One decade after the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) was inaugurated, Anglicans returned to Plano, Texas to release a revised Book of Common Prayer (BCP) and hear presentations on Christian discipleship.
Much like previous Provincial Assemblies, this one was characterized by the participation of Global South bishops exhorting adherence to orthodoxy amidst cultural headwinds. ACNA also continues to be shaped by constituent groups with significantly differing churchmanship. During the opening Assembly Eucharist, bishops clad in cope and mitre sang contemporary worship songs including Hillsong Music’s “Who You Say I Am”, a juxtaposition that seemingly only ACNA could facilitate.
Assembly participants also heard from the Rev. Anthony Thompson, an Anglican priest and husband to Myra Thompson, one of nine killed at Charleston’s Emanuel A.M.E. Church in 2016. Thompson’s forgiveness of assailant Dylann Roof and call for repentance at an initial bond hearing made headlines in the secular press.
Discipleship “Caught, not just Taught”
Revisiting a decade of ministry together, ACNA leaders identified the hand of the Lord as present in a project providentially uniting unlikely partners in ministry.
In his opening address, Archbishop Foley Beach listed the planting of hundreds of churches, ministry among the poor and marginalized, and the sending of missionaries as key achievements, alongside building campaigns and the new BCP.
“It’s really quite amazing. Actually, miraculous,” assessed Beach. “To God be all praise and glory.”
But Beach charged that the calling of believers is not to plant or grow churches, lead “incredible worship,” or publicly stand for what is right, as good as those things are.
“Our calling from Jesus is to go and make disciples,” Beach summarized, comparing new Christians to infants that must be cared for, loved, fed, cleaned, disciplined and nurtured until such a time that they may walk on their own. “The Kingdom of God is similar: we need to be taught how to walk the walk.”
Such instruction includes how to worship, pray, study the Bible, hear the Lord, and love neighbors, as well as what the scriptures say about Jesus, serving, and what is right or wrong.
“How do I walk in the Holy Spirit when the bottom drops out in my life?” Beach offered as an example. “Discipleship cooperates with the Holy Spirit to help us follow Jesus in the midst of our life situation.”
Discipleship is caught, not just taught, Beach insisted: it is a lifestyle shared.
The Archbishop and former youth pastor spoke of learning from spiritual mentors about how to seek God for God himself, not just for what God can give, and how to love God, not just love what God does for him. Repentance, he learned, is a lifestyle, “not a one-act play.”
Recounting the experience of a friend in prison ministry, Beach recalled that upwards of 95 percent of the violent offenders had sat in church and prayed the sinner’s prayer.
“What happened? Why didn’t it take?” Beach asked. “Could it be that no one had ever invested in their walk with the Lord, and they never became discipled? They had made a decision for Christ, but they had never become a disciple of Christ.”
Similar themes permeated the closing address by Rwandan Archbishop Laurent Mbanda, who called for renewed commitment to the Great Commission.
Mbanda recalled that in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, churches were sites of massacres, and most of the killers claimed a Christian faith, with even pastors implicated in the killings.
“There had been many converts, but they had not been mentored, equipped and discipled to live like Christ,” Mbanda assessed. “A renewed understanding and commitment to our call to the Great Commission was needed.”
“Are you in, or are you out? Are you joining, or are you just going to watch and observe? It is our time, and the Lord has given us an opportunity, let us take advantage of it. Let us use it for his glory. Let us proclaim Christ unashamedly.”
Push Back Against False Narratives
The gathering had a strongly ecumenical feel, with speakers including Southern Baptist Russell Moore, United Methodist James Bryan Smith and Evangelist Ravi Zacharias.
“A lot of people have really toxic narratives about God,” reported Smith. “We live at the mercy of ideas. We get an idea about something and it runs our life — or it ruins our life.”
Quoting author A.W. Tozer that “the most important thing about a person is what they think about God,” Smith, who teaches at Friends University, cited a study reporting that 38 percent of respondents viewed God as an angry judge who is poised to punish.
“Jesus destroyed a false destructive narrative about God and replaced it with true stories about God,” Smith stated, recalling the account in John chapter 9 of the man born blind to glorify God, not due to his or his parents’ sin.
Spiritual disciplines, Smith explained, are opportunities for God’s grace to move within us: “We’re creating space for God to act. These are things we can do that enable us to do what we can’t do.”
Each of the speakers seemed to connect with their audience. Assembly attendees noticeably leaned in, rapt as Zacharias spoke of the consistency of character seen in Joseph’s dependence upon God while in Egypt. Smith’s books reportedly sold out at the Assembly bookstore. But Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission President Russell Moore appeared to have the most fervent response.
As secularization comes through North America, Christians are reacting in one of two negative ways, Moore observed. Either they are not taking secularization seriously enough, or responding to secularization with a sense of “frenzied inevitability” that the “arc of history” is heading towards the elimination of religion and certainly Christianity. This latter response is characterized by perpetual outrage about what is transpiring.
Jesus, Moore offered, shows a way forward in Luke chapter 4amidst a time when cultural Christianity is falling away. It is no longer the case that one must be at least a nominal Christian in order to be considered a good American, Moore reported, recalling a college friend who was honest but not unusual in saying he wanted to be a member of a Southern Baptist church in order to be elected to political office in his state.
A response, Moore proposed, was to re-focus on the Kingdom of God. Jesus, he said, tied the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven to himself, but not as a means to an end.
“Our response should not be a sense of panic, but sense of opportunity,” Moore indicated, as Christians contrast with the ambient culture.
“When Jesus is well-received, he always concludes he is being misunderstood and presses the Gospel until there is shock and alarm,” Moore noted. “The Gospel comes as a contradiction to all the ways we prop up our own kingdoms around us. In a time when Christianity is no longer useful, that is when it can be powerful: for what it is, not as something that grows out of a culture, but is in contradiction to culture.”
Moore identified tribalism as a danger, quoting columnist and author David Brooks that “Tribalism is fake community for lonely narcissists.”
“What is the tribe to whom I belong, who are the people that are going to receive me?” Moore explained of tribalism. “It ends nowhere.” Instead, Moore suggested that Christians see and provide alternative structures pointing beyond attempts at tribalism to something that is “deep and meaningfully true.”
While he did not directly reference contemporary figures, Moore noted that Christians “do not need to advance the Gospel with influence” and should instead create and form a culture that has a distinctiveness about its very difference.
“You and I cannot be the people who are scared, frantic and fearful at the culture around us,” the SBC’s top policy official advised. “We have been trusted with a message and we do not have a different situation than any Christians who came before us in the things that really matter.”
In a refutation of the idea that there was ever a time when American culture was on the right path, Moore declared: “You don’t remember when the culture fell apart, because it fell apart somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Genesis chapter 3.”
“Do we have confidence in the Gospel to trust that it has the power to transform those who are aggressively speaking against it right now?” Moore asked, listing former opponents of the Gospel who became great champions of it, such as St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Paul of Tarsus, C.S. Lewis and Chuck Colson.
“Neither accommodate what any culture at the moment will allow, nor be constant outrage machines,” Moore advised. “Love people to whom we speak knowing that the Holy Spirit and the blood of Christ are enough for any of them.”
The future of the church, Moore noted, is guaranteed by a promise at Caesarea Philippi: “Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”
Forgive me if this question has been done to death already. I’m new here. How can we get ACNA going in the UK? The Churches were built for the glory of God and I for one refuse to let the Profane and Secular have them.
Industrial Christian,
Before getting to the “politics”, please know that the orthodox currently trapped in the CoE with what appears to be, at best, compromised episcopal leadership, are in the prayers of all of us on this side of the Atlantic.
To add a bit to what the others have said-
The key obstacle that the English will need to overcome (in addition to the lack of unity among organizations already mentioned) is lack of episcopal leadership from within the CoE. While the ACNA might well have come into existence without ex-TEC dioceses- the 4 diocesan bishops (followed a couple years later by a 5th) provided for the feeling of a “church within a church” and were the “focus of unity” for orthodox believers, . These bishops were able to keep their dioceses together in spite of major undertakings to undermine them. In the Church of England, there is no +Duncan, +Iker, +Ackerman, +Schofield, or +Lawrence.
Lacking that, the movement in England will need to be driven by the laity and non-episcopal clergy- the process will be more like it was for those of us in areas under revisionist bishops in the US. What we saw in the dioceses I lived in (I was changing jobs in the midst of all this) was that there were a few parishes that left TEC en masse with their clergy (although none with a building), but for most, it was a matter of people from several neighboring TEC parishes getting together in small groups originally in private homes, and later in rented or borrowed spaces. My father was an Episcopal priest, and I was confirmed as an Episcopalian, but although I was still technically an Episcopalian (a long story), the first sermon I ever preached was in a Morning Prayer service, to an ACNA congregation, from a Roman Catholic pulpit.
So, my recommendation would be that you try to organize a small group within your own parish, preferably with support of your clergy, but without if necessary. Try to make contact with those in surrounding parishes of like mind. Give up concerns about buildings, property, gold chalices, fancy vestments, etc. Pray together. Do bible studies and Morning Prayer together. Try to find a retired priest in your area who is orthodox and has a secure pension to celebrate the Eucharist with your group. Make contact with AMiE or Gafcon-UK or Bishop Ashenden or Andy Lines or Bishop Nazir Ali. When you get to the point where you think you have a cohesive group large enough to be self sustaining, remove yourselves from the jurisdiction of the Church of England. You will not be able to take the local parish church with you, nor likely much else. But in truth, faith and fellowship and sacraments are all you need to be the Church in the place where you are.
TJ
Welcome!
The key to ACNA was that different groups were largely able to set aside their disagreements and come together in the name of unity. The various orthodox Anglican groups have to agree to come together besides their differences. Until that happens, nothing from inside or outside can succeed. I do hope that will happen eventually.
The alternative is either the UK faces the hodge-podge of 50+ tiny “Continuing” Churches who do diddly-nothing, or orthodox Anglicanism simply dies out.
Thank you very much. That’s a great help.
The new prayer book should be an improvement, always supposing that ACNA parishes will use it. Many have been running services loosely “based on” the 1979, or using the 1979, and may find it difficult or unpleasant to submit to the discipline of using a Prayer Book authorized by the Church which in large part is an effort to render the 1662 into contemporary English.
The conflict here is evident in the use of that Hillsong hymn. I clicked on the link; it’s a performance piece whose words I couldn’t understand. Many of these contemporary music pieces are just that — performance music, not really designed for congregational singing. Where worship is a performance rather than the people worshipping the Lord together, problems arise. Combined with the wide variation in liturgical practices, and the differences around the ordained ministry, the ACNA often seems centrifugal.
I worship with the 1928 weekly. My parish is affiliated with the REC. Non-REC ACNA parishes in this area use the 1979, or liturgies loosely based on the 1979, or prayers based on the idea of the 1979, with lots of innovations.
So if I were to visit a local ACNA parish which some dear friends attend, I would see a loosely-1979 liturgy possibly officiated by a woman priest. One of my friends, a cradle Episcopalian, said they had used a Penitential Office from the new ACNA prayer book in Lent, and she had found it very moving. Her husband told me, some time ago, that something based on the 1662 was a “non-starter” for him. So working towards some semblance of liturgical unity among Anglican parishes is going to be a long haul.
Bishop of ACNA Cascadia says the 1928 BCP is authorized for continued use in the diocese. He is of the 1979 bent. I have the new prayer book downloaded as a pdf and just don’t see any urgency for parishes to purchase the printed version. Perhaps, the first adopters will be those who use a scrolling version on a large projected screen.
Yes Bishop Allen. He”s flexible when visiting a 1928 parish. The 1979 book was a response to trouble makers that were put off by the formal pronouns for you like thee and thou which most other world languages have. The new prayer book was not in response to a demand by the laity but a way to give certain scholars a project to work on and keep busy. The results may be perfectly fine.
Why do you say that about the new ACNA Prayer Book? Have you used it yet? What is your objection to it (that is, why do you feel it is a “mess”)?
Hi alphaTomega. I’m a member of the Liturgy Task Force, and just want to clear a couple things up. First, you give us far too much credit. This BCP was compiled based upon thousands of comments from the province itself. In fact, Archbishop Duncan was quite clear at all times that our opinions were not to be considered, but rather direction from the College of Bishops and feedback from the province. So I’m not sure who the “revisionists” are, but the book as it is reflects the varied preferences and usage of a very liturgically diverse church. That’s just information. Where I do need to correct something is in your assumption about our concerns regarding the catechism (if we are in fact the “revisionists”). I can only tell you that I never once heard any concern regarding the catechism and it being treated with too much consideration, and nothing like that was ever communicated by the Bishop’s Review Panel or the College itself. Instead, it is a very practical problem. The ACNA catechism is a lengthy document – a book in fact – that was the work of an entirely separate group. That work is actually undergoing a revision to be printed next January, as I understand. The BCP itself is over 800 pages. I would love to see the two works compiled into a single volume that I could give to confirmands, but unless we were to simplify and condense the current catechism into something it’s not, it would not fit in a pew-back edition. If we’re going to guess at motivations, always a dangerous proposition, as a province I would say it’s actually more accurate to assume that the bishops wanted a catechism that was more robust, and even perhaps more confessional, than one could find in a shortened version in the BCP.
Thank you, alphaTomega. My concern about the term “revisionists,” aside from the charged nature of the word itself, is just what I tried to explain. This, more than any book before, was the product of the province, not a revision committee. As for why the catechism is so long, that’s above my pay grade and influence. All I can say is that I find it to be a wonderful catechetical tool precisely because it is far more robust than anything found before.
In the end, we’re simply going to disagree about whether the intent should’ve been embracing of the wide scope of our province or an attempt to limit that scope. I would point out that what you speak of pejoratively, being “all things to all people,” is a direct quote of St. Paul in 1 Cor. 9, where he uses it in a very positive light. I understand your concerns, and respect them deeply. Yet, to cry for unity while decrying something that spans a wider scope seems self-defeating to me. Our province contains those who regard the 1928 less reverently than you, or perhaps even I, do, and charity demands we listen to them as well. I’ll stick with Paul in trying to be “all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some.”
As for usage, my only indication is that the publisher told many of us that they have had at least an order of magnitude more orders than expected. What becomes of that is up to God and His bishops.
Finally, the College of Bishops has been very explicit and vocal about the fact that they will not mandate this book top-down. That, too, has advantages and disadvantages. Still, I very much suspect most bishops will allow the 1928, but as always, I strongly urge any clergy to check with their Ordinary. I hope that gives some comfort, and please know that I engage only for clarity. I would be honored to worship with you anytime in the beautiful and true words of the 1928 prayerbook.
Marcus+,
Thank you for joining in this discussion. It is good to have a reminder of how much effort went into the new BCP (as well as the Catechism and Ordinal). While I have a fondness for the Elizabethan/Jacobean language of the 1928 (and Missal, and 1662 and 1549), I think the new book is well crafted, and certainly a major improvement over the 1979.
Thanks, brother. Good to hear from you! Some may be interested to know that we’re working feverishly on a Traditional Language Edition which should be published early next year. It will contain the whole BCP in Elizabethan English. Unfortunately, the timing of the College of Bishops necessitates it waiting until next year for final publication.
You can still find 1928 parishes even in TEC. ACNA seems fairly accepting of a variety of liturgical practices, and prayer books. And given that in most ACNA dioceses, parishes have the option to join another diocese or network, bishops are likely to be flexible on the “second order” stuff.
I worship with the 1928 weekly. My parish is affiliated with the REC. Non-REC ACNA parishes in this area use the 1979, or liturgies loosely based on the 1979, or prayers based on the idea of the 1979, with lots of innovations.
So if I were to visit a local ACNA parish which some dear friends attend, I would see a loosely-1979 liturgy possibly officiated by a woman priest. One of my friends, a cradle Episcopalian, said they had used a Penitential Office from the new ACNA prayer book in Lent, and she had found it very moving. Her husband told me, some time ago, that something based on the 1662 was a “non-starter” for him. So working towards some semblance of liturgical unity among Anglican parishes is going to be a long haul.
I have no desire to be offensive to my orthodox Anglican friends who use it, but the 1928 BCP is a progressive rejection of the 1662 Prayer Book tradition. Why it seems to be a rallying point for conservative Anglicans has puzzled me ever since I became aware of the issue. The 1928 is exactly the reason we got the 1979. But the US has not been good to the prayer book tradition since the beginning.
This is hard perhaps for US Anglicans to understand. But most orthodox Canadian Anglicans in my (admittedly limited) experience are bewildered if not horrified by the 1928 when they first encounter it.
Myself, I would have been happy with a contemporary-language version of the 1662 (much like Canada’s 1962). But we move on.
In this case, I think iTo is on the right track.
The 1928 is distinctly different from the 1662 (or 1789- the Episcopal version of the 1662 without the stuff about the English monarch, and some bits from the Scottish BCP). The 1928 is much more accepting of and adaptable to a Catholic point of view. I think the 1662 was more influenced by the Calvinists (than the 1928, and I don’t think anyone on the writing group for the 79 knew what “Reformed” means). I would argue that the ’28 is in no way “progressive”- it is actually (which iTo points out, in a way) regressive that is, it restores some of the “catholicity” of the 1549, which I have always understood to rely on an English translation of the Sarum rite for Holy Communion (this also being the basis of the Anglican and American Missals). And, frankly, there are parts of the 1979 (particularly the Rite II Eucharist, and “Reconciliation” – ie private auricular confession) that are almost straight out of Vatican II and it was seen as a “consolation prize” for Anglo Catholics who stayed in TEC after WO, and to be quite attractive to liberal Catholics leaving the Roman Church- since they can do the entire liturgy virtually from memory, other than Cranmer’s collects and Thomas Ken’s Doxology.
The genius of the 1928 was that enough of the 1662 remains, and it includes enough asterisks and alternative rubrics that you could end up with a Sunday service that was very much like the 1662, or you could have a Sunday service with smells, bells, and a sanctus, all out of one book. A “Protestant” Anglican visiting a “Catholic” parish (or vice-versa) could attend a “1928 BCP service” that was entirely different from the one in their home parish.
One other note on the 1928. By the early 2000s, you could use it to scare Episcopalians, especially revisionist diocesan officials. During one contentious meeting, I pulled it out of my pocket, said something like “at times like this, I turn my trusty ’28” and started to read the prayer for the Church (p37) which I had marked. A look of horror came over the “canon for inserting revisionist clergy into orthodox parishes” (ok, so the real title was more like “clergy transition officer”), and she said “You can’t read that, the 1928 is not authorized for use in this diocese. The bishop doesn’t allow that in his diocese!” To which I laughed, and pointed out that the prayer I was reading is copied, word for word, in the 1979.
I must agree, having lived through the transition, that the 1928 is NOT a “progressive” document, whereas the 1979 was intended to be such and has been used as such in many places.
The 1928 is indeed capable of being “high church,” more so than the 1662, but as TJ points out, high church and low church parishes used the 1928 quite happily for decades, each in their own way. Those were the days when the majority of clergy could say the Creed without fingers crossed behind their backs. I could visit high and low parishes and feel that, despite the differences, I was in the same church.