Anglican Mission, ACNA 'Clarify' Their Roles

Posted on: May 19, 2010

At the request of the Anglican Church of Rwanda, the Anglican Mission in the Americas is seeking a greater distance from the Anglican Church in North America, which it helped found.

The Anglican Mission will ask the ACNA's provincial council, which meets June 8 and 9, to change its status from jurisdiction to ministry partner. Leaders of both the ACNA and the Anglican Mission said that there was widespread confusion about how the two ministries relate to each other. Both parties said the new arrangement clarifies their structural relationship.

Changing the affiliation "will allow the Anglican Mission to maintain a level of connection to the North American Province, even though the missionary movement will remain under the spiritual and canonical authority of Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini and the Province of the Anglican Church of Rwanda," said a communiqué from the Anglican Mission. "It also allows for the Anglican Mission to continue to function as a missionary movement committed to church planting as we have for the last decade."

A communiqué from the Most Rev. Robert M. Duncan, Archbishop of ACNA, said the Anglican Mission's request for a different affiliation "came as a result of a January resolution by the Rwandan House of Bishops objecting to the dual membership of Rwanda's missionary bishops in the North American College of Bishops."

"The ACNA and its ministry partners remain fervently committed to Anglican 1000 and church-planting," Duncan said in the communiqué. "Local congregations continue to work together in ministry, and are free to transfer between the Anglican Mission in the Americas and the Anglican Church in North America (or vice versa) in consultation with the bishops concerned."

Anglican 1000, an ACNA initiative, is led by the Rev. Canon David H. Roseberry, rector of the Anglican Mission-affiliated Christ Church in Plano, Texas.

Both organizations praised the proposed structural change.

"The ministry partner membership status as defined in the Constitution and Canons of the ACNA actually outlines very succinctly the appropriate relationship between the Anglican Mission and the ACNA as they seek to work together in church planting across North America," said the Anglican Mission's communiqué. "This status allows for entities such as ministry organizations, dioceses, seminaries and even monastic orders 'to support each other in ministry to extend the Kingdom of God,' and the Anglican Mission is happy to join with other groups who have or seek this ministry partner status."

"The vision of a biblical, missionary and united Anglicanism in North America remains the vision of every North American Anglican," Duncan said in his communiqué. "Jurisdictional integration also remains a future hope as Rwandan canons do provide for the transfer of the Anglican Mission to the Anglican Church in North America when the time seems right."

This article comes from The Living Church Foundation
http://www.livingchurch.org/

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