By: George Conger
Thursday, 4th December 2008
Leaders of the Third Province movement sidestepped the contentious issue of women clergy last night, and have endorsed a provisional constitution and canons governing the emerging Third Province in the Americas.
“God did a great work today,” Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan told supporters at a church service in Wheaton, Illinois at the end of the Dec 1-3 gathering, as the disparate members of the Common Cause Partnership (CCP) of Anglican traditionalists in the US and Canada “came together with the proposed draft of the constitution and canons” and after discussing each proviso, “adopted unanimously” each article of the code.
This was “staggering considering who was around the table” said Bishop Duncan — the moderator of CCP and now the interim primate and archbishop of the provisional province.
Comprised of approximately 700 congregations with an average Sunday attendance of 100,000, the newly created Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) boasts Anglo-Catholics, Evangelicals, Charismatics, and a variety of traditionalists at odds with the Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada.
Its members include the four breakaway dioceses of Pittsburgh, San Joaquin, Quincy and Fort Worth and the Anglican diaspora of the last 125 years: evangelical groups that seceded within the past eight years, Anglo-Catholic groups that left following changes to the Book of Common Prayer and the introduction of the ordination of women in the 1970’s, and the Reformed Episcopal Church --- an independent Evangelical Anglican church that seceded in the 1870s in protest to the high church movement then controlling the Episcopal Church.
While the document must be ratified by the individual governing bodies comprising ACNA to give it de jure effect, it had already received de facto authority from its members. “We are not operating under it,” he said. The CCP leadership council is “now the provincial executive committee,” and “I am archbishop and primate-designate.”
The “seven primates meeting in Jerusalem [at Gafcon] asked us to prepare this “document, he said, and “I have fair reason to believe they will recognize it.” The Gafcon primates meet in London on Dec 4 to receive the ACNA documents, and are expected to give it their endorsement. Archbishops Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, Peter Akinola of Nigeria, Gregory Venables of the Southern Cone, Henry Orombi of Uganda and Benjamin Nzimbi are scheduled to meet in in Canterbury on Friday, a spokesman for Lambeth Palace told ReligiousIntelligence.com, and will present the documents to Dr. Rowan Williams.
Bishop Duncan was optimistic the new province would be incardinated as the 39th province of the Anglican Communion. “I have to believe,” he said, “the system will have to recognize the province before too many years pass.”
The “majority of Anglicans will recognize us” within a short time, he noted, and added that the ACNA would be recognized as a valid ecclesial body by other members of the Catholic faith as what ACNA stands for “looks like the Christian faith” and its apostolic witness would be recognizable to all.
A spokesman for US Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori declined to speculate on the ramifications of the Dec 3 rollout of the ACNA constitution. However, the Rev Canon Charles Robertson said he wanted it “to be clear that The Episcopal Church, along with the Anglican Church of Canada and the La Iglesia Anglicana de Mexico, comprise the official, recognized presence of the Anglican Communion in North America.”
The schism represented by the Wheaton constitution was unnecessary, Dr Robertson said. “There is room within The Episcopal Church for people with different views, and we regret that some have felt the need to depart from the diversity of our common life in Christ.”
Dr Robertson told ReligiousIntelligence.com that as a matter of doctrine and church tradition, separation in the face of division was not the apostolic solution. “Paul spoke of the importance of being together ‘in Christ’ to believers who were more apt to form sectarian movements and follow certain leaders while decrying others and even speaking ill of Paul himself.”
He noted that that “consummate Anglican,” Richard Hooker “both proclaimed and modeled a life in Christ that welcomed the diversity of his time, in the face of people who only recently before had been killing one another--literally killing one another--because each believed the other to be a heretic.”
While unable to remain in fellowship with the liberal hierarchy of the US and Canadian churches, the ACNA exhibits strands of churchmanship that have not always been able to work together.
How the bishops worshipped and what they wore at the closing service illustrated the traditional divides. While some bishops crossed themselves and genuflected at points of the creed, other bishops of the ACNA adopted a more protestant approach to the ceremony. The divergence could be seen in the vestments on display --- the Bishops of Fort Worth and Quincy wore scarlet mantelettas — a Roman Catholic vestment worn by a bishop when outside his diocese but suppressed in 1969 by Pope Paul VI, while some bishops wore Anglican choir dress of cassock, rochet, chimere and scarf --- others wore stoles over their choir dress, still others wore a plain white alb and stole --- while Bishop Duncan was dressed in an alb, stole, chasuble and maniple. The provisional constitution took no stand on the issue of the ordination of women, stating “the Province shall make no canon abridging the authority of any member dioceses, clusters or networks (whether regional or affinity-based) and those dioceses banded together as jurisdictions with respect to its practice regarding the ordination of women to the diaconate or presbyterate.”
While ambiguous on the issue of women clergy, the ACNA planted its doctrinal flag squarely within the Book of Common Prayer, stating it received the BCP “as set forth by the Church of England in 1662, together with the Ordinal attached to the same, as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline, and, with the Books which preceded it, as the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship.”
On June 22, 2009 the ACNA will hold its first provincial synod at St Vincent’s Cathedral in the Diocese of Forth Worth. A spokesman for Bishop Iker noted that at the synod “representatives of each constituency of the new province will gather with the intention of ratifying the constitution and canons that have been introduced today. “
“This new province is the goal for which we have worked and prayed so long,” Forth Worth said. “It is an exciting time in the church, and we anticipate that its birth will set the stage for future ministry and growth in our diocese” and for the Anglican way across North America.
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