By Robin G. Jordan
The three services and five eucharistic prayers now on the A Prayer Book for North America website
illustrate the kinds of worship resources that the Anglican Church in North
America’s Prayer Book and Common Liturgy Task Force should be developing for
the use of congregations and missional communities in the ACNA and which the
jurisdiction’s College of Bishops should be endorsing. They are agreeable to the teaching
of the Bible and consistent with the doctrinal and worship principles of the
Anglican Formularies. The three services are also fairly flexible and allow for the different
circumstances of the congregations and missional communities, which use them.
They are not wed to a particular style of worship.
Service of the Word, First Order, for example, provides a basic structure for the Sunday
gathering of a missional community meeting each week in the living room of one
of its members. It also provides the
structure for the liturgy of the Word for a new congregation’s weekly
celebration of Holy Communion held in a school cafeteria or a borrowed church
sanctuary. The service is tailorable to the size of the gathering, its
setting, its music resources, and so on. It is a service designed for a
church on mission.
What then is happening in the Prayer Book and Common Liturgy
Task Force that accounts for the rites and services that it has produced to
date and their decidedly unreformed Catholic character? Why isn’t the task
force producing worship resources geared toward the North American mission
field? Isn’t reaching and engaging the growing unchurched population of Canada
and the United States a major priority of the Anglican Church in North America and
a primary reason for its existence? One would think so from all the rhetoric
about church planting and new congregations. But as it turns out, the rhetoric
is just that—rhetoric. It does not reflect reality.
Former Archbishop of Nigeria Peter Akinola tied his support
of the Anglican Church in North America to its fulfillment of the Great
Commission. If the ACNA became nothing more than a refuge for disaffected Episcopalians
fleeing the Episcopal Church, he did not want anything to do with the ACNA. Yet
to one segment of the ACNA, that is exactly what it is—a refuge for disaffected
Episcopalians. This segment of the ACNA appears to be well represented in the
Prayer Book and Common Liturgy Task Force and the College of Bishops.
Anglo-Catholics and like-minded individuals have
historically gravitated to liturgical commissions or their equivalent in the
various Anglican jurisdictions. They have a vested interest in what goes into
a new Prayer Book. They recognize that it is the contents of a jurisdiction’s
Prayer Book that to a large part determines its official theology. They know
that if they can influence what goes in a new Prayer Book, they will also be
influencing what will be the jurisdiction’s official beliefs and practices. They
seek to ensure that the new book, if it does not embody their theological
views, is not unfriendly to them. For this reason one is likely to find more
Anglo-Catholics and individuals open to unreformed Catholic opinions on such
commissions than conservative evangelicals and other convictional Anglicans.
Bishop Robert Duncan, the bishop presently chairing the
Prayer Book and Common Liturgy Task Force, during his term of office as
Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America instructed the task force to
concentrate upon developing liturgies that would appeal to the tastes of people
in the ACNA. In other words, he told the task force to put the existing members
of the ACNA before the unchurched population of Canada and the United States in
designing rites and services for the new Prayer Book. This reflects a
maintenance mindset not a missionary one.
Bishop Duncan said nothing about developing liturgies that
were Scriptural, theologically-sound, consistent with the Anglican Formularies’
doctrinal and worship principles, and mission-oriented. Nothing at all!
Before he became Archbishop, Bishop Duncan had on several
occasions publicly rejected the Protestant Elizabethan Settlement, called for
a new settlement, and championed regression to the teaching and practices of
the pre-Reformation Church as a response to liberalism. The Elizabethan
Settlement has shaped historic Anglicanism since the sixteenth century. In the
role of Archbishop Bishop Duncan took great delight in using unreformed
Catholic practices at the consecration of new bishops and other ACNA
gatherings.
Serving as a special consultant to the Prayer Book and Common
Liturgy Task Force and a member of the College of Bishops’ Review Committee is
Bishop Keith Ackerman, former president of Forward in Faith North America
(FIFNA). FIFNA is an organization devoted to the promotion of unreformed
Catholic doctrine, order, and practice. It has gone on record as upholding all
the teachings of the first seven general councils of the supposedly undivided
Church before the East-West Schism in the eleventh century, the medieval
Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, and the medieval Catholic sacramental
system with its seven sacraments. These positions place FIFNA clearly at odds
with the Bible as well as historic Anglicanism. Bishop Ackerman has on a number
of occasions publicly called for a new Oxford Movement. The nineteenth
century Oxford Movement not only revived medieval Catholic doctrine and practices
that the English Reformers had rejected on firm biblical grounds but also introduced
later Roman Catholic innovations in doctrine and worship in the Anglican
Church.
Both the Prayer Book and Common Liturgy Task Force and the
College of Bishops are not treating convictional Anglicans as full stakeholders
in the Anglican Church in North America. They are catering to one segment of
the ACNA while discriminating against another. They are effectively
marginalizing convictional Anglicans while at the same time demanding their
cooperation, their loyalty, and their financial support.
Based upon the make-up and leadership of the Prayer Book and
Common Liturgy Task Force, the rites and services that the task force has
produced to date, and the degree of the College of Bishops' involvement in
their development, I seriously doubt that anyone who draws attention to the
task force’s decided bias toward unreformed Catholicism will receive a hearing
from the task force, much less a fair one.
Conservative evangelicals and other convictional Anglicans
in the Anglican Church in North America need to be weighing their options. I
cannot reiterate this enough. Time is running out for them. The time will come
and that time is near when it will be too late to do anything.
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