December 12, 2008
Wondering what all the fuss in the Anglican/Episcopal Church is all about?
In a nutshell, said the Rev. Peter Frank, director of communications for the Anglican Communion Network, “It is over competing views about who God is, who Jesus is, and what we are going to do about it.”
According to Frank and other disaffected Anglicans, the Anglican Church has lost its theological and traditional footing by forgotten who they are and what they believe. Some within the denominational hierarchy have strayed so far in their theological views as to propose – incredibly – a religion without God.
While there have long been voices within the Anglican Church calling for a return to foundational principles, the Common Cause Partnership is the first to unite those voices into a cohesive body.
With the Common Cause Partnership acting as midwife, on December 3, the new Anglican Church in North America was born. At a news conference and worship service at the Wheaton Evangelical Free Church in suburban Chicago, bishops, clergy and lay leaders from the United States and Canada unveiled a provisional constitution and the first set of canons.
The new movement unites 700 orthodox and breakaway Anglican congregations, representing roughly 100,000 members. Some within the leadership believe the movement will eventually be recognized as a province – the Anglican term for the church’s largest regional jurisdiction – by many of the world’s Anglican leaders.
“The purpose of this province is to share the Gospel of Jesus Christ and his transforming love in the United States, Canada and beyond,” said Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, moderator of the Common Cause Partnership.
Frank says that the new organization has received a letter of support from seven archbishops as well as other primates in the Anglican union.
The archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has left open the doors of communications as well. But, said Frank, it remains to be seen how the relationship between the new Anglican Church in North America and the old hierarchy plays out.
The Anglican Church in North America — A Unity of Disaffected “Mushrooms”
For quite a while, said Frank, groups of Anglicans disaffected by trendy theologies have been “popping up like mushrooms.” Receiving the most notoriety are issues concerning the ordination of openly homosexual clergy and same sex blessing ceremonies.
“Not all the disaffected had entirely the same issues,” Frank said, “but we had the same foundations in common: Jesus, the scriptures, and the Anglican form of worship.”
The Common Cause Partnership was formed four years ago when leaders of disaffected Anglican splinter groups began talking to one another, Frank said. Over time, they formed the goal of unity and agreed together to become a church.
Frank emphasized that the Anglican Church in North America did not pull congregations out of the Anglican Church, but united groups that for theological reasons had already left the Anglican Church.
“We’re not taking people who are still a part of the Episcopal Church, but people who have left. We are uniting, not dividing,” said Frank.
Currently, the Anglican Church in North America encapsulates eight Anglican jurisdictions and organizations in North America: the American Anglican Council; the Anglican Coalition in Canada; the Anglican Communion Network, whose bishop, Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan, will lead the new body; the Anglican Mission in the Americas; the Anglican Network in Canada, which affiliates with South America’s Southern Cone province; the Convocation of Anglicans in North America; Forward in Faith North America; the Reformed Episcopal Church; and bishops and congregations in Kenya, Uganda and Southern Cone, which shepherded the four seceding Episcopal diocese in the U.S.
Four dioceses in the U.S. have seceded from the national Episcopal Church: San Joaquin in Fresno, California; Quincy, Illinois; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Forth Worth, Texas. About 100 additional parishes are estimated to have withdrawn apart from their dioceses.
“By June (when the Anglican Church in North America meets to ratify its constitution), the Common Cause Partnership will have done its job as a transition body by giving birth to the Anglican Church in North America,” Frank said. “Then we hope we can get on to what we are supposed to be doing, which is Christian ministry.”
Frank hopes the Anglican Church in North America will heal some of the breaches within the Church, but acknowledges unspecified threats from unnamed groups as well as lawsuits.
“Last year, the Episcopal church spent $2 million on lawsuits to reclaim parish properties (from disaffected congregations.) We can’t be sure how those lawsuits will come out. There are some lawsuits pending and some settled favorably for the congregations. Some congregations have put the keys (to their church properties) on the desk and walked away. You just don’t sue people back in the church.”
In spite of the troubled birth of the Anglican Church in North America, Frank says the new body will continue to “move against the trend” and maintain the traditions of what it means to be Anglican: maintenance of the distinctive characteristics of the English reformation, a high view of scripture, and a deep appreciation of church tradition.
