Anglicans in USA

THE GAFCON Primates have recognised the new Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), they announced in London yesterday.

The move is hardly a surprise. When conservative Anglicans met in Jerusalem last May for the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), they called for the formation of an “orthodox” Church in the United States, in parallel with (or opposition to) the Episcopal Church there. The ACNA was formed late in the summer, uniting conservative groups in the United States and Canada.

The leader of the new Church, the Rt Revd Bob Duncan, joined the GAFCON Primates for their second meeting, this time held at the Renaissance Hotel next to Heathrow Airport. Bishop Duncan was formerly the Bishop of Pittsburgh, but was deposed by the Episcopal Church’s leadership at the time the ACNA was formed.

He said that he had given a progress report to the GAFCON Primates. His Church had 100,000 members in 700 congregations in 28 dioceses. On any given Sunday, there were about 80,000 worshippers, about ten per cent of the numbers in the Episcopal Church, “and growing all the time”. The previous arrangement for conservatives who dissented from what they saw as the liberal leadership of the Episcopal Church had been to join one of the five “protectorates” run by the Provinces of the Southern Cone, Uganda, Nigeria, Kenya, or Rwanda. Now all were united in the ACNA.

As well as being united, Bishop Duncan had told the Primates, his Church was “ready”, having prepared a constitution and canons “that look recognisably Anglican” and which he had amended after consultation with the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was also “focused” on its task of “reaching North America with the transforming love of Christ”, after a decade of division.

Bishop Duncan echoed the insistence of the Primates that theirs was not a breakaway movement. “I’m a cradle Anglican. My grandfather was a boy chorister. . . My theological views haven’t changed. The problem is that folks who have become the leadership of the Episcopal Church  in the United States have pulled the rug out from under me. The person who is our Presiding Bishop, she didn’t begin as an Anglican. I did. She represents something very different. I don’t think I’m a breakaway.

“I don’t believe I have divided the Church. I believe the innovators are the ones who are dividing the Church. I love them, and I want to behave in a godly way towards them, and I will do everything I can to convince them about the truth that’s been delivered; but my focus now has to be on those who don’t know Jesus.”

The creation of the ACNA had meant that the United States now had two parallel Anglican provinces, Bishop Duncan said, and this was “not altogether comfortable”, as the meeting of all the Primates in Alexandria had admitted. But the purpose of the GAFCON Primates had not been to create a second Church. “For the Communion as a whole, we have not talked about two parallel Churches. The majority of the Anglican Communion is saying that where the Communion has always been is where the Communion needs to be, and this group represents that view. We are the Communion. Who has the right to take the Communion from us?”

It was clear that Bishop Duncan thought that Anglicans in the United States were more sharply divided than elsewhere. “You really have two religions. You have one that believes as Anglicans always have believed, that Jesus is the only way to salvation, and you have another led by our Presiding Bishop of TEC [the Episcopal Church], who says ‘That would be to put God into a small box.’ One is classic Christianity. One is actually not Christianity, at least not in the way that classic Protestantism, classic 0rthodoxy, or classic Catholicism would recognise it.