Why Can’t We All Get Along? Catholics and Protestants in the Anglican Church in North America

By Robin G. Jordan

In the article “The Anglican Continuum – Some Thoughts for Its Renewal” the late Dr. Peter Toon championed the comprehensiveness that he understood to be one of the finer characteristics of Anglicanism and which Douglas Bess, author of Divided We Stand: A History of the Continuing Anglican Movement, dismisses as “muddle-headed thinking.” Bess by his own admission is an Anglo-Catholic. While he tries to be objective and is for a large part successful, his sympathy for the Catholic wing of the Continuum is evident. Bess opines that Dr. Toon did not understand the Catholic Revivalists in the Continuum and was fooling himself he believed that they would give thought to what he was saying.

While Dr Toon may have been correct in his assumption that comprehensiveness is one of the better characteristics of the Anglican tradition, Bess was right in his observation that this view of Anglicanism carries no weight with Catholic Revivalists. They view Anglican comprehensiveness as a weakness.

Bess focuses on Catholic Revivalists’ dogmatism as the reason why they see Anglican comprehensiveness as a weakness. However, their dogmatism is not the only reason that they view it that way.

From Catholic Revivalist perspective Anglican comprehensiveness is a weakness that they historically have been able to exploit, promoting the idea when it served their purposes, using it to establish credentials for themselves in the Anglican Church and to support their claim that they are a legitimate Anglican theological school of thought. Having used it to gain a foothold in the Anglican Church, they fear that others may take advantage of it in the same way.

When Catholic Revivalists have promoted comprehensiveness, it has been lopsided. It is a comprehensiveness that makes room for their beliefs and practices but not for the beliefs and practices of other schools of churchmanship. It is a one-way street.

One may champion Anglicanism as a convergence of theological streams—three streams, one river—as long as unreformed Catholicism is the main current of the river and evangelicalism and Pentecostalism are just eddies near the river’s banks. One may champion liturgical revision as long as it produces rites and services that are expressions of unreformed Catholicism or countenance unreformed Catholic beliefs and practices.

Self-preservation motivates Catholic Revivalists to oppose a policy of comprehensiveness in the Anglican Church in North America as much as dogmatism. They fear what may happen should they lose their grip on the levers of power in the ACNA. In the Episcopal Church progressive liberals exploited comprehensiveness to topple Anglo-Catholics from their position of leadership in that denomination as Anglo-Catholics had previously toppled its Evangelicals.

In the Anglican Church of North America Catholic Revivalists have taken ground in such areas as governance, the catechism, the ordinal, and the proposed Book of Common Prayer but fear the loss of this ground. They have not made much headway in their efforts to ban women’s ordination and to secure an all male priesthood. This has prompted Bishop Jack Iker to declare a state of impaired communion in the Anglican Church of North America.

The issue of women in ordained ministry is a perennial topic of discussion at meetings of the College of Bishops. While Bishop Iker has called for an ACNA equivalent of the Rodgers Report and accused former Archbishop Duncan of obstructing such a report, ten years after the formation of the province may a little too late for the kind of report that he wants to see the Task Force on Women’s Ordination produce. The only purpose that such a report would serve at this late date is to provided  Bishop Iker and other opponents of women’s ordination in the ACNA with leverage to use against supporters of women’s ordination in the province.

The Rodgers Report was produced three years after the formation of the Anglican Mission in America. Its recommendation was that “the Anglican Mission in America should maintain its present moratorium on the ordination of women, at least to the priesthood and episcopate, until a consensus emerges within the Anglican Communion that can be declared to be such by a Lambeth Conference.”

Since that time a lot of water has flowed under the proverbial bridge. The leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury has fallen into disrepute in the Global South provinces. Anglicans in the Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States as well as in the Gobal South look to the GAFCON Primates and the Global South Primates for leadership. Global South bishops boycotted the last Lambeth Conference. To the Global South provinces the bishops assembled at Lambeth no longer speak the mind of the Anglican Communion.

The Anglican Church in North America, unlike the Anglican Mission in America, did not impose a moratorium on the ordination of women to the presbyterate only their ordination to the episcopate. The constitution of the ACNA guarantees the right of dioceses that support women’s ordination to ordain women as deacons and priests.

As for the Global South provinces, while some do not ordain women, a large number of them do. A consensus is no more likely to emerge in these provinces than in the Anglican Communion as a whole. The panel for whom Bishop John Rodgers wrote the report knew that the emergence of a consensus was unlikely in the foreseeable future. It simply provided an after-the-fact rationale for the moratorium.

The overall drift in the Anglican Communion has been toward the acceptance of women’s ordination. That drift does not show any signs of changing directions. A reversal on woman’s ordination in the Anglican Church in North America might prove risky. It might alienate not only the supporters of women’s ordination in the ACNA but also the Global South provinces that ordain women.

Where does this leave ACNA clergy and congregations who place a high value on the Protestant Reformation and the historic Anglican beliefs and practices grounded in the Holy Scriptures and the Reformation? Frustrated in their efforts to ban women’s ordination, Catholic Revivalists can be expected to double-down and not to budge an inch in response to calls for greater comprehensiveness in the province. Even if they are successful in imposing such a ban, they cannot be expected to relinquish any ground that they have taken.

ACNA clergy and congregations that are committed to remaining faithful to the Bible and historic Anglicanism cannot ignore these developments. They are going to be affected by the developments if they are not already affected by them. Their viability as a theological school of thought in the Anglican Church in North America is at stake. This is a lesson that they should have learned from what happened in the Episcopal Church and continues to happen in that denomination. The remaining conservative Episcopal dioceses and conservative Episcopal parishes and missions have not been able to insulate themselves from the agenda of the progressive liberals in the denomination.

May be you are thinking to yourself, “Is it really as bad as that in the Anglican Church in North America?” Consider this. Does a friend and ally put in place a form of church government that does not allow you much voice in the affairs of the province? Does a friend and ally compile and endorse a catechism that conflicts with the historic Anglican formularies on such key issues as the order of salvation and the sacraments, favors the position of a particular side of an issue over which Anglicans have historically been divided, for example, baptismal regeneration; and espouses doctrine, implicitly if not plainly expressed, that historic Anglicanism has viewed as unscriptural? Does a friend and ally prepare and endorse proposed rites and services that expresses doctrine which the English Reformers rejected on solid scriptural grounds and countenances practices that they rejected for the same reason?

The obvious answer is “no.” A friend and ally does not do that sort of thing. However, that is exactly what the supposed friend and ally of Protestant Anglicans in the ACNA has done, proving by these actions to be no friend or ally.

My grandparents and my mother loved to quote proverbs. Some were taken from the Bible; others were taken from literature or were folk sayings. One of these proverbs was “actions speak louder than words.” What matters most is not what people say but what they do.

If the Anglican Church in North America is not making a genuine effort to make room for all the schools of churchmanship of conservative North American Anglicans in the here and now, the ACNA cannot be expected to do so at some later date. The culture of the province is being established at this very moment and it is not a culture that genuinely welcomes confessional Anglicans and other Protestant Anglicans. It is a culture that views them as an obstacle to the aspirations of the Catholic wing of the province.

Since it is not politically expedient to bar Protestant Anglicans from the province or to expel them, the province’s Catholic wing has adopted an alternative strategy of preventing them from becoming a significant influence in the province. We see that strategy in play in the form of church government, the catechism, and the proposed rites and services.

I am no wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. This strategy is a natural outgrowth of the Catholic wing’s conviction that its beliefs and practices are the only valid ones, its desire for self-preservation, and its desire to be the dominant influence in the province and to shape the province along the lines of how it believes that the church should be. Whatever lip service it may give to cooperation with Protestant Anglicans, it is not willing to put up with a potential rival in its midst. After all, it has an almost 200 year history of believing that it and it alone truly represents what it means to be Anglican.

The situation in the Anglican Church in North America is a life-and-death one for Protestant Anglicans because the province’s Catholic wing is creating an environment that not only is unfriendly to historic Anglicanism but also is intended to discourage its growth. This is evident from the ACNA’s form of church government, its catechism, and its proposed service book.

This brings us to the thorny question of whether Catholics and Protestants can coexist in the Anglican Church in North America? Where Catholics and Protestants do coexist in an Anglican jurisdiction, it is in the kind of environment in which a variety of schools of churchmanship are tolerated at the local level—at the level of the parish or mission—and at the jurisdictional level there is a commitment to the dictum, “Unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, and in all things, charity.”

The governing documents of the jurisdiction will contain a statement like the Fundamental Declarations of the Anglican Church of Australia.

1.The Anglican Church of Australia, being a part of the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of Christ, holds the Christian Faith as professed by the Church of Christ from primitive times and in particular as set forth in the creeds known as the Nicene Creed and the Apostles’ Creed.

2. This Church receives all the canonical scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as being the ultimate rule and standard of faith given by inspiration of God and containing all things necessary for salvation.

3. This Church will ever obey the commands of Christ, teach His doctrine, administer His sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion, follow and uphold His discipline and preserve the three orders of bishops, priests and deacons in the sacred ministry.

The jurisdiction’s governing documents may also affirm the doctrine and principles of the Church of England embodied in its historic formularies—The Thirty-Articles of Religion of 1571, The Book of Common Prayer of 1662, and The Form of Making, Ordering, and Consecrating Deacons, Priests, and Bishops of 1661.

The theological school of thought that has the most influence in the jurisdiction may espouse a moderate form of Anglo-Catholicism or a moderate form of the “Protestant reformed religion by law established,” which is tolerant of the existence of divergent opinions in the jurisdiction provided these opinions do not stray outside the limits of the comprehensiveness, which the jurisdiction has adopted. Its adherents do not feel a need to force their own particular beliefs and practices upon the other clergy and congregations with which they share the jurisdiction. They are secure enough in their position in the jurisdiction to take a low-key approach, recognizing that these other clergy and congregations may come around to their way of thinking over time.

Catholics and Protestants can co-exist in this kind of environment as long as the dogmatists of one wing or the other do not start jockeying to become the exclusive theological school of thought in the jurisdiction. When that happens, any thought of coexistence goes out the window. Any detente between the two wings will break down.

This is what is happening in the Anglican Church in North America. By their actions the dogmatists of the ACNA’s Catholic wing are signaling that they intend to become the exclusive theological of thought in the jurisdiction. The only two groups that will be tolerated in the province are those which subscribe to their beliefs and practices or are sympathetic to them. The second group is tolerated out of the expectation that it eventually will subscribe to these beliefs and practices.

What is developing is the kind of situation that calls for the type of intervention to which the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans has committed itself—at least on paper. Whether the FCA can bring itself to intervene in what was supposed to be GAFCON in North America is an entirely different matter.

One way of looking at the developments in the Anglican Church in North America is to see it as a test of the resolve of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans to truly stand for what they claim to uphold. Is the FCA willing to intervene in a GAFCON member-province if the developments in that province warrant a FCA intervention? If the FCA cannot bring itself to take that step then its usefulness as a defender of biblical Christianity and historic Anglicanism must be questioned. It is a paper tiger. All talk and no action.