I do not know if this is the correct location to pose these questions or not. Please move it, if necessary. I have a question for those in the ACNA. What is the general consensus of the election of the new Archbishop of the ACNA, Rt. Rev. Steve Wood ? Is any new or different direction expected to be taken? I am just curious.
I'm not ACNA anymore and have occasionally been called an ACNA hater (I don't hate them, I'm just realistic and brutally honest). I will not say too much but Steve Wood lost several parishes and clergy to Continuing churches a few years ago when he decided to ordain women. I don't see how anyone can expect them to sort that issue out with Steve Wood as the Archbishop. And that's the big issue that doesn't go away. I told some ACNA folk they weren't going to get +Ray Sutton or any of the REC bishops or +Richard Lipka or really any of the Nigerian crew but at the same time the guys from Diocese of the Great Lakes and C4SO couldn't win either. I know everyone wants to say the election was a move of the Spirit but there was an element of politics before it even commenced. They had to choose a milquetoast candidate or the whole thing will fall apart.
ACNA here. I haven't heard much about him. Allegedly he supports female deacons, maybe even female Priests (Not that such a thing truly exists). If true, then this is worrisome, and even before this, please pray for the ACNA. Thankfully, it's an issue that should solve itself with time. The people who support such things are phasing out. The youth is much more Orthodox minded. It can be frustrating when the ACNA forgets why it bothered to leave the Episcopal Church in the first place.
Supposedly Wood is pretty liberal as is his parish. I take all the social media - with text directly to my Bishop to expect a lot of calls from intending soon to be expat congregates - brouhaha with a grain of salt. Two local ACNA parishes (with distinct demographics) might give me an indication of the real tone and temperament.
Yes. I've seen many of the REC clergy expressing very disgruntled sentiments. Some of those guys have been that way since the College of Bishops infamous statement on women's ordination came out a few years ago but they don't pack their bag and leave. But overall I don't see many reactions that are overly excited or disappointed. Those who were disappointed rather quickly seemed to take comfort in the term of the office being 5 years. A few people might call +Peter Robinson but I don't think there will be any significant loss of parishes. ACNA parishes are generally just not compatible with Continuing churches. Any diaspora away from ACNA I would expect to see go independent (which is a pariah for Anglicans but occasionally happens in the US).
From my casual observations, I agree on all accounts and it doesn’t make sense for me as the REC could be/should be the most compatible branch within the continuing movement. My guess is the fear of leaving anything with a stronger “base“ for something still trying to figure out its system is intimidating. I can attest to that fact when I left a very well established Episcopal Church for a nondescript, virtually unknown parish some miles down the road. But to paraphrase Martin Luther King, isn’t ‘faith taking the first step up a flight even though you may not see the end of the staircase’? As for me, I’ve never looked back and Or doubted my decision.
Don't know a darn thing about him. I'm taking a wait and see approach. The people I've seen disgruntled are the ones who ALWAYS seem to be disgruntled, so I'm taking that with a grain of salt. That's not a potshot - it takes all kinds, and feeling secure enough to express one's dissatisfaction is a good thing.
I was not thrilled with the choice as I am against WO. As I see it, he is ok with WO but they can't be in charge of a parish. If we could institute that across the board that would be a start in rolling WO back because the anti WO diocese still would not be ordaining women. Maybe something like ths could happen. I still think on the long march in the ANCA the trend is towards the traditionalist position. My priest is anti WO and he said less and less women are asking to be priests so maybe this will work itself out on its on.
I have attended an ACNA church for a number of years and have nothing against the ACNA college of bishops or with whomever they would elect. We recently took on a new vicar (rector?) and he insisted that we must change diocese (to the Bishop director of Forward in Faith USA) before He would even consider coming This was a disgraceful power play unworthy of any Christian. For what it’s worth, I feel that the new vicar (rector) is unduly rigid in his preaching and more catholic than Rome with little tolerance or space for a milder opinion. One gets the idea that our previous bishop (of C4SO diocese) is a non Christian in league with the devil to corrupt Anglicans. This seems to me to be a very bad example, to speak of one who is supposed to be our authority we operated under for ten years or more and who remains in fellowship with the college of Bishops and I really believe we could be better led than that. I would take exception to destroying Bishop Steve Wood’s reputation unless he is found guilty of something truly offensive like certain other ACNA bishops who failed morally. If the continuing church do not like ACNA they can obviously leave but that would put them in the position the Pharisees found themselves in, of being right about tithing mint and cumin but sinning themselves on more substantial grounds. It is truly sad, almost heartbreaking how Bishop Ryle’s prophecy to the C of E (in his tract ‘What Do We Owe to the Reformation’) that they will pass away unless they reject ritualism has come to pass in our day. Find it and read it all; his third piece of advice is “do not be in a hurry to leave the Church of England just because many of her clergy are unfaithful, It is cheap and easy policy for churchmen to shirk trouble and run away in the hour of conflict…..” The Church of England that I was born into has splintered into dozens of fragments (but it still is and will remain my mother church) and it seems if the continuing church continues on its way, we will each be in our own denomination of one because we are unable to agree with anyone. Contrary to certain parties’ opinion, the Elizabethan English reformers were correct in labeling C of E a via media between Rome and Geneva. Allowing wheat and weeds to grow side by side until the end, not to root up the weeds lest any be lost, was Our Lord’s way.
That's what I both suspect and hope for. The WO issue seems to be limited to progressive hippy bommers and radicals who are allergic to Tradition. The youth are generally far more "conservative", not necessarily in a political sense, but they want things done the historical way. And a lot of the guys I've spoken to are a fair bit zealous. So, this issue might very well die out when the current leadership steps down. Archbishop Wood might understand that, but even if he doesn't, he'll probably be one of last influential voices for WO in the ACNA.
The times are changing drastically against WO. There are still some Bishops who impose WO out of spite, and to impose themselves as authorities over the church. They think they're the boss, instead of God, and they don't like the masses "telling them what to do". But everything I see around me, and everyone I know, opposes it. It really does look like it's on it's last leg, at least in the ACNA. It's a Top-Down issue. The old leadership supports it, but the young laity does not. At least, that's how it is where I am at.
This, if correct, is good news for the ACNA. But for me is the premise: popular opinion. Church dogma - of the true, Catholic Church - cannot be the result of the “viewpoint du jour”. As long as this may be the case, my perception of the ACNA church will continue to be a member of the Body as ecclestically thin.
With respect, as an interested outside observer, I doubt the above scenario very much. One of the largest growing jurisdictions as I understand it has consistently been C4SO, which also has a plurality of the regular attenders. On the flip side, a number of the former TEC dioceses have the same problems with attrition that they had before. And the children of today’s “young people” will almost certainly rebel against the perceived overbearing “orthodoxy” of their parents, as often happens. Even if that doesn’t happen, it will be impossible to hermetically seal ACNA members from wider cultural trends and attitudes. From my perspective, all the ACNA schism has likely managed to accomplish is to set the clock back by (maybe) two decades, and then what’s left of the “old guard” will be facing the same issues all over again. ACNA will either have to take the rather un-Anglican step of insisting not only on doctrinal but also organizational and disciplinary “purity” (i.e., Reformed-style confessionalism), or for the sake of keeping the organization together will move back toward the broad churchmanship model from which they seemingly fled. And all of this on top of the fact that all self-identifying Anglican jurisdictions, to quote Edward Norman, “exactly reproduce the same problems of identity as the parent Church” (http://justus.anglican.org/resources/misc/norman98.html). It’s not at all unlikely that at some point some or perhaps even all of the ACNA will reunite with TEC, and that most or all of the Anglican jurisdictions in the US in general will form a kind of United Protestant Church with other mainline Churches (like the ELCA and the UCC, which already have full communion with TEC), similar to the union that transpired recently in France. Demographic and cultural trends are not on the Churches’ side. A lot of cooperation and realignment/unification is going to be necessary in the coming years if anything other than non-liturgical, ahistorical “entertainment evangelicalism” is to survive, I’m afraid.
Well thought out and well written, Invictus. All the more reason for the traditional, orthodox Anglican Church to unite. At the very least, continue to have intercommunal agreements with like minded denominations with continuing efforts to reunite as One. I feel the same way; I hope we are wrong.
I appreciate that. I just think everyone should exercise a bit of healthy skepticism when it comes to speculative projections that are too specific. Such things cannot be cited as anticipatory justification for actions that would otherwise not be counseled. For example, I couldn’t tell you how many times I have been told the TEC will be gone within 20 years, based on demographic trends. First, that is not how statistics works. If a linear approximation of TEC membership is extrapolated to yield a membership of zero in year T, that means in year T+1 its membership will be negative. Growth rates are logarithmic, not linear, and whether they’re positive or negative, they typically level out at some point above the zero lower bound. Second, and more importantly, what is really being said there is, “we won’t have to answer to the charge of schism once your jurisdiction is no longer around. It’s a temporary deviation from orthodox practice that we’re willing to accept for the sake of a ‘purer’ orthodoxy.” The problem there is that if we look at, for example, the 4th century, when a significant number of the bishops, perhaps even a majority, were Arian, the pro-Nicene response was not to leave the official structure and setup a parallel hierarchy. They instead worked, successfully, to regain control of the existing one. The whole process took decades. And this is a pattern that repeated itself again and again after Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451), for a considerable period in the East. The Arian controversy was fundamental if anything was, yet it was not exactly clear in the moment who was right, who was wrong, and why, plus there was actually a somewhat broad spectrum of opinion on the specifics among the Fathers (such as whether it was proper to call the Holy Spirit “God”) and substantial disagreement about just what “of one substance” in the Creed really meant. The “orthodox” position that eventually emerged was the conclusion of the controversy, not its presupposition. History was written by the victors. Why is this time different? As for WO, my current jurisdiction uses it. I have no objection to it and I have no desire to change it. In the TEC, it is, thankfully, a settled issue. No one argues about it. I have, however, been in jurisdictions in the past that did not have it, and in which the majority of women didn’t want WO, as far as I could tell. It did not seem to me that any great injustice was being committed there, and it was a non-issue. No one argued about it. There is, surely, room for each approach for people acting in good conscience.
I agree in the former and respectfully, humbly reject the latter. As a cradle to [almost grave] member of TEC and having a strong identity with the same as a leading figure within my diocese’s cathedral, my “road to Damascus” moment unveiled my deepest convictions about the Faith. But as I explained to my dear friend, the Dean, if it were not for [the local cathedral church] where would the people go? In spite of TEC errors and schisms, [the local cathedral church] is a wonderful home and serves its role in the community. But over time [the local cathedral church] will become more and more Protestant and eventually evoke heresies under the premise “it’s not that important” (yes…yes….Im using the same discredited linear model) but it is. Very important. You see, I’m not very smart and cannot tell you what Jesus would’a done if he was walking around today. All I can do is read what He did do, what the Church Fathers agreed on what is important and the earliest of the Church doctors theorized there upon. It’s all I’ve got.
That’s not a question I’m trying to answer here. All I intend to highlight is that there are always unanticipated consequences whenever attempts at reinvention occur. They tend to take on a life of their own. There are also a number of glaring inconsistencies in the ACNA project that make it very difficult to evaluate as a whole. The Continuing movement does not seem to have this difficulty, at least in theory. WO may have been the proverbial ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ in the latter’s relationship with TEC, but it is also clear that the Continuing movement had a radically different vision of what the trajectory of Anglican patrimony should be: the Continuing movement doesn’t want to be part of an Anglican Communion; they want to be part of the Catholic Communion (and not necessarily in the sense that Catholic=Rome), and they have taken concrete steps to realize that goal. WO is simply incompatible with such a project. The situation is rather different for the ACNA. As I understand it, ACNA and the Continuing movement are liturgically incompatible. It is not obvious to me how ACNA can in the long run succeed in simultaneously (1) avoiding the Continuing movement project, (2) avoiding the issues that have been controversial in TEC, and yet (3) remaining recognizably Anglican. To return to the original subject of the thread, it will be instructive to observe from afar how ACNA’s new archbishop seeks to meet that challenge.
My apologizes. I was going down a rabbit hole from your post, not the original subject matter. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not very smart and appreciate you bearing with me. Anglican means very little as noted in all the different divisions under a much larger umbrella. As for me, I rather be recognizably orthodox Catholic preferably under the English patrimony (mainly because it’s what I understand). To your point in the previous thread, why change at all? Initially, there was no change and any attempt to change was addressed in the first Seven Councils. After the Schism, the slope became very slippery in the Western hemisphere. Each turn has lead to additional error, schism and heresy. This includes WO. I realize (or think I do) you have an interest in preserving the Anglican Church. But my question is why if it being Anglican means nothing in Faith. I’ve left the TEC and all of its beautiful trappings because I’m was searching something more tied to what Christ commissioned his Apistles and disciples some 2000 years ago. Thankfully, I found it in the APA and thus far not one has second guessed my decision (other than being somewhat socially ostracized by certain TEC parishioners). If leaving TEC means today I’m sitting on the deck of a sinking ship, so be it. I guess I have the Eastern church as an alternative; or Roman if they clean up their errors and schisms. But this I do know: I won’t become Anglican Protestant which is what TEC and ACNA are and will search to receive the Blessed Sacrament elsewhere.