A New Year, a New Prayer Book

By Robin G. Jordan

The College of Bishops of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) will be meeting in January as it has since the formation of the ACNA. I am anticipating that the 50-member College of Bishops will approve the final version of the proposed ACNA Book of Common Prayer at that meeting. The question is whether the proposed service book will be submitted to the Provincial Assembly for final approval. The ACNA canons do not outline a procedure for the adoption of a prayer book for the province.

Title II Canon 6 Section 1 states:

“The Book of Common Prayer as set forth by the Church of England in 1662, together with the Ordinal attached to the same, are received as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline, and, with the Books which preceded it, as the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship. The Book of Common Prayer of the Province shall be the one adopted by the Anglican Church in North America [italics mine]. All authorized Books of Common Prayer of the originating jurisdictions shall be permitted for use in this Church."

Section 2 of the same canon goes on to state:

“It is understood that there is a diversity of uses in the Province. In order to use these rich liturgies most advantageously, it is the responsibility of the Bishop with jurisdiction to ensure that the forms used in Public Worship and the Administration of the Sacraments be in accordance with Anglican Faith and Order and that nothing be established that is contrary to the Word of God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures.”

This section charges the bishop of an ACNA diocese (or network) with responsibility of ensuring that the forms of service used within his jurisdiction conform with the “Anglican Faith and Order,” as he interprets it. It also charges the diocesan bishop with ensuring that these forms confirm with “the Word of God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures.” The latter is an interesting choice of phrase since it permits a modernist view of Scripture and leaves the determination of what is the Word of God in the Scriptures to the diocesan bishop. It contrasts sharply with the classical Anglican view of the Scriptures as “the Word of God written.”

While this section may be interpreted as granting the diocesan bishop final authority in regards to what forms of service are used in his jurisdiction, or as recognizing such authority as inherently that of a diocese’s ordinary, depending upon your point of view, it is more than a stretch to claim that it authorizes the College of Bishops to adopt a prayer book for the province.

But when it comes the procedure for the adoption of a prayer book for the province, Title II is silent. It is the writer’s considered opinion that this omission was intentional rather than an oversight. The ACNA’s Catholic Revivalist wing, which has exerted a degree of influence upon the development of the form of governance of the province, its ordinal, its catechism, and its proposed rites and services disproportionate to the size of that wing, and which dominates the College of Bishops, did not want to tie itself to a procedure that it could not control.

Further on in the ACNA canons we read:

“By the tradition of Christ’s One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, Bishops are consecrated for the whole Church and are successors of the Apostles through the grace of the Holy Spirit given to them. They are chief missionaries and chief pastors, guardians and teachers of doctrine, and administrators of godly discipline and governance.” (Title III Canon 8 Section 2)

The wording of this section is adapted from the canons of the Roman Catholic Church and reflects an unreformed Catholic view of the office of bishop. It is the position of the ACNA’s Catholic Revivalist wing. For those who may unfamiliar with the term “Catholic Revivalist,” it refers to a movement in the Anglican Church to return the church to a mythical golden age of the Church before the Great Schism that divided the Eastern and Western Churches in the eleventh century.

Former ACNA Archbishop Robert Duncan who now chairs the ACNA Liturgy Task Force voiced Catholic Revivalist sentiments when in the days leading up to the formation of the ACNA he called for “a new settlement” to replace the Elizabethan Settlement and the turning back of the clock in the Church to an earlier time, to the time of the lord bishop, arguing that regression was an appropriate response to the crisis besetting the Anglican Church. The Elizabethan Settlement shaped classical Anglicanism. Anglicanism’s classical formularies have their origins during the reign of Elizabeth I, as does its evangelical, Protestant, reformed character.

Bishop Keith Ackerman who is member of the Council of Forward in Faith North America, a leading Catholic Revivalist organization, and a member of the ACNA Liturgy Task Force articulated the Catholic Revivalist view of the episcopal office when he said, “The bishops are the governors of the Church.” It is a view that is at odds with the more reformed view of classical Anglicanism, which limits the authority of the episcopal office and subjects it to that of the magistrate, historically in the case of the Church of England to the King and Parliament. The latter view has ancient antecedents in the role that the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire played in the Eastern Church and other princes played in the Church in their realms. It is also noteworthy that the canons of Roman Catholic Church acknowledge in their abolition of that practice the historical practice of the prince of a realm serving as the nominator for the bishops in his realm,

The modern expression of the classical Anglican view of the episcopal office is the synodical form of church governance in which the authority and responsibilities of the bishop are clearly laid out in the governing documents of the province, to which the bishop is subject as any other member of the church, and the government of the church is shared with representatives of the clergy and the laity.

Even the Caroline High Churchmen who had a elevated view of the office of bishop acknowledged the subordinate role of that office to the magistrate as represented by the King. It was the King who issued the writ for the election of a new bishop and it was also the King who nominated the candidate for a particular office. The chapter of the cathedral then elected the candidate that the King had nominated. A number of the Caroline High Churchmen were raised to the episcopate because Charles I favored their Arminian theological views as well as their High Church liturgical practices.

In the nineteenth century the authority of the office of bishop would become a major point of contention. In England a series of judicial rulings would affirm that bishops were subject to the canons of the church and to the acts of Parliament as any other clergyman. They were not above the law. In the United States, however, the view that the bishop was a law unto himself prevailed in some Episcopal dioceses. The latter view has its share of adherents in the ACNA today.

One is hard put to find any grounds for the notion that the College of Bishops has authority to approve a prayer book for the province in the ACNA constitution. The ACNA canons refer readers to Article X of the ACNA constitution for “the membership and chief work” of the College of Bishops. Article X, Section 1, states: “The chief work of the College of Bishops shall be the propagation and defense of the Faith and Order of the Church, and in service as the visible sign and expression of the Unity of the Church.” As broad as this description of the College of Bishop’s “chief work” may appear to be, it is also more than a stretch to interpret it as giving the College of Bishops the last word on the proposed ACNA prayer book.

The bishops tacitly acknowledged that themselves when they adopted a resolution calling for an amendment to the canons dropping the requirement that all churches in the ACNA must use the prayer book adopted by the ACNA and permitting the continued use of “all authorized Books of Common Prayer of the originating jurisdictions” in the province. The ACNA canons were subsequently amended to this effect.

However, the revision did not go far enough. It did not outline a procedure for the adoption of a prayer book for the province. It also did not make provision for networks of churches within the ACNA to develop and adopt service books for their own use along the lines of those adopted by the Dioceses of Ballarat and Sydney in the Anglican Church of Australia.

Among the defects of the proposed ACNA prayer book and the various other prayer books presently used in the province is that they were not designed with congregations on the North American mission field in mind. They were designed for use in different times and places. They are insufficiently flexible and adaptable to the circumstances of twenty-first century North American congregations.

While the proposed ACNA prayer book incorporates texts from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, its doctrine and liturgical practices are a radical departure from that classical Anglican formulary. The proposed book goes further than the Episcopal Church’s 1928 and 1979 Prayer Books in the direction of unreformed Catholicism. It not only does not conform to the standard of the 1662 Prayer Book, a standard affirmed by the Jerusalem Declaration, but also to the standard of the other classic Anglican formularies, a standard also affirmed by that declaration. It points to what may be an inherent weakness of North American Anglicanism if it can be characterized as such. It tends to go off in directions that lead away from biblical Christianity and classical Anglicanism—so-called “progressive Christianity” in the Episcopal Church and Catholic Revivalism in the ACNA. Neither is true to what the late Peter Toon called the “Anglican Way.”

At this stage greater scrutiny of the proposed ACNA prayer book, its doctrine and its liturgical practices, and whether they conform to the standard of the classical Anglican formularies, is called for—scrutiny not only inside the ACNA but in all the branches of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. Among the questions that need to be asked is, “Does this book stand for what the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans stand for? Does it stand for something else?” In its commentary on the Jerusalem Declaration the GAFCON Theological Resource Group calls for such a scrutiny of prayer books that deviate from the standard of the classical Anglican formularies. It is the lack of this kind of accountability that has contributed to the present state of the Anglican Communion.

Any vote on the book in favor of its adoption in the College of Bishops should be treated as the endorsement by a group that has a vested interest in its adoption and not as final. A hold should be put on any vote on the book in the Provincial Assembly until a thorough scrutiny of the book has been completed and needed revisions made.

At this stage more attention needs to be given to equipping ACNA congregations with practical tools for use on the mission field. To this end the congregations themselves may be in a far better position to develop such tools than a task force that is removed from the everyday realities of gospel work. Rites and services that may enrich the worship of the cathedral and seminary chapel often prove impractical in the setting of fire station community rooms, school cafeterias, storefronts, and other non-traditional venues where twenty-first century congregations gather for worship. These types of settings require far greater flexibility, brevity, and simplicity than the proposed ACNA prayer book offers