Great Commission Anglicans Need Their Own Service Book

By Robin G. Jordan

I have been following the progress that the Anglican Church in North America has been making in expanding into the Commonwealth of Kentucky, which is now my home state. The Diocese of the South of the Anglican Church in North America has only three churches in Kentucky. The Reformed Episcopal Church’s Diocese of the Central States, a second ACNA diocese that incorporates Kentucky, has a mission in Owensboro, Kentucky. The PEAR-USA Southeast Region, a third ACNA network of churches that also includes Kentucky, has none. This is the extent of the ACNA presence in the Commonwealth.

When compared with the number of Continuing Anglican churches in the Kentucky, the ACNA presence in the state is no larger than the Continuing Anglican presence. The Anglican Church in America has one church in Kentucky. The Anglican Catholic Church has a priory in Kentucky but no churches. The Episcopal Missionary Church has one church. The United Episcopal Church has two churches, which were formerly a single church. One has services on Sunday mornings and the other on Wednesday nights. They were originally a part of the EMC church but split off from that church. The Anglican Orthodox Church has no churches. The Anglican Province of America lists one church on its website, which it also lists as affiliated with the ACA. The APA website, while giving an address for the congregation 17 miles from Murray, lists the congregation as worship in a cemetery chapel in Bowling Green, Kentucky. So does the ACA website. The Orthodox Anglican Church has no churches in Kentucky. Continuing Anglican church websites are updated infrequently and often contain out of date or inaccurate information.

For the sake of comparison, I am listing the number of Episcopal churches in Kentucky. According to Wikipedia, the Diocese of Kentucky has “36 parishes in the diocese, with about 10,500 baptized members. A majority of the members live in the Louisville area, with the remainder scattered throughout southern and western Kentucky, primarily in communities with more than 10,000 residents.” Whether missions are included in this number is not indicated in the article. The directory on the diocese’s website lists 39 congregations but does not distinguish between parishes and missions. According to Wikipedia, the Diocese of Lexington has its “greatest membership strength is in the Bluegrass region in and around Lexington, with a smaller pocket of strength in the Northern Kentucky suburbs of Cincinnati. The Diocese has only a few congregations in the Appalachian portion of the southeastern corner of the state.” The directory on the diocese’s website lists 37 congregations but does not distinguish between parishes and missions. The Episcopal presence in Kentucky is far larger than the ACNA and Continuing Anglican presence combined.

Since he became Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America, Diocese of the South Bishop Foley Beach has attended an Anglo-Catholic Congress, launched a social ministries initiative, and made a number of promotional trips outside the United States including a recent junket to Moscow. He has to my knowledge announced nothing new on the church planting front in his diocese or in the ACNA.

While the Anglican Church in North America boasts that it has almost a 1000 congregations, no reliable statistics are available on the size of these congregations, how long they have been in existences, what kind of growth they are experiencing, and their overall viability. Church planting in the ACNA has all the appearances of being spotty. I do not have sufficient information to say that it has come to a standstill but it is certainly negligible in Kentucky.

When I visited the REC Owensboro Mission website, I noted that the mission uses the Episcopal Church’s 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the Episcopal Church’s 1940 Hymnal, not the two most effective tools for reaching and engaging the unreached and unengaged in Kentucky. The constituencies to which the 1928 Prayer Book and the 1940 Hymnal appealed is up there in age and shrinking in size. The use of the 1928 Prayer Book and the 1940 Hymnal is a sign of two major factors that hurt a church’s mission —a church’s love of past culture more than its present context and its love of tradition more than its children. While Owensboro is a fairly large town and the Episcopal Church enjoyed success in planting churches in large towns, we are talking about the 1950s and earlier, not recent times.

The last Episcopal church planted in my part of Kentucky was launched in 1980. It used the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the 1982 Hymnal, and the hymnal supplement, Songs for Celebration. It was enjoying a measure of growth until 2003 when Gene Robinson was consecrated a bishop of the Episcopal Church. This precipitated a split which cost the church a part of its congregation, a loss from which it has never recovered.

Both it and the Continuing Anglican church formed by the part of the congregation that left over the Robinson’s consecration are floundering. The Continuing Anglican church would adopt the 1928 Prayer Book and the 1940 Hymnal but they have proven a hindrance rather than a help to its growth.

Episcopalians form a very tiny segment of the region’s population--less than 1 %. Former Episcopalians who have a sentimental attachment to the 1928 Prayer Book and the 1940 Hymnal form an even tinier segment of that population. The Tudor English of the 1928 Prayer Book and the particular selection of hymns in the 1940 Hymnal, their language, and the practices associated with their use are not the drawing card that they may have been in the 1950s and earlier. Even then they had limited appeal in the region.

The use of the 1928 Prayer Book and the 1940 Hymnal creates a disconnection between a church and its community. The world outside its doors is post-Christian twenty-first century America, not post-World War II twentieth century America.

If one examines the pattern of church planting that the Episcopal Church followed in the Commonwealth of Kentucky during the nineteenth and twentieth century, one notices that the Episcopal Church typically started mission congregations in towns that were accessible by riverboat and later railroad in the nineteenth century and by the state and Interstate highway system in the twentieth century. These mission congregations were confined to communities that had a fairly dense population and in which a nucleus of Episcopalians already lived and worked.

This pattern becomes more pronounced in the period in which Anglo-Catholicism became the dominant theology in the Diocese of Kentucky. This occurred fairly early in the history of the diocese. The Anglican Church in North America in what little church planting it has done in the Commonwealth of Kentucky has followed a similar pattern.

The Episcopal Church’s expansion in these two centuries was fairly slow. A number of the mission congregations that the Episcopal Church started never grew large enough to become self-supporting parishes. They are subsidized to this day.

I have read at least one history of the Episcopal Church in Kentucky in which the author rationalized its sluggish growth with the argument that the Episcopal Church, unlike the evangelical denominations, focused on quality over quantity. A more accurate appraisal would have been that the Episcopal Church with its Anglo-Catholic theology and High Church style of worship appealed only to a very tiny segment of the population and this segment was found only in communities with a high population density.

The same history was dismissive of the various approaches such as crusade evangelism, door-to-door evangelism, radio broadcasts, and tracts that evangelical denominations at the time it was written used to evangelize the unchurched population. One observes in the Anglican Church in North America similar attitudes toward evangelical denominations evidenced in this history.

The challenges that the Episcopal Church faced in the past are relevant to the Anglican Church in North America in the present. A denomination that adopts Anglo-Catholic theology and a High Church style of worship is not going to make significant inroads in Kentucky. It will always have a very tiny presence in the Commonwealth. It will be limited in its capacity to spread the gospel and make disciples both by its theology and its style of worship. They will form barriers to its fulfillment of the Great Commission.

As well as creating a disconnection between churches and their communities, they also enervate a church’s zeal for evangelism. Considering the unfortunate fact that American Christians have a tendency to shy away from evangelism, particularly Episcopalians and former Episcopalians, anything that contributes to this proclivity represents a serious problem.  

In the mid-1980s I was involved in what was one of the last successful Episcopal church plant in the Diocese of Louisiana. In the space of seven odd years it would grow to the point where it became self-supporting parish. It would experience a major church split that was related to its rapid growth and the limits of its rector’s leadership capacity, losing a third of its member households. It would experience another setback with the Robinson’s consecration in 2003, which seriously damaged the public image of the Episcopal Church in what was a politically and socially conservative community. By 2007 it had become a subsidized mission again. Here again a major contributing factor was the leadership capacity limits of the same rector.

In its heyday the congregation was largely a mix of evangelicals and charismatics and its worship reflected this mix. The congregation was also fairly outward-looking. After the split the rector took the church in a Anglo-Catholic, High Church direction while catering to those attracted to such liberal innovations as labyrinth walking. This shift in direction did not offset the losses from the split and the harmful effects of the Robinson consecration. What new people it did attract were more inward-looking than those they replaced.

During the same time period two Continuing Anglican churches were launched in the parish—Louisiana’s equivalent of a county. Both churches used the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the 1940 Hymnal and targeted disaffected Episcopalians. Both churches were short-lived. If they had adopted a different approach to worship, targeted a much larger segment of the population, and had been more outward-looking, they might still be around to this day. The parish was one of most rapidly growing areas of the state.

What happened in Louisiana and what has happened in Kentucky are among the reasons that I believe that the Anglican Church in North America needs a much more comprehensive and flexible liturgy than the rites and services that the Prayer Book and Liturgy Task Force have produced to date and which the College of Bishops has endorsed. They are far too Anglo-Catholic and High Church for the North American mission field. Confining outreach to whatever segment of the unchurched population that they might appeal is not being faithful to the Great Commission. Christ commanded the disciples and through them as its representatives the Church to go and make disciples of ALL people groups. The only qualifications that he added to this command were that we are to baptize new disciples in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit and to instruct them in his teaching.

Just as the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the 1940 Hymnal have proven a hindrance to outreach for the Continuing Anglican churches, we can expect the rites and services of Texts for Common Prayer to form a similar obstacle for ACNA churches. Like the rites and services of the 1928 Prayer Book, they are designed for cathedrals, seminary chapels, and parish churches. They cannot be tailored to a variety of circumstances—to the non-traditional settings in which congregations worship on the mission field or to the limited resources that are available to them.

What congregations on the mission field need is a service book that is shaped by the gospel and embodies the teaching of the Scriptures and the doctrine of the Anglican formularies. They need forms of service that are stripped down to their bare essentials and which can be used with equal facility in a living room, a hotel conference room, a storefront, or a shared sanctuary. They need alternative patterns of worship that enable even a handful of people to gather around God’s Word on Sundays or whenever they meet. It should be evident to anyone perusing the contents of the service book that for those who prepared it the Great Commission is their first priority.

As our Lord pointed to the attention of the disciples, the fields are ripe for harvest. They are heavy with the maturing grain even in post-Christian twenty-first America. We should be girding our loins, sharpening our sickles, and going into the fields to reap the corn whitening under the sun.

The urgency of the task is far more pressing than we may realize. Ripening wheat left to stand in the fields will become unharvestable. Wind and rain will knock down the corn. Mold will attack it. Any loose grain that falls to ground will begin to sprout.

Our Lord knew this. Hence he urged the disciples to pray that the lord of the harvest would send more workers into his fields.

The mechanization of agriculture in Canada and the United States and the concentration of most of the population in urban and suburban areas may explain why we do not fully appreciate what our Lord was saying.

At the time of our Lord’s earthly ministry a team of workers went into the fields. Some workers reaped while the other workers bound the cut wheat into sheaves and set up the sheaves in shocks in the field. The sheaves were hauled by cart to the threshing floor where the wheat was threshed and winnowed. The grain was then stored.

We reap when God through our ministry and witness leads someone to Christ. We bind the sheaves and set them up in shocks when we enfold new believers into new congregations.

Remember that we must give an accounting to our Lord for everything that we have said and done. How will we explain shrinking from the task that he has appointed us to do—to spread the gospel to the remotest parts of the earth and to share the good news with all of humanity.

We cannot hire someone else to go in our place. We must go ourselves. While everyone is not called to labor in the mission field outside our community and region, we all are called to serve as missionaries to those who do not yet know Christ in our community and region. We all should make it our concern that we are equipped with the right tools for the task.