AUDIO
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Archbishop Peter Jensen's Christmas Message 2011 on the centrality of Jesus to human history
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The Washington Times of June 17 under the banner of 'New Anglican Church poses dilemma' commented that the inauguration of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) posed a “dilemma for the worldwide Anglican Communion over who represents Anglicanism in the United States and Canada”.
The formation of ACNA is a direct challenge to the legitimacy of The Episcopal Church (TEC). Four dioceses have left TEC: San Joaquin in California, Quincy in Illinois; Fort Worth in Texas and Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. The new Province includes 11 Northern Virginia parishes, some of which pre-date the American War of Independence. It is no surprise then that TEC is litigating over millions of dollars worth of property.
Reaction to the election of Gene Robinson and the authorising of same-sex blessings forced the commissioning of the Windsor Report and the establishment of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Panel of Reference. Two of the Panel's references were the Church of the Redeemer in Florida Diocese and St John’s Shaughnessy in the Diocese of New Westminster, Canada. Despite visits from panel members and week-long conversations, both references failed to provide any meaningful help to the congregations. The Florida congregation and some 20 other Florida clergy ejected by the bishop have now found a new home in the new province. St John's, with other Canadian churches grouped as the Anglican Network in Canada, has also found lodging in the new province.
The ACNA has an average attendance of 100,000, which is more than the number of Anglicans in 13 of the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion. So far seven provinces recognise ACNA in place of TEC. There is no formal process of recognition in the Anglican Communion by any of the so-called 'instruments of communion'.
The GAFCON Primates' Council has welcomed ACNA as fulfilling the Jerusalem Declaration aspiration, 'we believe the time is now ripe for the formation of a province in North America for the federation currently known as Common Cause Partnership to be recognised by the Primates' Council'.
This new Province in North America provides a constitutional framework for the exercise of Christian ministry in accordance with Anglican principles and doctrines.
Can we pray that, under God's providential hand, the new province will be one where the Scriptures are studied with true understanding, false doctrines are driven out, and good works abound?
A Compromised Consitution which affirms the 39 articles in their " literal and grammatical sense" and their role in defining doctrne and settling disputesbut allows their meaning to be ignored and flouted.
One of the Bishops subscribining is Jack Iker of Fort worth..he was recently at Walsingham, where he prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary and claimed to preside at benediction..worship of the Holy Commumion elements. All such actions contradict the 39 articles.
Indeed the opening ceremony of ACNA took place in a Cathedral in Bedford, Texas where there is a tabernacle, venerated statues and the smell of incense in the air. The Cathedral website advertises confessions and a Rosary prayer group. Within ACNA there are at least 200 such parishes and four dioceses of the most advanced Anglo-Catholic nature.
1. They make fools of Sydney Anglican leaders who have supported the ACNA, adopting doctrinal positions that these leaders do not hold nor teach and represent a repudiation of their doctrinal views.
2. Sydney Anglicans who are evangelical and Reformed in their doctrinal views and who take a job in North America would not be able to join an ACNA church without compromising their convictions.
3. Sydney Anglicans who are evangelical and Reformed in their doctrinal views and accept a ministerial or teaching position in the ACNA would not be able to minister or teach in the ACNA without compromising their convictions.
4. Entities like the Diocese of Sydney, More Theological College and the Anglican Church League would not be able to enter into ministry partnerships with the ACNA without subscribing unreservedly to its doctrinal positions, which include the recognition of other doctrinal authorities beside the Bible, the Creeds, and the Anglican formularies; recognition of seven sacraments; the Real Presence; baptismal regeneration; recognition of bishops and episcopacy as being of the essence of the Church; and tactual succession. These doctrinal positions, if not stated in the constitution and canons, are implied.
5. Under the ACNA definition of Anglican orthodoxy Sydney Anglicans are not orthodox Anglicans.
6. The ACNA includes some of the most vocal proponents of Sydney’ expulsion from the Anglican Communion for lay and diaconal administration of the Lord’s Supper.
To be continued.
In the light of the foregoing Archbishop Jensen and the Standing Committee of the Diocese of Sydney may want to reconsider the welcome they extended to the “new province†and issue a statement calling upon the ACNA to take a more comprehensive position toward Reformed-evangelicals. However, there are those in the ACNA who might regard such a statement as meddling in the affairs of an autonomous province like their brethren in The Episcopal Church and become even more opposed to making the new church genuinely comprehensive as conservative Anglicans understand comprehensiveness. When members of the Provincial Council, the highest governing body in the ACNA, proposed that the partisan doctrinal position of one of the Fundamental Declarations in the constitution should be modified to make the new church more comprehensive, the Anglo-Catholic bishops were opposed to any substantive change. Those who made the proposal backed down out of fear of a church split. In this sense Anglo-Catholics leaders in the ACNA might be seen as holding the new church hostage with the other leaders tiptoeing around them lest they upset the former. To be fair to the Anglo-Catholics in the ACNA, there are also other dynamics operative in the new church.
Plus the fact that the Reformed Episcopal Church had to reject its former position of welcoming non-episcopally ordained clergywithout re-ordination. Several evangelicals have walked out and mauinatain that the original evnagelicalism of tne REC has been subverted.
Just wait until the legal cases start going against ACNA big time.
So it is possible for Word of God as given to St Paul to be re-evaluated on women but not on gays!
This is a reformed church proclaimed Duncan.
In defiance of Reformed Anglicaism all the following are found in ACNA.....
Prayers for the dead
Invocation of the Saints
Requiem Masses
Eucharistic reservation
Adoration and worship of the Communion elements.
All tolerated in the Anglican Church in North America.
THIS IS a GREAT reformation according to Duncan ...yet the doctrines of Rome ( thrown out at the birth of the Anglican reformation) are all back in place. Despite the fact the Church has in Roman Catholic understanding no valid orders to celebrate them !
The situation that is facing conservative evangelicals is not only partisan doctrinal tone of the ACNA constitution and canons but the form of governace and modes of church leader selection that they establish. The environment that they will create will not be highly conducive to the growth of traditional evangelical Anglicanism in the ACNA. Conservative evangelicals are widely scattered through the judicatories of the ACNA and they are poorly-represented in the councils of the ACNA. Those who do speak for them run into substantial resistence to even modest proposals to make the ACNA more comprehensive. Conservative evangelicals have no organization to advocate for them like the Anglo-Catholics. A number of those who identify themselves as evangelicals in the ACNA sit rather loosely to the doctrinal distinctives of classical evangelical Anglican but have appointed themselves as spokesman for evangelicals in the ACNA. They are claiming that the ACNA is Reformed enough for evangelicals to live with-.
Which Gospel... David Short's Evangelical gospel in Vancover or Bishop Iker Anglo -Catholic one in Fort Worth?
That is the crucial question.
Seriously..the issue is ....simple are the evangelical and anglo-catholic
Gospels equally acceptable...that is the premise of ACNA..and evangelical Sydeny is endorsing it.
Agent provocateur?! In the States I am accused of being a "shill of TEC," on the lunatic fringe of Anglicanism, outside of the mainstream, etc. Sydney Anglicans can take comfort in the fact that the same people who regard conservative evangelicals like myself as a part of a "fringe element" also view them in the same light.
What is an interesting development is that ACNAers are using the same kinds of arguments to dismiss the concerns of people like myself as the liberals and revisionists used to dismiss their concerns--arguments like we represent the majority in the ACNA, those who are unhappy with how things are unfolding in the ACNA are a tiny minority, etc.
Point this to their attention and they are likely to become extremely defensive. Just as liberals and revisionists had no difficulty bashing those who did not share their perceptions of TEC, inclusiveness, same sex blessings, and the like but were extremely offended by anything conservative Anglicans said, ACNA "true believers" react in the same way to those who do not share their perceptions of the ACNA. It is like deja vieux.
As I have pointed elsewhere on the Internet, the ACNA is like an European cuckoo chick. It is squawking loudly for the food while evangelicals around the world shove worms down its throat in the form of recognition, welcomes, and that sort of things. At the same time its constitution and canons effectively throw the evangelical chicks and unhatched eggs out of the nest.
Personally if I were in the US, I would be in the PCA, OPC or EPC.
When did the "historic orthodox faith" become sacramental salvation--salvation by the sacraments and good works--then? TEC certainly is infected by heresy and liberalism but it does have a remnant of evangelical Christians who believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross to reconcile God to humankind and those who placed their faith in Jesus Christ are reckoned as righteous in God's sight, not for their own works or deservings but for the merits of Jesus Christ. TEC is no longer a friendly environment for evangelical Christians but neither is the ACNA for evangelical Christians who stand squarely in the Reformed tradition of Anglicanism. The cuckoo chick may be cheeping, "I believe in the Trinity; I believe in the Incarnate Son." However, that does not make the chick one of Reformed-Evangelicals own. Nor does it mitigate its thrusting of Reformed-Evangelicals out of the nest, hatched and unhatched.
A number of Anglo-Catholics in the ACNA would be only too glad to see Reformed-Evangelicals leave the ACNA for another denomination. If you have studied the history of the Anglican church, you know that the more extreme Anglo-Catholics have been trying to do this since the nineteenth century. They would love to eject the Reformed-Evangelicals as the Restoration bishops ejected the Puritan-Presbyterians in the seventeenth century--to purge North American Anglicanism of every vestige of its evangelical and Reformed heritage.
Continued from above.
Then they could claim that Anglo-Catholicism alone is genuine Anglicanism, something that they already do from their own pulpits and in their writings. The English Reformation, Protestantism, and Reformed Anglicanism were aberrations that temporarily got the English Church on the wrong track but the Oxford Movement got it back on the right track again, just as the Counter-Reformation got Christianity back on the right track where it was permitted to undo the work of the Reformation. When Reformed-Evangelicals in the Anglican Church give ground, Reformed-Evangelicals outside the Anglican Church also loose ground.