By Robin G. Jordan
In North America and around the world Anglicans and
non-Anglicans are waiting to see what will be the outcome of the Primates
Meeting in Canterbury. A number of questions are on their minds. Will Presiding
Bishop Michael Curry and Archbishop Fred Hiltz be expelled from the gathering as
a disciplinary measure against their respective provinces? Will Archbishop
Foley Beach be seated as an equal with the other Primates and allowed to
participate in the entire meeting? Will the Anglican Church in North America
receive the recognition of the Archbishop of Canterbury as a member province of
the Anglican Communion? Will the GAFCON and Global South Primates eventually
walk out and form a second conservative Anglican Communion in which the ACNA is
a full member?
The question that is on my mind is how the meeting’s outcome
is going to affect the future of North Americans Anglicans who are faithful to
the Bible and the historic Anglican formularies and stand in the Reformation
heritage of the Anglican Church—Anglicans who are a part of the Anglican Church
in North America and folks like myself who for a variety of reasons are
presently not a member of an Anglican church in the United States or Canada?
I have contact with a number of folks who fall into this
second group. Among the reasons that they are not a member of an Anglican
church, the following reasons are the most common:
1. The only self-identified Anglican churches in their
locality are traditionalist Anglo-Catholic Continuing Anglican churches and
liberal Catholic Modernist Episcopal churches.
2. Their locality has no self-identified Anglican churches—Continuing
Anglican or Episcopal. Church planting is not one of the strengths of the
Continuum and the Anglican Church in North America’s church planting efforts
are for the most part confined to the larger metropolitan areas and their
outskirts. A number of Continuing Anglican jurisdictions, like the Episcopal
Church, are in decline, which has led to church closures.
3. The Anglican Church in North America is officially
unreformed Catholic in its teaching and practices, based upon its Fundamental
Declarations, its Canons, its Catechism, and its proposed Prayer Book. While a
number of churches in the ACNA identify historic Anglicanism and themselves as
Protestant and accept the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion as their confession
of faith, they generally use service books that are unreformed Catholic. They,
like other ACNA churches, are confined to certain areas of the United States
and Canada. These churches also have no official standing and an uncertain
future in the ACNA which does not make room in its formularies for their
doctrinal beliefs and worship practices.
If the Anglican Church in North America is recognized by the
Archbishop of Canterbury or is recognized as a full member of a second
conservative Anglican Communion, its present leaders will have no incentive to
change the direction in which they are taking the denomination. They will have
little if any motivation to make the denomination more comprehensive in doctrine
and practices and more synodical in its form of governance at the provincial
level and to implement needed reforms in its disciplinary canons as well as the
methods in which it selects bishops. The churches in the ACNA that identify historic
Anglicanism and themselves as Protestant and accept the Thirty-Nine Articles of
Religion as their confession of faith will be forced to further compromise their
convictions and abandon their theological identity or join folks like myself
out in the cold.
These churches, however, do have a third option. They can
band together and form their own denomination and compile and adopt their own
Catechism and Prayer Book—a Catechism and a Prayer Book, which are Scriptural and Protestant. They can also adopt a policy of aggressive church planting,
organizing congregations and worship communities in all areas and segments of
the population of the United States and Canada rather than just the areas and population
segments upon which the Episcopal Church has focused in the past and the
Continuing Anglican jurisdictions and the Anglican Church in North America have
more recently focused. They do not have to leave their future in other people’s
hands.
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