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Wouldn’t the formation of a second new province in North America break the North American Anglican Church into more pieces? Isn’t the North American Anglican Church fragmented enough already? Wouldn’t its formation further weaken the Anglican presence and witness in North America?
These three questions encapsulate what I anticipate would be two major objections to the formation of a second new province in North America. Before readers conclude that I am indulging in the fallacy of attacking a straw man, these two objections are the ones that I have heard the most often when I have in the past brought up the subject of forming a second new province in North America.
The problem with these two objection that they make a number of assumptions which upon close examination do not hold up.
The Anglican Church in North America was not organized as an ecclesiastical home for the several different conservative Anglican theological schools of thought that existed in the United States and Canada at the time of its formation. It was organized as a new home primarily for Anglo-Catholics and others sympathetic their particular form of doctrine and practices. This may have not been the intention of a number of the founding entities involved in its formation but it was clearly the aim at the back of the minds of the members of the Common Cause Roundtable that played a key role in the drafting of the Common Cause Theological Statement, which was subsequently incorporated into the ACNA’s draft constitution as the province’s Solemn Declarations. This aim, while evident in the Solemn Declarations and other provisions of the ACNA’s constitution clearly comes to the fore in ACNA’s canons, its catechism and its proposed 2019 Book of Common Prayer.
If the Anglican Church in North America had been organized as a new home for all these schools of thought, it would have been organized along more comprehensive lines in its doctrine and practices and more synodical lines in its governance. Its formularies would not favor one school of thought over the others. It governing structure would not permit the same school of thought to dominate its decision-making bodies.
A major contributing factor to the fragmentation that has characterized the St. Louis Continuing Anglican movement was that its Catholic Revivalist wing sought to impose its form of doctrine and practices on the rest of the movement. It caused a deep fracture in that movement. The ACNA’s Catholic Revivalist wing is doing the same thing in the Anglican Church in North America, causing a similar fracture in that province.
Rather than being a force for greater unity in the North American Anglican Church the Anglican Church in North America is the cause of division but not in the sense that the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church claim. The ACNA is the cause of division within the conservative wing of the North American Anglican Church. The Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church created their own fracture in the North American Anglican Church when they adopted the liberal agenda for the full inclusion of LGBT people in the life and ministry of the church and ordained non-celibate LGBT clergy and authorized same-sex marriage rites.
The formation of second province in North America would recognize the existence of a fracture that the ACNA’s Catholic Revivalist wing has already caused. This fracture is one which that wing has no interest in repairing since closing the rift would require that wing to relinquish the gains that it has made in the Anglican Church in North America. Repairing the fracture is not in its self-interest.
A second fracture in the ACNA is the issue of the ordination of women. Those opposed to women’s ordination in pressing for a moratorium on the practice are contributing to the widening of that fissure.
When the ACNA’s bishops gather together twice a year, they may give a nod to the unity of the province. But the Anglican Church in North America is already fractured and any unity is an illusion. Instead of being a symbol of unity, the bishops are actually one of the causes of its fracturing. Rather than working to make the province more comprehensive in its doctrine and practices, the College of Bishops has been working to create an environment in the province, which is unfriendly to all conservative schools of thought but one—Catholic Revivalism. Rather than working to make the province more synodical in its governance, the College of Bishops has been encroaching about the authority of the other decision-making bodies in the province.
As for weakening the Anglican presence and witness in North America the formation of a second province in North America would have the opposite effect: it would strengthen the Anglican presence and witness in the Canada, Mexico, and the United States and their overseas territories. It would create a genuine Anglican presence and witness in North America, a presence and witness that is firmly built on the doctrinal foundation of historic Anglicanism—the Holy Scriptures and the historic Anglican formularies.
The ACNA’s constitution relegates any reference to the Jerusalem Declaration, which upholds the historic Anglican formularies as essential to a genuine Anglican identity, to its preamble where it is incidental to the narrative of the province’s formation and is not binding in anyway upon the province.
The ACNA’s Solemn Declarations equivocate in their acceptance of the authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion. They dilute the authority of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as an integral part of Anglicanism’s longstanding standard of doctrine and practice.
The ACNA’s canons go further and take positions that are contrary to the doctrine and principles laid out in the Thirty-Nine Articles.
The ACNA’s catechism is a hodgepodge of Arminian, Eastern Orthodox, Semi-Pelagian, and Roman Catholic doctrine. It misinterprets the Thirty-Nine Articles in several places and conflicts with the Articles in a number of places. Missing from the ACNA’s catechism is the Augustinian-Reformed doctrine that characterizes historic Anglicanism.
The ACNA’s 2019 proposed Book of Common Prayer embodies Roman Catholic doctrine and practices. It may borrow texts from the 1662 Prayer Book but in doctrine and liturgical usages it has little in common with the classical Anglican Prayer Book. The Roman Catholic Church also cannibalized texts from The Book of Common Prayer to produce a traditional language liturgy for the Anglican Ordinariate but like the ACNA’s 2019 proposed Prayer Book it also has little in common with the 1662 Prayer Book.
The catechism and the 2019 proposed Prayer Book are what the Anglican Church in North America is presenting to an unsuspecting public as representative of genuine Anglicanism. To my mind what the ACNA is doing comes pretty close to fraud. The criminal intent to deceive may be missing but the ACNA is clearly misleading people.
What is happening cannot be entirely dismissed as ignorance on the part of the ACNA’s leaders. A number of them do know better. They know what they are packaging as Anglicanism is not historic Anglicanism. They are a part of a movement that has sought to replace historic Anglicanism with its own form of doctrine and practices.
Former ACNA Archbishop Bishop Robert Duncan, for example, has called for a “new settlement;” Bishop Keith Ackerman for a “new Oxford movement.” Presiding Bishop Ray Sutton has played an influential role in leading the Reformed Episcopal Church away from the evangelical principles of its founders into what he claims is the mainstream of the Anglican Church, into what bears a strong resemblance to Catholic Revivalism in its form of doctrine and practices.
A number of the ACNA’s clergy and congregations have never been exposed to genuine Anglicanism. They may come from an Episcopal background. By the 1960s Catholic Modernism had become a major influence in the Episcopal Church. It had both Anglo-Catholic and Broad Church antecedents. In the 1960s and 1970s the Episcopal Church experienced the charismatic renewal movement and in the 1980s and 1990s the third-wave movement. They would also influence thinking in the Episcopal Church.
A number of these clergy and congregations may come from denominational or non-denominational backgrounds in which an Arminian-Pentecostal theology is the prevailing theology. They may have been influenced by one or both of the forms of Catholic Revivalism in the Anglican Church in North America—the Anglo-Catholic movement and the Ancient-Future Church movement.
The Ancient-Future Church movement had its beginnings in the Episcopal Church in which the late Robert Webber was a major figure in that movement. Webber’s books had a strong influence outside of the Episcopal Church, particularly among evangelicals and charismatics. One of the results was the formation of the convergence churches which blended liturgical worship with Pentecostal and later Roman Catholic theology.
While the Anglican Church in North America claims to be Anglican, independent Catholic or convergence might be a more accurate description of the denomination, based upon its governing documents, catechism, and proposed service book. The ACNA certainly does not represent authentic historic Anglicanism.
Except for the clergy, congregations, and dioceses that are fully committed to biblical Christianity and historic Anglicanism, genuine Anglicanism is in very short supply in the Anglican Church in North America. Consequently the ACNA cannot be viewed as a strong Anglican presence and witness in North America. What would be weakened by the formation of a second province in North America would not the Anglican presence and witness but the mistaken perception that the ACNA is genuinely Anglican.
The Anglican formularies are the touchstone of historic Anglicanism. They distinguish the real thing from the bogus. The Thirty-Nine Articles serve four important purposes. I am for a large part quoting what J. I. Packer wrote in The Thirty-Nine Articles: Their Place and Use Today. The Articles identify what the Anglican Church stands for in a divided Christianity. They safeguard the apostolic gospel. They guard the pulpit against anti-evangelical heresy. They circumscribe comprehensiveness with the gospel.
In equivocating over accepting the authority of the Articles in its Solemn Declarations and then disregarding their authority in its canons, its catechism, and its proposed service book, the Anglican Church in North American not only seeks to change Anglican identity but also the gospel. The doctrine expressed directly or indirectly in the ACNA’s canons, catechism, and proposed service book and the related practices carry a theological freight that not only promotes a different identity but also proclaim a different gospel.
Whatever language a province may, for example, use to avoid referring to Confirmation, Ordination, Marriage, Penance, and Unction as sacraments—sacramental rites, sacramental ministries, church sacraments, and so forth—that province in viewing these rites as means of grace has aligned itself with the sacramental system of the Roman Catholic Church. It has left the door wide open for other Roman Catholic doctrines such as actual and sanctifying grace and Roman Catholic views of justification and sanctification associated with these doctrines. It has tacitly abandoned the New Testament, Reformed, and Anglican doctrine of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. It has set foot on a different path than the genuine Anglican Way.
Bringing together into a single province all the clergy, congregations and dioceses that are fully committed to biblical Christianity and historic Anglicanism is a critical step toward creating a genuine Anglican presence and witness in North America. It would establish a much-needed network of churches for planting and growing new churches that share this commitment, remissioning existing churches; training,ordaining, and licensing clergy; equipping other church leaders; and developing and distributing resources for the use of churches both in and outside this network. It would provide the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans with a much-needed second option. Members of the FCA who are fully committed to biblical Christianity and historic Anglicanism would not be faced with the awkward choice of supporting an ecclesial body with which they have no affinity other than a traditional view of marriage and human sexuality.
A string of kites can fly higher than a single kite. Each kite provides more lift, enabling the entire string to fly to great heights. Several churches together can also do far more than a single church alone. Imagine what several networks of churches can do.
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