REC representative on Common Cause Partnership's Governance Task Force. He indeed was the right person!

The Anglo-Catholic members of the provisional Provincial Council would block any substantive changes to the fundamental declarations.

Then Archbishop-elect Robert Duncan in an address to the delegates to the inaugural Provincial Assembly ridiculed those who wanted to make the two documents clearer and more detailed and to make other needed changes in the documents. He equated them with the people of Israel who wished to return to captivity in Egypt. He essentially discouraged the delegates from debating the documents’ provisions and revising them.

The two documents were rushed through the inaugural Provincial Assembly with very little discussion of their provisions and frequent interruptions by Archbishop-elect Robert Duncan telling the delegates that speakers were waiting to address them. The provisional Provincial Assembly was not given an opportunity to change provisions of the documents, omit provisions, or add new provisions. A number of delegates reported that, while they voted for the ratification of the two documents due to the false sense of urgency created by Common Cause Partnership leaders, they had serious misgivings about the contents of the documents.

Ahead of the inaugural Provincial Assembly evangelicals were offered assurance that if they supported the adoption and ratification of the documents, their concerns would be addressed later. The assurance offered to evangelicals proved to be a ruse intended to secure their support. The open letter offering this assurance was subsequently removed from the Internet.

Without a fresh start the Anglican Church in North America is going to lose sight of the principal task of the Church—that of spreading the gospel and making genuine disciples of Jesus Christ. This is what happened in the Eastern and Western Churches in the past and in the Continuing Anglican Churches in more recent times. The maintenance of a particular cultus displaced the proclamation of the gospel; the proselytization of new converts to that cultus and their formation in its beliefs and practices supplanted the making of new followers of Jesus Christ and their instruction in his commandments.

Under the provisions of a new constitution and a new set of canons and with the election of new leaders the denomination’s attention could be kept focused upon the Church’s principal task. To borrow an analogy from a confessing Anglican in New Zealand, the Anglican Church in North America could be re-coupled to the locomotive of the gospel and pulled back onto the mainline of the Great Commission.