It is in part a response to Fr Jay Thomas’ final question in April’s Anglican Trajectories1 article,

“Can you convincingly answer the question: Where is the Anglican’s spiritual home most securely found?”

The Right Rev. Kevin Francis Donlon serves as Assistant Bishop of Zanzibar and Episcopal Vicar of the Anglican Union for the Propagation of the Gospel, an international ministry of ortatories.

Abstract

The contemporary Anglican Communion finds itself in a state of profound ecclesial fracture, characterized by a binary struggle between the strict Confessionalism of the Global South (GAFCON) and the increasingly liberal trajectory of the historic Communion. This polarization has driven a significant exodus of Anglo-Catholics toward the Roman Catholic Church via the Personal Ordinariates. This paper argues that this dichotomy represents a failure of imagination regarding the “Anglican Idea.” Drawing upon the insights of Rev. Canon Professor Arthur Middleton2 and the architectural blueprint of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral3 this analysis proposes a Fourth Way: a formalized orthodox Anglicanism that reclaims catholicity without Roman submission, transcends the current Global South/ Anglican Communion binary, and establishes a new structural unity grounded in the Creeds, Scripture, Sacraments, and the Historic Episcopate.

Introduction: The Crisis of the Via Media

Historically, the Anglican tradition has defined itself not by a rigid systematic theology, but by a distinctive method of holding together seemingly contradictory truths—autonomy and communion, scripture and tradition. Since the days of Augustine of Canterbury, the Anglican impulse has been to strive for the via media (middle way). However, the contemporary articulation of this middle way is frequently dismissed as a ‘lukewarm compromise,’ obscuring its original intent as a dynamic tension between the authority of Scripture, the reason of the church, and the tradition of the early fathers.

The current landscape is no longer defined by this creative tension but by a binary struggle. On one side stands GAFCON (Global Anglican Future Conference), which champions a return to strict Confessionalism, demanding adherence to the Thirty-Nine Articles and the Book of Common Prayer as exhaustive tests of orthodoxy.4 On the other stands the Communion, increasingly fractured by disputes over doctrine and practice, particularly regarding the ordination of women and the blessing of same-sex unions.

In this polarized environment, a significant number of Anglo-Catholics have concluded that the only viable path forward is migration to the Roman Catholic Church via the Personal Ordinariates established under Anglicanorum Coetibus. This migration, however, represents a capitulation to a false dichotomy. It ignores the possibility of a renewed, formalized Anglican orthodoxy that Wesley, the Tractarians, and their descendants sought—a path grounded in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral that offers a genuine fourth way, transcending the impasse between sectarian rigidity and liberal drift.

I. Reclaiming the “Catholic” Without Rome

The first pillar of this proposed Fourth Way is the reclamation of Catholicity independent of the Papacy. The flight of Anglo-Catholics to Rome is predicated on the belief that the Anglican Communion cannot uphold a unified doctrine and that the “Catholic” wing of the church has collapsed. This view assumes the fullness of the Patrimony—the liturgical, sacramental, and apostolic tradition—can only be preserved under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome.5

However, the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral (1886/1888) provides the theological architecture to challenge this assumption. The Quadrilateral explicitly affirms the Historic Episcopate and the two great Sacraments (Baptism and the Lord’s Supper) as essential to the Christian faith. An “orthodox Anglican” movement could formalize a structure that insists on these points as non-negotiable, effectively creating a “catholic” Anglicanism that does not require submission to the Papacy.6

By anchoring authority in the Ecumenical Creeds (Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian) and the Historic Episcopate, such a body could reject the “liberal” drift of the Communion without adopting the rigid, often Protestant-leaning Confessionalism of GAFCON. The argument here is that the via media is not a compromise between Rome and Geneva, but a distinct ecclesial reality that holds the fullness of the ancient faith. It asserts that the catholicity of the church resides in the continuity of apostolic succession and the sacramental life, not in the juridical supremacy of a single bishop.

This approach enables a robust defense of the “catholic” identity within Anglicanism. It posits that the Thirty-Nine Articles, often wielded by confessionalists as a barrier against Rome,7 were never intended to be a substitute for Ecumenical Creeds but rather a historical document reflecting the Reformation’s specific controversies. By elevating the Creeds and the Episcopate as the primary standards, orthodox Anglicans can assert that the church is truly Catholic without becoming Roman, preserving the Patrimony within a distinctively Anglican framework.

II. Transcending the GAFCON-Anglican Communion Binary

The second pillar addresses the structural and theological deadlock between GAFCON and the Anglican Communion. The current crisis is often framed as a choice between two irreconcilable options: a fractured Communion that permits “creeping liberalism,” or a GAFCON-aligned Confessionalism that rejects the fullness of the Catholic liturgical and sacramental tradition.

Emerging formally at the 2008 Jerusalem Conference amid mounting disputes over sexuality, biblical authority, and ecclesial discipline, GAFCON represented a justified protest against what many perceived as doctrinal collapse within portions of the Communion. The movement’s emphasis upon the authority of Scripture, classical moral teaching, and ecclesial accountability reflected legitimate concerns regarding theological revisionism and institutional incoherence. Highlighting those realities when much of the Communion was putting its ecclesiastical head in the sand was a gift to the church!

However, what was once a Conference is now a movement which has increasingly grounded Anglican identity in a heightened confessionalism centered upon the Thirty-Nine Articles, Reformation formularies, and sharply defined doctrinal boundaries. In practice, this has often resulted in a tendency to identify authentic Anglicanism primarily with its Protestant distinctives rather than with its broader catholic inheritance. GAFCON has defined what it means to be Anglican in three documents: The Jerusalem Declaration 2008, the Kigali Commitment 2024, and the Abuja Affirmation 2026, which arguably completes the “distortion” Canon Middleton feared: that a reactionary Protestantism that loses its catholic phronema.

To summarize these well-intended, lengthy statements is perhaps unfair to the efforts of those who drafted them, but I assert that we can agree in general on the theme of the three documents, where the Jerusalem Declaration (2008) sought doctrinal assent from the GAFCON participants in an effort to replace Anglican comprehensiveness with “confessionalism.” The Kigali Commitment offered a resounding critique of the failure of the ecclesial structures, calling for a replacement of the Instruments of “Communion” with a complete realignment by virtue of a covenant. Such affirmations are understandable given the depth of the ecclesial crisis; they risk subtly transforming the Anglican Idea from a reformed catholic tradition into a species of Protestant confessionalism. It narrows Anglican identity to doctrinal distinctives arising from sixteenth-century controversies and risks subordinating the broader catholic tradition to polemical formulations shaped by the Reformation era. GAFCON’s theological motivation is rooted in fidelity to classical moral teaching; its method, however, is not a recovery of the Anglican Idea, but rather a profound structural and canonical novelty that forges an entirely new Anglican way.

Conversely, the Conciliar Creedalist perspective, influenced by the Tractarians, argues that the critical universal boundaries of the catholic faith are the Scriptures, the Ecumenical Creeds, and the Councils. This view sees the Thirty-Nine Articles not as a creed, but as a historical document that should not be elevated to the level of dogmatic necessity for all time. For the Creedalist, the via media is the space where the ancient catholic faith is preserved, and any addition of later confessional tests is seen as a departure from the primitive church’s simplicity.

A Quadrilateral-based structure resolves this tension by elevating the Creeds as the primary standard (satisfying the Creedalist) while interpreting the “Historic Episcopate” and “Scripture” in a way that demands a high view of sacramental life and apostolic continuity (satisfying the Anglo-Catholic). Crucially, this model renders the Thirty-Nine Articles as a subordinate, historical guide rather than a binding dogmatic test. This removes the friction point that drives Anglo-Catholics away from the Communion and prevents the “sectarian rigidity” that alienates the broader catholic tradition. For many traditional Anglicans, both Anglo-Catholic and Broad-Church Evangelicals who are creedally oriented, this appears not as a recovery of Anglicanism, but as a reduction of Anglicanism. Drs. Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner make this case as they stress that the Anglican Idea to be just that requires sacramental communion, conciliar patience, and visible catholicity.8

By transcending the binary, this Fourth Way acknowledges that the friction arises because the two approaches speak past one another. The Confessionalist sees the Creedalist as diluting the faith; the Creedalist sees the Confessionalist as creating a sectarian barrier. A formalized Orthodox Anglicanism, grounded in the Quadrilateral, demonstrates that the Anglican tradition is capable of being truly Catholic without becoming Roman, and truly

Evangelical without becoming sectarian. It creates a space where the “catholic” and “Evangelical” wings of Anglicanism can coexist not as enemies, but as complementary expressions of the one faith.

III. A New Vision for Anglican Orthodox Structural Unity

The third pillar of this proposal addresses the structural deficit that has plagued the Anglican Communion. The current crisis is partly structural: the Communion lacks a central governing body with teeth, leading to a “communion of provinces” that often acts as independent nations. This lack of central authority allows for a “lowest-common-

denominator” approach that fails to uphold the integrity of the faith, while simultaneously failing to enforce the boundaries necessary for unity.

The present Anglican crisis may be understood fundamentally as the collapse of balance between two essential ecclesial instincts that Anglicanism historically sought to hold together: the confessional instinct and the catholic-conciliar instinct. Both emerge from legitimate theological concerns. Both preserve genuine aspects of Anglican identity. Yet when isolated from one another, each becomes distorted in ways that threaten the integrity of the Anglican tradition itself. It is ironic to note that some within the GAFCON movement (such as the ACNA) have championed a “Three Streams” model as the way forward, calling for an orthodox integration of catholic practice, evangelical teaching, and preaching along with charismatic zeal. The irony is that this has been criticized within GAFCON itself as a modern invention that undermines the movement.9

This internal tension highlights the danger: in the push for a “coherent orthodoxy,” the movement may eventually “squeeze out” the Catholic stream to maintain a purely Protestant confession.

To address this, a formalized “orthodox Anglican” structure could adopt the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral as its constitution, complemented by the Principles of Canon Law Common to the Anglican Communion. This structure would formalize the norms universally, highlighting the relationship between modality (the local church) and sodality (missional structures).

This proposal further recognizes that catholic communion requires not only theological affirmation, but canonical embodiment. The Anglican Communion has already taken significant steps toward articulating common juridical principles through the “Principles of Canon Law Common to the Churches of the Anglican Communion.” That text demonstrates that Anglican churches already share substantial canonical assumptions regarding episcopal oversight, sacramental order, synodical governance, and ecclesial discipline.10

The proposed structure would establish a clear definition of membership based on the four points of the Quadrilateral:

1. The Holy Scriptures as containing all things necessary to salvation.

2. The Creeds as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.

3. The two Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

4. The Historic Episcopate, locally adapted.

The Anglican Union for the Propagation of the Gospel offers the Fourth Way that transcends this binary reality. It accepts the GAFCON critique of doctrinal drift but rejects its method of fragmentation. Instead of creating a parallel jurisdiction, the Union invites GAFCON participants to renew the mission of the whole Communion, provided they adhere to the Quadrilateral.

Simultaneously, it challenges the See of Canterbury to re-center its mission on the Gospel rather than on institutional preservation. In some respects, given its hybrid dimension, the Anglican Union acts as a mediator of tension:

• For the individuals who cannot abide by the trajectory of the collective statements of GAFCON, the Union offers a canonical home that respects orthodoxy without forcing individuals into a narrow Protestant confessionalism, anchoring them in the sacramental and episcopal life of the whole Church.

• For those in relation to the See of Canterbury, the Anglican Union offers individuals and parishes a path to doctrinal clarity through the standards of the Union, without the need for schism.

• For the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans (GSFA), it provides a structured, mission-focused alternative to the ad-hoc alliances of the past

Under this approach, a model is proposed for Anglican membership, which would be contingent upon acceptance of these four points. If a province or individual accepts the Creeds, the Bible, the Sacraments, and the Episcopate, they are in communion. If they reject them, they are outside the bounds of this specific Orthodox Anglican structure. This clarity would prevent the “creeping liberalism” that drives conservatives away and the “sectarian rigidity” that alienates Catholics.

Furthermore, this type of Union, which is non-jurisdictional, allows for a rigorous enforcement of the via media as a distinct ecclesial reality. It would move beyond the current “communion of provinces” model, which often results in a paralysis of decision making, to a more cohesive body capable of upholding the “Anglican Idea.” This does not necessarily mean a centralized hierarchy akin to Rome, but rather a robust network of provinces bound by a shared constitutional commitment to the Quadrilateral. Such a structure would provide the necessary stability to resist both the liberal drift and the confessional fragmentation, offering a genuine home for those who seek a Catholic faith within an Anglican identity.

The Quadrilateral does not render the Thirty-Nine Articles obsolete; rather, it restores them to their proper historical and theological function. By establishing the Ecumenical Creeds and the Historic Episcopate as the primary constitutional norms (Principles 2 and 4), the Quadrilateral ensures that the Articles are read not as a standalone Protestant manifesto, but as a reformed commentary on the ancient catholic faith. The Articles themselves (Article VIII) explicitly subordinate themselves to the Creeds, stating that they ‘may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.’ Thus, the Quadrilateral acts as the hermeneutical key: it prevents the Articles from becoming a sectarian fence by anchoring them in the universal consensus of the undivided Church, while simultaneously preventing the Creeds from becoming abstract by demanding their concrete expression in the sacramental and episcopal life of a future orthodox Anglican Tradition

The classical Anglican via media has often been misunderstood as institutional compromise or theological ambiguity. Historically, however, it referred to a principled form of reformed catholicity: a Church committed simultaneously to apostolic continuity, evangelical doctrine, sacramental worship, conciliar order, and missionary adaptability.

A renewed Anglican orthodoxy must therefore reject both theological liberalism and sectarian reductionism. It must resist both centralized ultramontanism and fragmented provincial independence. The future of Anglicanism depends upon recovering a thicker ecclesiology in which visible communion is sustained through shared doctrine, canonical accountability, sacramental order, and common mission.

The goal is not bureaucratic uniformity, but communion in truth. Without structures capable of embodying doctrinal fidelity and ecclesial discipline, appeals to communion inevitably collapse into sentimentality or institutional incoherence.

A renewed Anglican orthodoxy capable of transcending the GAFCON–Communion binary will require similar trans-jurisdictional communities today: communities grounded in Scripture, sacrament, creed, liturgy, and apostolic mission that can sustain the classical Anglican synthesis beyond the failures of existing institutional polarization.

The goal of this Fourth Way (distinguishing from the proposals of IAFUSCO, Global South Anglicans, and GAFCON) is neither compromise nor vague centrism. It is the recovery of a deeper Anglican principle: that the Church may remain genuinely catholic without Roman centralization, genuinely evangelical without sectarian reductionism, and genuinely comprehensive without theological incoherence.

A further strength of this proposal lies in its recognition of the distinction between modality and sodality within Anglican ecclesiology. Historically, Anglican life has flourished through both territorial diocesan structures and trans-local missionary networks, societies, reform movements, and religious communities.

CONCLUSION

The Fourth Way is not a compromise, but a recovery of the Anglican genius for orthodoxy and ortho-praxis. It suggests the reality that the missing link in our ecclesial architecture is the long-maligned sodality.

By centering our unity on the propagation of the Gospel as articulated in the Quadrilateral, there is a dynamic space for dialogue. This Union offers a path forward that is neither a retreat into Rome nor a reduction into sectarianism. It is a bold, missional vision that trusts the Holy Spirit to work through a network of faithful communities, bound together by the Quadrilateral and the shared work of the Gospel. This is the future of Anglican unity: a dynamic, mission-driven communion that is capable of sustaining orthodoxy in the twenty-first century.

Ultimately, the ‘Fourth Way’ is the realization that the Quadrilateral is the synthesizing agent of the entire Anglican tradition. It is the lens through which the Book of Common Prayer is understood as a catholic liturgy, the Thirty-Nine Articles as a reformed confession, and the Ordinal as an apostolic rite. Without the Quadrilateral, these formularies can be pulled apart into opposing camps: the Articles used to exclude the catholic, or the Prayer Book used to dilute the Reformed. The Quadrilateral binds them together, asserting that true Anglican orthodoxy requires all four: Scripture as the source, Creeds as the summary, Sacraments as the means, and Episcopate as the order. This is the only way to prevent the ‘via media’ from collapsing into a ‘via media’ of compromise, and instead elevate it to a ‘via media’ of fullness, where the canonical tradition protects the integrity of the Prayer Book and the Articles against both Roman centralization and Protestant sectarianism.

If Anglicanism is to offer a credible witness within global Christianity, it must recover the conviction that catholicity requires both charity and order. The via media cannot survive merely as an ethos of moderation; it must become once again a confessing, conciliar, and canonically coherent communion rooted in the historic Anglican vision of reformed catholicity.

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The full, unabridged paper (18 pages) may be downloaded here:

A Consideration Of Canonicity, Catholicity And Communion A Fourth Way For Anglican Orthodoxy

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A Consideration of Canonicity, Catholicity and Communion: A Fourth Way for Anglican Orthodoxy By The Rt. Rev. Kevin Francis Donlon, Ph.D., LLM

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To let you in under the hood for a moment. Parts 2 and 3 were originally written as one draft in mid-March and only separated to fit the narrower confines of editorial requirements. Some confusion about the thesis of Part 2 might be due to pulling it out of the larger original draft. Part 1 was drafted in early April and published soon thereafter.

Part 1: Anglican Trajectories

Part 2: Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction

Part 3: Anglican Identity after Abuja

Anglicanism is not Confessional

As a priest in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), I have (until now) consistently heard it said that we are not a confessional church. This statement has been made by bishops, clergy, and laity from all corners of the ideological spectrum. What do people mean by this statement? Typically, they mean to distinguish Anglicanism from truly confessional denominations—those that have particular confessional statements as the basis for their life together.

The rejoinder to “not being confessional” is typically that we are “catholic.” After many years of hearing this, I began to say it myself. I’ve told it to confirmands, new members, old members, and everything in between. Anglicanism is not a confessional tradition; instead, we are a catholic tradition. In essence, we do not “confess” our particularities as Anglicans, but rather we only confess—and thereby regard as de fide (of the essence of the faith)—those things that are truly in keeping with the universal witness of the Church catholic (cf. the Vincentian Canon).

Within the ACNA, this distinction can clearly be seen in the Fundamental Declarations of our Province, a statement to which our own Canons and Constitutions refer as “the Doctrine of the Church.” The Fundamental Declarations “confess” four things: the Scriptures, the sacraments of the gospel, the episcopate, and the catholic creeds. In other words, we confess that which binds us to the “fullness and unity” of the catholic Tradition. We are confessional, to be sure—but only in the sense that together we adhere to the Scriptures, the sacraments, the episcopate, and the creeds; and in the sense that we have a shared commitment to the catholic tradition.

But being an Anglican is more than just these four Catholic realities. Within the Fundamental Declarations, we have nuanced statements on the seven Ecumenical Councils of the Church, allowing for a generous, yet traditional application of pre-schism orthodoxy, which holds to the dogmas without the anathemas. Additionally, we “receive” two things: the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and Ordinal as a standard for doctrine and discipline and the standard (with the preceding books) for worship. And we receive the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion as expressing the Anglican response to certain doctrinal issues controverted at that time, and as expressing fundamental principles of authentic Anglican belief. In short; we receive our Anglican tradition, and we confess the catholic faith. This does not make us confessional, it makes us catholic.

Anglicanism is not Institutionalist

Besides not being a confessional church, we also are not, so I have also been told (and so I have said myself), an institutionalist church. We do not have a pope who determines who is in or out. No matter how much the Archbishop of Canterbury may want to pretend to that role. For almost a century (1785–1867) “the Anglican Communion” was a family of churches united by a common liturgical tradition and a common inheritance of English Catholicism. This common inheritance was not only in those things that are de fide but also in matters of reception. The reception of the Thirty-Nine Articles in the Protestant Episcopal Church (USA) was different from that in the Church of England (they amended two articles and rejected one), and so too was their Book of Common Prayer different (particularly in the Eucharistic canon). There was no questioning, however, their common life that was bound up together in a communion of fellowship rather than in a communion of structure. They recognized each other’s common catholicity within the Anglican tradition rather than demanding formal admission to one and the same institution. Institutions are necessary for human organization, but they are not necessary for the sharing of communion.

What of Abuja?

From March 3–6, bishops from around the world gathered in Abuja, Nigeria, ostensibly to overthrow the hegemonic and symbolic power of the Archbishop of Canterbury by electing a new primus inter pares (first among equals) for the Global Anglican Communion. Instead of reorganizing the traditional authority structure within Anglicanism, however, they instead overthrew it, setting up their own institution with a corporate evangelical polity based in Protestant confessionalism, stating in “The Abuja Affirmation”:

True communion is confessional, rather than defined by a shared history or institutional structures.The Jerusalem Declaration, which includes the Reformation Formularies, expresses our common confession of the Biblical truth, shared faith, and communal conviction. We are in fellowship with all who assent to the Jerusalem Declaration…. There are not two Communions, but two incompatible definitions of communion – one confessional, the other institutional.1

And:

The Gafcon Primates Council [council of senior Archbishops] has been replaced by the Global Anglican Council. The newly constituted Global Anglican Council consists of Primates, Advisors, and Guarantors [lay and ordained] as voting members.2

So, are we confessional or not? Are we institutionalist or not? Instead of the old institution with a traditional catholic hierarchy and see (whether apostate or not), we now have a new institution, which has abdicated the episcopal office’s unique role of defending the faith and watered it down to a corporate board binding the faithful to a unifying confession of faith.

As a parish priest in the ACNA, this raises several red flags and a pressing question: “What is my confession?”

What is my Confession?

Traditionally, confessionalism—in the narrower, Protestant sense—is known as an exacting adherence to a clear, if rigid, magisterium. Take confessional Lutherans (any member of the International Lutheran Council of Churches), for example, and they will detail to you their confessional identity. This identity was hard-fought, both in defense against the covert influence of Calvinists infiltrating their seminaries in the sixteenth century and against official persecution under the Prussian King in the nineteenth century. If you have ever picked up a Book of Concord (the Lutheran Confessions) you will immediately note that it is exponentially longer than the Anglican Formularies. Every jot and tittle of Lutheran belief is spelled out, with the Augsburg Confession as the centerpiece and crown jewel. There is no spectrum, just the clarity of confessional Lutheran beliefs (and hundreds of pages on justification by faith alone).

The Anglican Formularies have the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion as their centerpiece. Whereas Concordia is exacting, the Articles are known for providing breadth. Indeed, this is one of the reasons they have not traditionally been referred to as a confession. How can you have a breadth of interpretative views concerning a confession of faith? Or more clearly stated: is it just a matter of interpretive opinion whether Christ has two natures or one nature? Is it alright to claim, “I interpret the confession of faith in the Nicene Creed one way, but someone else might interpret it another way?”

Following Abuja, the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008, which had previously been regarded as a standard or basis of fellowship, has now become the confession of faith for the Global Anglican Communion; but can it carry that weight? Within the Jerusalem Declaration there are a number of articles that might give various readers pause, but only one in particular is noteworthy for this discussion and my own concerns regarding confessionalism (for further reflections on the Jerusalem Declaration, I recommend the Global Anglican Commentary). Article 4 of the Declaration states: “We uphold the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word and as authoritative for Anglicans today.”3 Thus, Article 4 highlights three primary aspects about the Thirty-Nine Articles:

• Contain True Doctrine

• Agree with God’s Word

• Authoritative

Within the world of Protestant confessionalism, there are two ways to understand subscription to a confession: There is a quia-subscription, which affirms that the individual holds to the confessional standards because (quia) the confession agrees with God’s Word rather than “in so far as” (quatenus) the confession agrees with God’s Word (which is known as a quatenus-subscription and which, as everyone knows, is not actually a confession in the typical sense of the term). The language of the Jerusalem Declaration—if nothing else—seems to assume that the type of “confession” or adherence to the Thirty-Nine Articles is now a quia-subscription. Which begs the question: can we hold to differing interpretations of the Thirty-Nine Articles? This is a pressing question because within Anglican circles there are a myriad of Articles without univocal consensus of interpretation (most acutely surrounding Eucharistic piety and practice). If the Thirty-Nine Articles are now “the true doctrine of the Church agreeing with God’s Word,” then we must know the answer to this question. It seems that by making the Jerusalem Declaration into a confessional statement, Abuja has made the Thirty-Nine Articles into a confessional statement, functioning in the same strict fashion as the Westminster Standards do for Presbyterians or the Formula of Concord does for confessional Lutherans.

It ought to be noted that the word “contain” does a lot of work within JD Article 4. If—taking the most liberal reading of this word—it is granted that not all of the Articles are the true doctrine of the church agreeing with God’s word, but only some of them are; then how do we know which ones we need to confess together? Considering the brevity of the rest of the Jerusalem Declaration, this question is actually quite pressing if it is to serve as a confession of faith. The problem is, we have been given no way to know which ones contain the true doctrine of the church.

To demonstrate this dilemma, let us consider three examples from three different portions of the Articles. Even within the narrow ideological spectrum of the signers of Abuja, the authoritative nature of the Articles is far from settled:

1. One might uncontroversially assume that early articles which basically summarize the creed contain the true doctrine of the church agreeing with God’s Word and are authoritative for Anglicans today; however, as discussed in Anglican Trajectories REACH-SA (a signer of Abuja) rejects the phrasing and thereby the normative and traditional interpretation of Article III concerning the descent of Christ into Hell on Holy Saturday. So, does that mean that Article III does not agree with God’s word…

2. It almost goes without saying that the normative Anglican in the ACNA (another signer of Abuja) does not think the section on Eucharistic Theology fully contains the true doctrine of the church. For example, while a normative read of Article XXVIII proscribes the reservation of the Sacrament, that practice is now so common that it is actually presumed and commended in the Book of Common Prayer (2019).4 Does this mean the rest of the Sacramental theology of the Articles is not the true doctrine of the church...

3. As a final example, one of the most quoted articles, Article XX, ought to at least be authoritative especially when it states: “it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God's Word written, neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.” And yet, as noted in Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction, those who now “confess” the Jerusalem Declaration have allowed signers to join which explicitly ordain that which is contrary to God’s Word written in the ordination of women; a practice which only comes about by expounding one place of Scripture so that it is repugnant to the rest of it. Does that mean Article XX is no longer authoritative for Anglicans today…

It seems that—at least in GAFCON—the jury is still out after 450 years about where in the Articles the true doctrine of the church resides.

But let’s assume for a moment that—regardless of the wording of the Jerusalem Declaration––the traditional Anglican consensus of allowing for multiple views on the Articles remains in place, what about the rest of the Jerusalem Declaration: can we hold to differing interpretations of it? In other words, can we just get along? Or, must we confess in solidarity?

Walking Together [apart] in Good [bad] Disagreement

The Abuja Affirmation explicitly states that it is a “lie” to “walk together despite deep disagreement with those who have abandoned biblical teaching.” Or, in essence, we must confess in solidarity. And yet, this brings me to the unholy contradiction at the root of Abuja’s fellowship which I discussed in Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction. By triumphantly heralding a new day of confessional identity, the Bishops gathered at Abuja have decided that primary matters of faith, order, and theological anthropology—the ordination of women and their teaching authority in the church—can be held in good disagreement and it is only on matters of human sexuality where communion amidst difference can not be maintained.

The Jerusalem Declaration states that “the Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.” [Jerusalem Declaration, Art. 2] But the general secretary of the newly formed Global Anglican Council states that the ordination of women (or lack thereof) is “a secondary issue”[5] that Anglicans can agree to disagree on. GAFCON claims that it has reordered the Global Anglican Communion around a confessional identity, and yet on the second article of its confession—the plain and canonical authority of Scripture—it refuses to hold the line.6

As the keeper and witness of Holy Writ, the Church has the obligation and responsibility to do theological triage, and there are methods to do so (for example, see On God Given Diversity and Freedom in Secondary Matters7), but that work has simply not been done. Instead, GAFCON and the signers of Abuja have simply agreed to walk together in good disagreement over a primary question on scriptural teaching—there is, it would seem, no need to confess the faith in solidarity with each other. Therefore, the question still goes unanswered: How can we bless (ordain) what God forbids? Or, in the language of the Articles: is it now licit for the church to ordain that which is contrary to God’s Word written? (cf. Art. XX). Until this is answered, we are seemingly confessionalists without a meaningful confession.

The Catholic Religion

Joseph Ratzinger, before he was Pope, once said: “A strong Catholic potency has always remained within Anglicanism; [But] Jesus did not found a Catholic party in a cosmopolitan debating society, but a Catholic Church to which he promised the fullness of truth.”8 In essence, Ratzinger implies that being a catholic is more than just subscribing to a catholic mindset in a pluralistic church, it means being the catholic church. Historically, down through the English Reformers, Anglicanism has always claimed to participate in the fullness of the catholic church; we truly belong to “the Catholic Church to which [Jesus] promised the fullness of truth.”

Indeed, as Kyle Clark advocates, the fruition of the Anglican establishment and their attending Articles of Religion following the long century of reformation was not one of confessional particularity, but rather of catholic continuity.9 Within the Anglican tradition, what has been maintained through the centuries is the catholic religion, purged of medieval excess and honed through its own internal process of rejecting heretical practices (such as the aberrant Eucharistic piety of the 1552 Book of Common Prayer). This tradition has breadth—the same breadth as the catholic faith. This breadth is not to be confused with anything-goes(ism) or “generous orthodoxy” but is rather grounded on the clear and consistent scriptural witness and the unambiguous teaching of Holy Mother Church, who is the “witness and keeper of Holy Writ” (Art. XX).

The English Reformation took over one hundred years to settle. A definitive consensus did not arise until after the tumult of civil war and regicide; let us pray nothing as serious occurs in our century. We are in a new Anglican Reformation, and Abuja is an important marker in that new century. The question during the first Anglican Reformation was whether we would keep the Catholic faith unstained by the abuse or its reform. That same question remains just as pertinent today. And the answer for faithful Anglicans must lie in a rejection of Abuja’s affirmations and a return to the faith and tradition we have received within the Anglican tradition: the Catholic Religion.

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Part 2: Anglicans and the Abuja Contradiction

Part 3: Anglican Identity after Abuja

In a prescient article from March 27, 2026 the famous (or infamous) Episcopal Priest and journalist George Conger drew attention to three divergent trajectories for the Anglican Tradition that have coalesced throughout March of 2026.

1. The first, and most long-standing, is the normative Anglican Communion centered around the historic See of Canterbury. However, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally—enthroned on March 25, 2026—is neither fit for the office ontologically or theologically. For all intents and purposes the See remains vacant, and the Communion listless.

2. The second trajectory is the newly reconstituted Global Anglican Communion bound—as of March 6, 2026—by a confessional identity centered around the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008 (JD) and organized in direct opposition to the Canterbury Communion and its theological relativism.

3. The third trajectory is the personal ordinariates of the Roman Catholic Church established in 2008 to preserve the living patrimony of the Anglican tradition within the Church of Rome. These ordinariates were recently reinvigorated with a Vatican statement, published on March 24, 2026—notably the day before Mullally’s enthronment—stating positively that as Anglicans entered into “full communion with the Catholic Church, it [the Catholic Church] was enriched.”

So, Conger poses the question: for a traditional Anglican, “where is their spiritual home most securely found?”

As a traditionalist priest in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), I am—presumptively—finding my place along the second trajectory. But for a number of reasons I find little peace with that path. Indeed, of the three options presented (as such), the only palatable trajectory is the third: communion with the Church of Rome and the continuation of the Anglo-Catholic patrimony that I cherish. But are these the only three trajectories? Or, is there a fourth?

Confessionalism vs. Settlement Churchmanship

What is so bad about confessionalism? First, it is worth mentioning that Anglicans—all Christians, Lord willing—are confessionalist. We confess the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ. More specifically, every Sunday and Principle Feast Day in the ACNA we “Confess our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed.”1 But this type of catholic confessionalism isn’t what is meant by “confessionalism” in the modern sense of the Abuja Affirmation. Abuja binds the consciences of churchmen and women to a strict understanding of the Anglican tradition. This strict understanding gives me profound pause; particularly in what it allows for within those rigid bounds

In a subsequent article, I plan to expound more on the nature of confessionalism and how it relates to Abuja, the Jerusalem Declaration, and Anglican history. But in this article, I want to examine the issue of Churchmanship within the Anglican tradition as it applies to this new-found confessionalism in comparison to the Ordinariates of Rome.

Since time immemorial (or, at least 1559) there have existed two primary churchmanships within the Anglican Tradition. The emphases of these traditions have morphed over the years; a High Churchman isn’t the same as an Anglo-Catholic, nor is a modern reformed evangelical Anglican the same as a Low Churchman; and yet, there is more overlap and similarity than dissimilarity. The genius (and possibly downfall) of the Elizabethan and Restoration settlements is an intentionality to not settle certain disputes between these churchmanships. Instead, a common order of worship was prescribed to bind all in one fellowship around a common table by a common font, through common prayer. This broad settlement pushes fiercely against the concept of confessionalism because what bound the church was not strict dogmatic or doctrinal agreement, but an ability to pray together.

To change from a communion of prayer, to a communion of confession poses some existential problems for this Settlement of Churchmanship. Most notably, I wish to draw attention to the challenge posed by the participation of the Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of South Africa (REACH-SA) within the signatories of the Abuja Affirmation, and what their inclusion means for the future of orthodox Anglicanism.

A Case Study in South Africa

As a parish priest in a rural agricultural town, I have a particular interest in South African Anglicanism. Every year for a couple of months a number of migrant workers from South Africa are granted temporary visas to come and work in the Peanut and Cotton farms of South Georgia. These South Africans are faithful Anglicans and every Sunday they arrive at my parish in a work truck. They receive with attention and faithfulness the preached Word, and they partake with us of the Blessed Sacrament. They then join us for fellowship and teaching—for breakfast and Sunday School. They are just as much members of my parish, as they are the parishes they have come from. Indeed, I have received a gift from their parish priest for my cure of their souls while they are in the states; a priest of the notably Anglo-Catholic province of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa (ACSA).

ACSA is not a member of GAFCON and it is not a signatory to the Abuja Affirmation. Indeed, I am notably concerned by the direction of this province in recent years, specifically within the capital regions (as opposed to the rural towns my parishioners come from).

In opposition to ACSA, there is REACH-SA which, like the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC), was founded in rejection of the Anglo-Catholic revival—in essence, they reject the settlement and its inclusion of a breadth of churchmanship. However, unlike the REC, they have not walked back these puritanical founding principles. Instead, they have doubled down. As a self-styled Anglo-Catholic, my existence as an Anglican stands counter to the very raison d’etre of REACH-SA. What are some examples of them doubling down on their Puritan (and thereby not Anglican) doctrine?

• Lay Communion: the Canons of REACH-SA allow (albeit, in extenuating circumstances and with episcopal approval) for lay celebration of Holy Communion, which is a flagrant rejection of Articles XXIII and XXXVI in the 39 Articles and the rubrics of the 1662 BCP (both of which are part of our new confession of faith in the Jerusalem Declaration).2

• Rejection of Baptismal Regeneration: the 1992 REACH-SA Prayer Book deftly inverts the language of regeneration in the baptismal rite of the 1662, overturning the consensus of the Prayer Book tradition and the language of sacramental instrumentality in Article XXVII.3

• Rejection of the word “catholic” in the creeds: the 1992 REACH-SA Prayer Book replaces the word “catholic” with universal. Although the word catholic does pertain to the universality of the church, the intentionally changing of the ecumenical creed with seeming aim at anglo-catholics and the repudiation of the Prayer Book tradition is impossible to miss.4

• “Correction” of Christ’s Descent into hell and the harrowing of Hades: The revision of the 39 Articles for REACH-SA explicitly denies Christ’s Harrowing of Hades, and rather makes Article III about “the descent into hell” simply about affirming that Christ truly died.5

• Enforced receptionism: both in their altered means of saying the words of administration (emphasizing the 1552 words) and in their alterations to the Prayer of Humble Access, the normative belief articulated by the 1992 REACH-SA Prayer Book is that of receptionism or even virtualism in the Sacrament, rather than Real Presence as demonstrated by E.B. Pusey in the definitive Real Presence: The Doctrine of the Church of England.6

• Grape Juice for the Lord’s Supper: REACH-SA allows grape juice to be used in the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, going directly against the Articles XIX’s intention that the sacraments be “ministered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.”7

I would consider each of these not just a reformed low church impulse, but rather, a rejection of the Anglican tradition—indeed, of the catholic faith. This has gone beyond the pale. And yet, after Abuja, we now say that we hold to the same confessional identity… Can that possibly be true?

Or, do we just confess that we don’t want there to be blessings of same sex unions or liberal theology in the church? Is that all that binds us together? It almost seems so…

The Roman Alternative

Pope Benedict XVI, who founded the Anglican Ordinariates, famously stated: “A strong Catholic potency has always remained within Anglicanism; [But] Jesus did not found a Catholic party in a cosmopolitan debating society, but a Catholic Church to which he promised the fullness of truth.”8 In essence, to be a catholic is more than just subscribing to a catholic mindset in a pluralistic church, it means joining the catholic church. Historically, down through the English Reformers, Anglicanism has always claimed to participate in the fullness of the catholic church; we truly belong to “the Catholic Church to which [Jesus] promised the fullness of truth.” But what if that’s not true?

To an Anglo-Catholic like me, the inclusion of ardently anti-catholics (like REACH-SA) in the Abuja Communion pointedly undermines that claim. If the only options (discounting for the moment the Canterbury Communion) are Abuja or Rome, how can a catholic side with Abuja for reasons other than sheer convenience?9

It is worth considering the seriousness of this crisis. Personally, it has sent existential shock waves through me.

It was the habitual reflex of the broad churchmanship consensus—which we claimed was truly catholic—that opened the door for these unhappy bedfellows at Abuja. REACH-SA has never been a part of the Anglican Communion, and they have only been accepted now by GAFCON because the mainline Province in South Africa has a theologically liberal center of gravity in Capetown. But if the churchmanship consensus can allow for this, then it has failed. Indeed, maybe this whole experiment was flawed from the start?

It is into these existential questions that Rome offers its answer. The consensus was a flaw; the only way to be truly catholic, is to be a part of the church whose very identity is catholic, rather than to be a catholic in a reformed church. It is a compelling answer. An answer, which, as the Anglican Communion descends into disarray, sounds more and more viable by the day. Or, as Conger says, “Rome has now put its understanding of Anglican heritage on the table in a form that cannot easily be ignored. It has said, in doctrinal black and white, that the Anglican tradition at its best is not a problem to be solved but a gift to be received, purified and shared. Set beside the spectacle at Canterbury, that claim lands with particular force.”

Wither a Fourth Trajectory?

Conger’s question stands: for a traditional Anglican, “where is your spiritual home most securely found?”

As I come to this final portion, my heart fails me. Where is the Anglican tradition which I love? A tradition bound together for centuries by a theological method rooted in Common Prayer. A tradition where the reformational formularies were respected, but lived in light of the Prayer Book; in essence, Prayer Book Catholicism. We must return to the center of our tradition. But does that center exist?

I pose this question to the luminaries of our tradition—to the churchmen and clerics who love the Anglican way. Most especially I pose this question to our bishops; to my bishops, my right reverend fathers in God whom have been entrusted with the stewardship of this faith and this tradition. Can you offer a compelling vision of a fourth way? Or, are we bound to these three trajectories? Can you convincingly answer the question: Where is the Anglican’s spiritual home most securely found?

Introduction: From Crisis of Authority to Ecclesial Division

With the conclusion of the 2026 Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) summit in Abuja, Nigeria, a new vocabulary has entered Anglican discourse. Among the most prominent terms is “conciliar.” Many Anglicans assume the term refers simply to governance through councils rather than through a single hierarch. While this captures part of the meaning, it does not adequately describe the deeper ecclesiological implications now unfolding within global Anglicanism.

Historically, Anglicanism adapted ideas from the medieval conciliar tradition, transforming fifteenth-century principles of ecclesial consultation into a distinctive model of church governance. The Anglican Communion rejected centralized juridical authority while maintaining unity through episcopal fellowship, shared liturgy, and consultation among autonomous churches.1

Yet this model depended upon a delicate equilibrium: autonomy held in tension with communion. Anglican provinces retained independence, but they also recognized a shared identity expressed through the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the symbolic primacy of the Archbishop of Canterbury. That balance is now under unprecedented strain.

The present Anglican crisis is often described as a conflict over doctrine, particularly in matters of human sexuality and holy orders. Yet the deeper issue is ecclesiological. Anglicanism now faces a crisis not merely of theology, but of authority, governance, and identity.

What began as disagreement within a communion is increasingly becoming the formation of parallel ecclesial structures, suggesting that Anglicanism may be moving from internal conflict toward a structural division of communions.

I. The Anglican Adaptation of Conciliarity

Unlike the centralized authority structures of the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England rejected the idea of universal juridical authority vested in a single office. Instead, the English Reformation produced a distinctive ecclesiology balancing royal supremacy, episcopal oversight, and theological discernment.

Article XXXVII of the Thirty-Nine Articles affirms the monarch’s authority in ecclesiastical matters within England, yet Anglican theology gradually articulated a broader framework often described as dispersed authority.2

In this model authority is shared among several sources:

• Scripture

• Tradition

• Reason

• The consensus of the faithful

The English Reformation invoked conciliarist logic to justify its break from Rome. The 39 Articles of Religion state in Article XXI: “General Councils... when they be gathered together (forasmuch as they be an assembly of men, whereof all be not governed with the Spirit and Word of God) they may err, and sometimes have erred...”3

By acknowledging that even councils can err, Anglicans took the conciliar principles from the 15^th Century a step further: Scripture is the ultimate authority, and councils are the necessary, though fallible, tools for interpreting it. This pattern with Scripture holding Primacy became an Anglican Quadrilateral which promoted a “via media” (middle way), fostering a communion of autonomous dioceses in the Church of England and ultimately autonomous provinces in the Anglican Communion rather than a top-down hierarchy.

As for the Archbishop of Canterbury in England, he held a Primacy of Honor which globally on the Communion was to be moral influence but no juridical jurisdiction beyond his diocese, not to mention the provinces of the Communion. In this way Anglicanism evolved without a centralized magisterium while still preserving catholic order.

The role of the Archbishop of Canterbury emerged within this structure as a symbolic center of unity rather than a juridical authority. Lambeth Conference resolutions repeatedly affirmed this limited role. For example:

• Lambeth 1888 authorized the Archbishop to appoint ecumenical committees

• Lambeth 1930 described the Archbishop as “the center of unity” for the Communion

• Lambeth 1968 recognized the Archbishop’s relationship with the Anglican Consultative Council

• Lambeth 1978 affirmed his role in convening bishops for consultation and fellowship4

These resolutions demonstrate that the archbishop’s authority within the Communion is moral and relational rather than canonical. The Anglican Communion thus developed as a fellowship of autonomous provinces bound together by bonds of affection rather than legal jurisdiction. For nearly 150 years this evolving ecclesiology sustained remarkable global growth. Yet its did so with a weakened structure or what many call an ecclesial deficit of Anglicanism, where autonomy and dispersed authority are ever-evolving variables not rooted in a canonical or conciliar series of norms.

II. Conciliarity and the Doctrine of Necessity

The Anglican understanding of conciliarity emerged in conversation with earlier debates within the medieval church. Conciliarism developed during the Great Western Schism (1378–1417) when multiple claimants to the papacy divided Western Christendom.

Canon law traditionally maintained that the Pope could be judged by no one (Prima Sedes a nemine iudicatur).5 Yet conciliar theorists argued that extraordinary crises justified extraordinary remedies. In situations where the unity of the Church itself was threatened, a council representing the wider church could act to restore order. This reasoning became known as the Doctrine of Necessity.

The most famous example was the Council of Constance, which resolved the papal schism by deposing rival claimants and electing a new pope. Conciliar theory therefore asserted a crucial principle: When ordinary structures fail, the Church may create extraordinary mechanisms to preserve its unity and faith.6

It is precisely this logic that appears to animate the recent actions of GAFCON because in March 2026 GAFCON announced the creation of a Global Anglican Council (GAC) intended to provide leadership for Anglicans who believe the traditional Instruments of Communion no longer protect the faith.7 The initiative seems to draw inspiration from the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches Cairo Covenant, which proposed a new conciliar structure for global Anglican leadership. These two bodies met in Kigali in April of 2023 and discussed the merits of a variety of proposal to restore orthodoxy within the Anglican Communion.8

GAFCON leaders argue that these structures are necessary because the existing instruments of communion have lost credibility. But are the instruments of Communion even conciliar? Historically councils were legitimate precisely because they represented the entire church. For example, even The Council of Constance gathered supporters of all rival popes in order to restore unity. By contrast, the Global Anglican Council represents only one portion of Anglicanism as it seeks to represent Anglicans worldwide who identify with what GAFCON calls “orthodox” or “confessing” Anglicanism, particularly those who ascribe to the Jerusalem Declaration (2008) and the broader of Confessing Anglicans.

Thus, what is presented as conciliar reform may instead mark the emergence of parallel ecclesial authority.

III. Two Councils, Two Visions of Anglican Authority

The Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) has long functioned as one of the four historic Instruments of Communion. Created by the Lambeth Conference in 1968, it gathers bishops, clergy, and lay representatives from across the Anglican world for consultation and cooperation. Its authority is deliberately limited. The ACC does not legislate for provinces but instead encourages collaboration in mission and ecumenical dialogue.

The Global Anglican Council represents a fundamentally different approach.Formed by GAFCON in 2026, the GAC seeks to function as a governing council for those provinces aligned with the Jerusalem Declaration.

This creates two parallel structures:

These councils embody two competing ecclesiologies. The ACC represents the historic Anglican preference for consultation without coercion. The GAC represents an emerging model of confessional Anglicanism.

IV. The Problem of Conciliar Legitimacy

Conciliar authority historically depended upon universality.9 A council derived legitimacy from representing the entire Church, including those with whom one disagreed. The Council of Constance succeeded because it included supporters of all rival papal claimants. Neither Lambeth nor GAFCON nor the Global South Fellowship currently meets this standard. In the case of the Lambeth Conference, it lacks universal participation due to theological disagreements. Similarly, GAFCON gatherings intentionally include only those who subscribe to the Jerusalem Declaration, the Kigali Commitment and now the Abuja Affirmation. While the Global South Fellowship does have overlap of members not all members ascribe to the Jerusalem Declaration, but all members are required to assent to the “Cairo Covenant 2019” and the “Ash Wednesday 2023 Declaration, this creating its own criteria for exclusions.

In classical canonical terminology, a council that excludes significant portions of the Church risks becoming a conciliabulum—an assembly lacking universal authority.10

This raises a critical question: Is the Global Anglican Council a legitimate conciliar body or simply a confessional alliance of like-minded churches? Moreover, how can any of these leading Anglican expressions—irrespective of its orthodox claims—contend they are authentically conciliar? Despite claims to conciliarity, GAFCON has offered a “parallel framework” or called to lead a “reforming movement”. Furthermore, there has been a distinction between GAFCON (a movement) and the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans (GSFA), which has more established covenantal structures. In both cases there is dissonance and consonance with the Anglican Communion. It seems that all three Anglican bodies (GAFCON, ACC and GLOBAL SOUTH) have an approach to “conciliarity” which appears to be a form of “rule by committee” without canonical foundations.

This divisive Communion risks transforming the Anglican Idea from a communion defined by its own Quadrilateral into a fellowship defined primarily by confessional alignment. The question emerges: what happens to the theological traditions of Orthodox Anglicans that do not fit neatly within the Jerusalem Declaration’s Cairo Covenant framework? Anglo-Catholic theology, with its emphasis on sacramental realism and patristic continuity, may find itself in tension with the Declaration’s more Protestant-leaning formulations. Similarly, the Broad-Church Prayer Book tradition, which has historically valued theological reflection and intellectual charisms, faces pressure to conform to a confessional standard.

V. Canonical Chaos: Overlapping Jurisdictions

The Anglican Communion has long navigated the tension between local autonomy and global unity, yet the rise of parallel jurisdictions represents a fundamental rupture in its ecclesiological fabric. Historically, the church operated under the ancient canonical principle of una sedes, unus episcopus—one bishop in one territory. This geographical exclusivity was not merely administrative; it was a theological safeguard designed to preserve the visible unity of the Church. Within a defined diocese, the bishop served as the singular focal point of apostolic succession and sacramental authority, ensuring that the faithful could identify a clear locus of communion.

However, the contemporary landscape of Anglicanism has seen a dramatic departure from this norm,11 driven largely by the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). In response to perceived doctrinal drift within the historic provinces of the Communion, GAFCON has authorized the establishment of missionary dioceses and even entire provinces within territories where established Anglican structures already exist. This phenomenon is particularly evident in North America and Europe, regions that have long been the heartlands of the Anglican tradition. By planting new jurisdictions in these spaces, GAFCON has effectively created a system of overlapping authorities, where multiple bishops claim legitimate oversight over the same geographic and spiritual population.

The canonical consequences of this proliferation are profound and destabilizing. The traditional ecclesial map, once defined by clear territorial boundaries, has become a palimpsest of competing claims. This creates an immediate crisis of legibility for the wider Christian world.

Ecumenical partners—from the Roman Catholic Church to the Orthodox communions and Lutheran federations—have historically sought dialogue with “the Anglican bishop” of a given region, operating on the assumption that a single representative embodied the province’s stance. Today, that assumption no longer holds. Instead of a unified voice, ecumenical interlocutors encounter a cacophony of competing claimants, each asserting apostolic legitimacy and doctrinal fidelity. This multiplicity renders the concept of a unified Anglican witness increasingly difficult to sustain, as the “one bishop” model essential for clear diplomatic and sacramental engagement has fractured.

More than a mere administrative inconvenience, the emergence of these parallel jurisdictions signals a deeper fragmentation of Anglican ecclesial identity. It suggests that the Communion can no longer rely on geography to define its boundaries or its unity. When authority is no longer tied to a specific territory but is instead claimed by transnational movements based on doctrinal alignment, the very nature of the church shifts from a visible, localized community to an invisible network of ideological affinities. This shift challenges the classical understanding of the church as a visible body united in space and time.

Ultimately, the proliferation of parallel jurisdictions indicates that the Anglican Communion is grappling with an existential crisis of identity. The move away from the principle of one bishop per territory does not simply reflect a disagreement over theology or liturgy; it represents a fundamental reimagining of what constitutes the Church. If the visible unity of the Church is to be maintained, the Communion must confront the reality that its current trajectory toward fragmented, overlapping jurisdictions may render the concept of a single, coherent Anglican identity obsolete. The challenge ahead is not merely to manage these competing claims, but to determine whether a church can remain truly “catholic”— universal and whole—when its very structure is built upon the foundation of division that stems from its great ecclesial deficit which is the primacy of autonomy within Anglicanism.12

V. The Confessional Turn in Anglican Identity

Traditional Anglican ecclesiology operated on a distinctive principle: unity through liturgy rather than uniformity through doctrine. The Thirty-Nine Articles, drafted during the English Reformation, were never intended as exhaustive confessional standards but rather as boundary markers against specific theological errors. Anglican identity emerged organically from shared worship patterns, the rhythm of the Daily Office, and participation in the sacraments under episcopal oversight.

This approach allowed for considerable theological diversity within the Communion— Evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, and Broad-Church parties could coexist precisely because the binding element was not doctrinal precision but liturgical and sacramental communion.

GAFCON’s elevation of the Jerusalem Declaration to primary criterion of belonging as an Orthodox Anglican signals a fundamental reorientation. The Anglican Idea no longer depends on participation in a shared liturgical tradition and more on explicit subscription to specific doctrinal formulations of the undivided church.13 This confessional turn mirrors the approach of continental Reformed traditions more closely than the historic Anglican way of the Quadrilateral.

The tragedy and the opportunity of this moment lie in the realization that the Anglican identity is no longer a monolith. It has split into two distinct trajectories, each claiming the mantle of orthodoxy and authenticity. The future of Anglicanism will not be defined by how well these two visions can be reconciled, but by how clearly they can define themselves against one another, and whether the world is ready to accept that there may no longer be “one Anglican Church,” but rather two competing heirs to the Reformation legacy.

Moreover, this chasm creates challenges for the ecumenical relationships that Anglicanism has cultivated over centuries. Partners in dialogue with Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and other Protestant communions have historically engaged with Anglicanism as a liturgical and episcopal tradition. A confessional redefinition complicates these relationships, as ecumenical partners must now navigate multiple competing claims to Anglican authenticity based on doctrinal subscription rather than visible communion.14

Conclusion: Finding a Narrow Path Between Two Extremes

In 1999, Bishop Chuck Murphy of the Province of Rwanda articulated that within Anglicanism, there was a crisis of faith and a crisis of leadership. Certainly, the early members of GAFCON Leadership heard that cry, namely Archbishops such as Akinola, Kolini, Nzimbi, and Orombi. The substrata of that cris was the crisis of ecclesiology and canonicity. Many hoped the crisis would pass because Anglicanism had traditionally been a “big tent” held together by the Book of Common Prayer rather than a strict confession of faith along with Common Principles such as the Lambeth Quadrilateral.

By insisting that every participant assent to that document, GAFCON has effectively turned a theological confession into a gatekeeping instrument—much as the historic Reformed confessions did for Presbyterianism. The declaration’s strict adherence to a particular doctrinal line has, in practice, produced a new orthodoxy that many Anglicans cannot comfortably inhabit.

For orthodox Anglicans whose sense of identity rests on the historic liturgy, the episcopal succession, and the breadth of the Anglican quadrilateral (Scripture, Tradition, Reason, and the consensus of the faithful), the GAFCON framework is often too narrow. Its interpretation of secondary matters (adiaphora) excludes the theological latitude that Anglo-Catholics and prayer-book evangelicals have traditionally enjoyed. By defining belonging primarily through a single declaration rather than through lived communion, GAFCON risks internal fragmentation—the very disunity it claims to remedy.

At the same time, the liberal trajectory represented by the current Archbishop of Canterbury offers little consolation to these same orthodox believers. The Archbishop’s emphasis on inclusive language, progressive ethics, and broader ecumenical openness runs counter to the confessional rigor demanded by GAFCON, leaving a substantial segment of the Communion—those who value both historic catholicity and disciplined orthodoxy—without a clear institutional home.

Consequently, orthodox Anglicans, both Anglo Catholics and Prayer Book Evangelicals, find themselves caught between two poles:

• GAFCON’s confessional exclusivity – a rigid doctrinal filter that marginalizes nuanced theological expression.

• The archbishop’s liberal reforms – a pastoral agenda that dilutes the doctrinal boundaries many orthodox Anglicans deem essential.

Both poles undermine the collegial, dispersed authority that the Anglican Communion historically prized. Rather than moving toward genuine collegiality—a shared governance model where bishops, clergy, and laity cooperate in mutual accountability—these divergent trajectories deepen the identity crisis for those who wish to remain faithful to the historic Anglican heritage while also seeking a coherent, canonically consistent communion.

Until a renewed mechanism of mutual recognition and balanced synodality emerges—one that honors the historic episcopate, respects the breadth of the Anglican quadrilateral, and allows space for both confessional conviction and diverse churchmanship—orthodox Anglicans will continue to navigate a fragmented landscape, praying that the promise of “autonomy within communion” can be realized without forcing them to choose between GAFCON’s narrow confessionalism and the Archbishop’s liberal orientation and taking another path altogether different.

The future of Anglicanism may depend upon whether these competing visions can be reconciled—or whether Anglicanism is already entering a new era as a family of divided churches rather than a single global communion.

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Jerusalem Declaration Article 11

“We are committed to the unity of all those who know and love Christ and to building authentic ecumenical relationships. We recognize the orders and jurisdictions of those Anglicans who uphold orthodox faith and practice and we encourage them to join us in this declaration.”

Confessional documents are contemporary applications of the unchanging Gospel message. Article 11 restates the prayer of Jesus in John 17:21, “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.” To commit to Christian unity is to align ourselves with the will of Jesus, expressed in his prayer. Praying, “Thy will be done,” includes Christian unity. Failure to achieve that unity is, in a word, sin.

The Christian community is described in the New Testament, especially by Paul, by the analogy of the body, each part having a place and function, but all united in one body, with the head in charge. “We are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, which is the blessed company of all faithful people,” in the eloquent Prayer Book words.1 If that Body is wounded or amputated, unity has failed.

Some conceive of ecumenism primarily in terms of institutional merger. But Jesus places it in the context of the relationship between the Father and the Son, a seamless unity bonded by perfect love. In contrast, the Canterbury Communion’s “Instruments of Unity,” driven by institutional connections, bonded by money, are unable to achieve the goal of Jesus’ prayer. “Let us love one another, that we may with one mind confess the Father, Son and Holy Spirit” is the way the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom introduces the congregation’s confession of the Nicene Creed. True unity is motivated by divinely-modeled and divinely-inspired love and expressed in a shared Faith.

How does this play out in doing faithful ecumenism?

Our Baptismal Unity

The source of all ecumenical life is Trinitarian baptism. The mandate given by Jesus in his last message to the apostles was to go baptize all people, teaching them to be disciples (Matthew 28:18-20). It is baptism which incorporates us into the Christian family, granting us union with God and one another in Christ. Baptism is also foundational because it is God’s act, not man’s. The Christian community is not achieved by man’s efforts, but through the reception of sacramental grace from God. We “know and love Christ” because he first loved us.

The great Danish theologian, Bishop Nicholai Grundtvig, notes that the Creed comes alive only when being confessed by the congregation, the gathered and living Faithful. What God has done through Baptism is not merely to unite an individual to Christ, but to make an individual a member of Christ’s Church. Union between God and Man at the individual level overflows into the corporate. Thus, what began with the Baptismal Symbol of the Apostles’ Creed expands into the Eucharistic Symbol of the Nicene. The living confession of the Creed is a united witness shared by all the Faithful, loving one another in creedal harmony. Ecumenism does not thrive as much in interdenominational negotiations as it does in the shared unity of prayer and praise with the ultimate telos of full Eucharistic participation.

Two-Tiered Ecumenism?

The days when denominational loyalty meant a shared belief are gone. Virtually all major denominations are now divided, with each group not acknowledging the validity of others within the same denomination. The repositioning, sad as it is, does mean orthodox Christians increasingly find each other beyond institutional identification. Knowing and loving Christ is not limited to one denomination, for our Baptisms transcend these institutions.

Article 11 distinguishes between orthodox Anglicans and other Christians. The former are invited to join in signing the Jerusalem Declaration. This would seem to invite a two-tiered ecumenism, one for Anglicans and one for others. But orthodox Christians are not fundamentally divided when it comes to the core deposit of the faith. While theological distinctions often remain among the orthodox, more often cultures rather than institutions are dividing lines. Archbishop Jeffrey Fisher pointed out some time ago that to be Anglican is simply to be a catholic Christian. And for all orthodox Christians we invite them to pray with us and join us in the mere catholicity expressed in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrillateral.

Innovation Inhibits Integrity

Jesus laments over Jerusalem, “How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34). We assume all within the “blessed company of all faithful people” are baptized believers by definition. Those not faithful to the Gospel message, we assume are not in the “blessed company.” The seriousness and tragedy of our divisions is real and must be acknowledged.

Those who have long commanded the core institutions of Anglicanism are wont to cry “schism” at orthodox Anglicans who remain faithful to the Gospel message, and thus cannot share in the theological distortions promulgated by these institutions. Such accusations of schism, however, are based on cultural, not theological bonds. Schism is departure from the Body of Christ, as witnessed by the authority of Scripture passed forward through the catholic Tradition. The burden of proof is on those who adhere to novel doctrines to show how they remain within the Body of Christ.

Sadly, Christians continue to be divided and Jesus continues to weep over Jerusalem. Article 11 and Article 13 express opposites which must be seen in tandem, the one confessing “the unity of all who know and love Christ,” the other pronouncing anathema on those who stand outside the orthodox Faith. Our Eucharistic joy in the Body is mitigated by our sinful disunity which tears it apart. In particular, the neology to which many cling, even within GAFCON itself, continues to devastate the unity of the Faithful. To be catholic, as most Anglicans self-identify, is to be driven by the ecumenical mandate. Ecumenical and catholic are even congruent words, the one speaking of the Church as a family household, the other of belonging to the wholeness of the Church.

Unity Is Not Optional

Christian unity is not an optional extra or marginal activity; it is the will of God. As such, we must respond with sincere, clear action. Let us pray, with Jesus, that we may be one, and cooperate with the Spirit to make it happen. Let us continue to seek the mind of Christ together, that our sad divisions may cease, not because we ceased to care about doctrinal clarity, but because the Spirit has led us into all the truth. Let us worship, as God enables, with orthodox Christians, recognizing that it is through our adoration of the Father through the Son in the Spirit that we receive unity.

Global Anglican Commentary

Article 10 is a succinct, almost terse, statement of the basic theological foundation for the enormously important, interdependent, and contemporary issues related to creation, economics, and justice. These issues are often not so much disputed as ignored by orthodox Christians, with the consequence of seriously distorting the Gospel message for our time.

Theology of Creation

The first statement of the Creed echoes the first statement of the Bible, affirming God as Creator. In Genesis 1:26, God gives man dominion over the earth and its and all that dwell therein, which still remains God’s (Psalm 24). Man’s rule can thus be best described as a covenantal monarchy, a governing stewardship according to pre-established standards for the greater good, rather than a personal dictatorship. The heavens and the earth and all that are therein are included in the divine creation, and therefore in the mandate of stewardship. Man is accountable to God, as the owner, for the management of the earth.

This is compatible with Jewish tradition and much Eastern thought. It was, however, counter-cultural in the milieu of the Roman Empire. Over the centuries, Christianity has always fought a battle against a dualistic worldview, which separated the spiritual from the material. This pervasive dualism has been especially prevalent in Western civilization, not infrequently permeating Christian thought as well. This has in turn led to a misinterpretation of “dominion” to mean the exploitation and “conquering” of the material creation, rather than the careful nourishing management of the earth implied in good stewardship.

Article 10 of the Jerusalem Declaration directly and simply refutes this misinterpretation. 1 Peter 2:9 is a key statement; we are to be kings and priests. Our baptism annoints us both to rule as wise stewards of creation and to offer our rule to God as his priests. Since all the earth is sacred, all the baptized Faithful have the holy vocation of sharing in its stewardship and in offering it to the Creator and Owner. To damage the earth or its creatures, including humans, is to desecrate God’s sacred temple of earth, just as St. Paul points out that each human is a temple of God’s (1 Corinthians 3:16-17, 6:19-20) and is to be respected as such. To be indifferent to the current exploitation and consequent suffering of the earth and her creatures is only to move your sin from that of commission to omission.

Implications of our Theology

Yet has orthodox Anglicanism implemented the correct interpretation of stewardship and reflected its central importance in its’ worldview and ethics? Article 10 cannot simply be assented to; it mandates action. And yet, this action demands that we rightly understand stewardship. To limit stewardship—as is often done—to donations or raising funds for needs ecclesial or terrestrial (“so long as I give God his cut, I’m fine”) is a failure to grasp even the basics of Article 10. To accept the Article means accepting the burden of “responsibility to be good stewards” and to “uphold and advocate for justice” and “seek relief and empowerment of the poor and needy.” These are actions, not abstract concepts. Jesus expects such action from us, over a lifetime, as he makes clear in the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matthew 25:31-46).

It is important to remember our ultimate motivation. The two “Great Commandments” to love God and neighbor are incorporated in the Anglican Rite as key entrance elements in the Holy Eucharist, orienting us to the context of love in our liturgy of Sunday and the liturgy of the week which follows, lived in the world. “Relationship with the Creator of all things cannot, by definition, be something exclusive; it is the key to a love that embraces all creatures. ‘Anyone who loves God loves not only his fellow man, but the entire creation as well.”1 It is this which ultimately drives our stewardship of creation, and as part of that, our commitment to justice and to the “relief and empowerment of the poor and needy.”

Those who imagine themselves outside of nature, and see our relationship with the environment as “man versus nature,” are deceived by the false view of the material world. Man is fully part of the natural world, taking his place among the other species. He is designed to live in harmony with those species and his own, in his assigned vocation as steward of the planet and its great variety of inhabitants.

Peace, Justice, and Creation

The sinful greed and avarice of many of our fellow humans, extending even into the excessive consumerism of many Christians, has led to a crisis caused by such bad stewardship. Christians are called to give prophetic witness to change this disobedient and ungodly behavior, so the planet can be restored, and we humans can survive. This stewardship is interdependent. As the late Pope Francis helpfully articulated, “Peace, justice and the preservation of creation are three absolutely interconnected themes, which cannot be separated and treated individually.”2 Therefore, “we are faced not with two separate crises, one environmental and the other social, but rather with one complex crisis…. Strategies for a solution demand an integrated approach to combating poverty, restoring dignity to the excluded, and at the same time, protecting nature.” The interdependence of these crises is affirmed by the phrasing of Article 10, which holds these themes together rather than siloing them into separate articles.

Lift Up Your Hearts

Stewardship begins at the altar: “The Gifts of God for the people of God” (Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom)—the material sacramental gifts embedded in bread and wine—are prototypes of the material creation we will encounter as we leave the altar and enter into the week to come in the world. Wheat and water are joined with human effort to make bread, which is made by the Spirit to be for us the Body of Christ. We, having returned to God the talent he gave us with our investment of effort,3 receive back from God himself. All of creation desires to participate in the perfect,4 and we have been given the responsibility of taking that which lacks reason and aligning it with God’s Wisdom, Christ (1 Corinthians 1:24). Thus, humanity has been charged with a kind of stewardship that does not merely prolong the existence of created things, but shapes them godward. Applying the sacramental love we have received to the challenges and decisions we face is how we exercise good stewardship to nurture the creation entrusted to our care, and the poor dependent on our mercy, along with facilitating the justice of their cause.5

When faced with the overwhelming scope of this crisis, a feeling of helplessness is not surprising. Only a shared, common response—collective action—can make an impact. Yet shared responses are composed of multiple individual decisions to act. The most important thought to remember is expressed in the motto of Mumintroll (a Finnish cartoon character, created by Tove Janson): “The little he could do, he did.”

With this in mind, and with the urgent, crisis-driven imperative to be a good steward—illucidated in the Scriptures, and proclaimed by the Jerusalem Declaration—the following practical steps are suggested as we “uphold and advocate for justice in our society”:

1. Pray for guidance

2. As you receive Christ in the sacramental gifts of the Eucharistic elements, let them motivate you in taking action as a good steward

3. Educate yourself regarding the interrelated damage being done by greedy sinfulness to the planet and to the many living in poverty and without justice

4. Stewardship is exercised in a multitude of ways, some of which are:

   1. To speak up on behalf of the creation and its suffering inhabitants,

   2. To be politically active, voting and/or working for candidates who are committed to the wise stewardship of nature, man and beast; to be an intelligent voter, well-informed and not easily duped,

   3. To seek and support groups and agencies, especially (but not limited to) Christian ones, who you can verify by research are implementing the goals of Christian stewardship, including alleviating poverty,

   4. To witness to your fellow Anglicans as to the necessity and priority of Article 10 in their lives.

Article 10 provides an excellent conceptual foundation for the work of stewardship incumbent upon Christians. Lethargy, apathy, indifference, and avoidance are too often the response of affluent American Anglicans. The message of Christ in Matthew 25 is extremely clear that these responses are unacceptable failures of Christian ethics. Lift up your heart, instead, and rejoice in being a good steward enveloped in the sacramental love of Christ for all creation, including you and me.

Global Anglican Commentary

By the Rev. Fr J. Kelman, SSC

Most would agree that in the English world no other books have been as influential as the Authorized Version (or King James Version) of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer (BCP).1 However, a careful reader picking up a first edition of either of these would not find an exact match to our contemporary editions. The Authorized Version underwent various spelling changes, an update in 1769, the later exclusion of the Deuterocanon in many circles, and the English text underwent major revision in the Revised Version (1894), Revised Standard Version (1957), then splintering into the New Revised Standard Version (1989) / NRSVue (2021), English Standard Version (2001), and Revised Standard Version 2nd Catholic Edition (2006). All maintain a common root—Holy Scripture—but each, including the Authorized Version, has a translation philosophy representative of the spirit of its given age, some with greater theological bias one way or another.2

The Book of Common Prayer serves in the English Spiritual Tradition as an apt analogy to the concerns of Bible translation. Is the worship of the church faithful to our origins? In what way? Formal equivalence? Dynamic Equivalence? Paraphrase? Do concerns of contemporary relevance, archaism, novel theology, or developing doctrine, change *what we do—*or rather, *who we are—*when we gather?

If Article VI of The 39 Articles of Religion is clear that all things necessary for salvation are contained in Holy Scripture, the Book of Common Prayer chronicles how the English tradition has read scripture: not in isolation, not individually, but corporately. These traditions integrating Word and Sacrament uphold the Apostolic faith. Indeed, the goal of the Book of Common Prayer as a project of the Reformation was that anything “contrary to Holy Scripture or to the ordering of the Primitive Church” was avoided because nothing should distract from the Gospel of God.3

Over the centuries, the Ecclesia Anglicana4 has undergone nearly as many changes as there are understandings of the word “Anglican” today. Nevertheless, we can look to the paths our church has traveled to understand and remember the way of the Anglican Spiritual Tradition.

“We rejoice in our Anglican sacramental and liturgical heritage as an expression of the gospel”

The Anglican tradition is a providential, radical experiment in expressing the simplicity of Gospel while participating in the unbroken pattern of apostolic sacramental practice, in continuity with the liturgical tradition of our forebears. Through the twists and turns of history—reformation, reaction, revolution, reconciliation (all in about 100 years from 1549-1662)—the Book of Common Prayer sought to uphold what was believed as the patristic faith expressed in the Church within the Western Tradition. What was of utmost concern was not finding ministry partners in the Reformation, or triangulating against Rome as such, but that the Gospel should be consistently proclaimed through the liturgy—both the proclamation of the Word and the sacraments—as a way to live out Holy Scripture through the tradition of the Church. The Gospel of God is that which cuts to the heart, and the liturgy must not distract from that.

The Book of Common Prayer is a tested public disclosure to the people and to the world of the lived, prayed, believed spirituality of the English Patrimony. The faith of the Church is disclosed by how she worships: not mere aesthetics, but prayer, and the sacraments upheld through these prayers.

As a standard, or Rule of faith

“we uphold the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer”

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is more than any other the hard-won, authoritative, tested by centuries, bought with the blood of saints and martyrs, distilled core of reformed Catholicity:5 to add to it is to move in a direction (more Protestant, or more Catholic, or more liberal, etc.); to take away from it—to baldly contradict it—is removal of the Western Tradition itself, arguably the sacraments. Just as the liturgy is not to distract from the Gospel, so too should it represent valid sacraments. It should not misrepresent the sacraments as doing things they do not, nor misrepresent as not doing the things that they in fact do.

When a given strain within the tradition changes liturgy, its expression necessarily forms belief. If change is produced by looking to culture first and the tradition second, the beliefs that come from such liturgy may subvert the tradition itself by shaping downstream belief. Left unchecked, laity and clergy alike, shaped by the novel liturgy, may begin to expect as normal matters which contradict Articles VI, XXI, and the like, not the least other articles of the Jerusalem Declaration. That this has already happened in the Anglican tradition is reinforced by the existence of the Jerusalem Declaration itself.

The 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a standard represents the greatest unity of a church that is as Catholic (proclaiming the Gospel to all, in all places, at all times) as it is Reformed (which is to say, reforming from the abuses that distract from the Gospel). It represents a synthesis of at times conflicting sides of the church, who are as yet called by Christ himself to be one.

It means that if one conflicts, removes, or changes parts to it, one may deviate from the standard and thereby be at risk of changing the faith itself. While there are boundaries, this cannot be understood as rigid.6 Change may be good, even remedial. If we reject this, we would no longer be upholding the Reformation heritage our church expressed in Article XXI; that is, “even councils, may err, and sometimes have.” So too with Rites: “Wherefore things ordained by them as necessary to salvation have neither strength nor authority, unless it may be declared that they be taken out of holy Scripture.” The 1662 itself made a number of revisions to its predecessor prayer book—updating the language, clarifying the theology, and even adding liturgies that had become necessary due to the intervening history7—while insisting that these changes in no way represented a repudiation of the previous book, but rather stood in continuity with it.

However, the cost of revision must be counted soberly. John Henry Newman notes this in Tract III of Tracts for the Times, speaking of alterations in the liturgy,

If all your respective emendations are taken, the alterations in the Services will be extensive; and though each will gain something he wishes, he will lose more from those alterations which he did not wish.8

Revision to the liturgy, then, must not be undertaken lightly or triumphantly, but circumspectly.9 Fiddling with a standard changes all subsequent measurements. If one is converting a standard, it must be considered what consequences this may have if it is universally adopted in place of the former standard, the revision of which hazards removal of the worship of that local use from the worship of the church ‘always, everywhere, and by all.’10

Revision: Revolution, Evolution, Preservation

“to be translated and locally adapted for each culture.”

Translations

Returning to the idea of a biblical text: if the standard set forth in the English liturgy of the Western Tradition is a standard for contemporary as well as historic Anglicanism, and if the liturgy is not read directly (Hebrew or Greek, Latin or hieratic 17th-century English), then the manner in which the text is converted to the needs of the present day becomes important.

1. Is the text a paraphrase or strongly dynamic translation: adapting shapes of the liturgy and repackaging phrases according to the translator’s priorities? (A)

2. Is the text a formal—direct—translation: updating spelling and punctuation, names of monarchs, or removal of them, as applicable? (B)

3. Or might it be a functional compromise or synthesis between the two? (C)

These three uses of the prayer book can be thought of as Revolutionary (A), Evolutionary (C), and Preservational (B). All must measure solidly against the authority of Scripture, under the authority of the church militant here on earth.

Revolutions

Article XX makes clear that the church has the authority to establish diverse rites, but they are only to be respected as liturgies of the Church insofar as they remain faithful to the biblical and apostolic deposit of faith. A liturgy, no matter how supposedly “authoritative” it may be, cannot carry any weight if it is “contrary to God’s Word written.” This precludes revolutionary texts which bear the authority of bishops who, or national conventions which,

1. Antagonize the plain meaning of scripture and the articles.

2. Subvert or supersede the Catholic deposit preserved in the classical Prayer Book.

Some, due to a theological conviction, have changed the liturgies in ways the classical Prayer Books did not envision, and the passage of decades of use renders normal a novel theology not found in the Prayer Book lineage.11 Whether trial liturgies or ratified Prayer Books, those which undermine the Gospel bear no authority in Christ’s church, though procedures of men have permitted them.

Some revisions are optimistically borne out of ecumenical tendencies, as exemplified by the ICEL-influenced liturgies,12 the aim not being English but universal in worship. These changes in rites owing to revolution of the modernism of the 20th century have benefits—again, of greater connection to other Christian bodies outside Anglicanism—but at the cost of rendering the already cloudy water of Anglican identity even more opaque.

This is not to say that such innovatory texts are not usable, much less invalid, but that when interpreting them, the intent and meaning must be assessed according to a standard that is not just the most recent committee which formed them. The classical Prayer Books—American, Canadian, English Editions—each have a consistency between them that is immediately familiar to a scholar of any one.

At best, therefore, these ecumenical projects may function as tangential traditions in relation to the Prayer Book Tradition; at worst, they exist in contradiction to it.

Evolutions

To guard against the risks of a revolutionary liturgical tradition, a more circumspect approach has been offered. An evolutionary text13 is by necessity a compromise or synthetic text: it is not directly participating in the standard but exists as a branch intentionally and repeatedly connecting to it. It aims to be a separate but complementary but not contradictory tradition leaning again on the authority of Article XX.

Such texts redirect the revolutionary liturgical period towards classical. In this it is not so much a syncretic work, but rather a synthetic: integrating the developments that most of the Western Tradition accept, while seeking to regain some of the English tradition14 that preceded the mid-20th century revolutionary tendency. It is one that is both a translation of the classical standard, and answerable to it, while also integrating another standard tradition, under the authority of its agreeableness with Holy Scripture and with churches across traditions. What is most important is that evolutionary worship nowhere conflicts with the standard given in the classical Prayer Book.

Preservations

A preservation liturgy maintains the provenance of the 1549-1662 Books of Common Prayer, including the 1928, 1962, and other national books which preceded the penchant for revolutionary revision. One example is the 1662: International Edition, an independent, non-ecclesiastical revision designed for use outside the Commonwealth,15 roughly aligning to Peter Toon’s philosophy of preservation: light updates, with local flourishes.16 Another is the Reformed Episcopal Church’s 2003 Book of Common Prayer, which includes elements of the 1928 American and 1662 English traditions. Some, such as the ACNA 2019, allow options to preserve, in part, the classical book. In it there exists the option to re-arrange the Holy Communion into a 1662 shape,17 which, if used with the Prayer Book Society Canada’s 1662 supplement for Collects and Lections, retains the Western Tradition heritage of that service.18 The Reformed Episcopal Church continues to hold a classical prayer book lineage in its Book of Common Prayer revision in the Americas, UK, and Europe.

To follow the standard of the 1662 is to drink deeply from our Sacramental and Liturgical Heritage,19 of the last many centuries of providential stability, confidently rooted in the ancient traditions of the church and the priority of the Gospel. The Vincentian Canon calls the faithful to continue in worship that is recognizable as much 300 years ago as in the present, so that in 300 years it will still be recognizable. The guarantee of this is to carry the fire held by those before us and to pass it on undiminished.

Integrations

Whether using an old text preserved, or a new text authorized, we must uphold the classical Prayer Book tradition as a standard for Anglican Churches to maintain literacy, honor, and parity with the English expression of the Western Tradition we have received: we must never forget who we are, not relegating once-cornerstones to the scrap piles, but honoring and building upon them.

For more on the 1662 use across Global Anglicanism, please see my work, A Case for the 1662 Book of Common Prayer; or the Historic Lectionary preserved in the 1662 standard, On the use of the Historic Lectionary. This essay is a contribution to the Global Anglican Commentary series Orienting Toward Jerusalem: On the Jerusalem Declaration.

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It’s no secret that the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is going through the wringer right now. We’ve got two bishops under disciplinary investigation or trial, one special diocesan jurisdiction that just got ripped apart in an authority crisis between multiple bishops, and controversy over how each of these cases is being handled. Even some bishops and administrators not currently under scrutiny are being called into question over their alleged or apparent complicity with how various issues and cases have been mishandled in the past. There is a lot of heartache, a lot of broken trust, and a lot of confusion.

Fixing this will take more than slapping a canonical revision to Title IV onto the Province; it will take vulnerability and transparency; hard questions must be asked and hard answered given; liars must confess; sinners must repent; the disobedient must conform and the leaders must lead rightly.

Apologia

I’m just a parish priest with a writing habit, sitting in a quiet spot in New England, safely distanced from pretty much everyone involved in provincial matters. I have no personal stakes for or against Archbishop Wood or any of the other men filling in for him in their various capacities, and I have no insider knowledge concerning who’s done what sins and who’s covering up what secrets. So I am very far from being able to offer any solutions; my place largely is to pray for them from my safe distance and strive to live up to the expectations placed upon me and the vows that I have taken as a priest in God’s Church.

As a writer, though, and specifically as a commentator on the Prayer Book that binds us together, I do have some observations on the nature of the episcopacy and how different understandings of that great office may be coming into play in the present crises.

The Bishop’s Vows

As with deacons and priests, one of the best ways to understand the ministry and identity of a bishop is to look at the questions posed to a bishop-elect at his ordination / consecration service. The Examination questions are answered by vows: the clergyman makes promises to his superior(s) that he will live accordingly. So let’s take a look at what the Bishop vows at his consecration.

1. Are you persuaded that you are truly called to this ministry, according to the will of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Order of this Church? I am so persuaded.

2. Do you believe that the Holy Scriptures contain all things necessary for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ? And are you determined out of the Holy Scriptures to instruct the people committed to your charge, and to teach or maintain nothing as necessary to eternal salvation but that which may be concluded and proved by the Scriptures? I do so believe, and I am so determined, the Lord being my helper.

3. Will you then faithfully study the Holy Scriptures, and call upon God by prayer for the true understanding of them, so that you may be able by them to teach and exhort with wholesome doctrine, and to withstand and convince those who contradict it? I will, the Lord being my helper.

4. Are you ready, with all faithful diligence, to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrine contrary to God’s Word, and both privately and publicly to call upon others and encourage them to do the same? I am ready, the Lord being my helper.

5. Will you renounce all ungodliness and worldly lusts, and live a godly, righteous, and sober life in this present world, that you may show yourself in all things an example of good works for others, that the adversary may be ashamed, having nothing to say against you? I will, the Lord being my helper.

6. Will you maintain and set forward, as much as you are able, quietness, love, and peace among all people, and diligently exercise such discipline as is, by the authority of God’s Word and by the Order of this Church, committed to you? I will, the Lord being my helper.

7. Will you be faithful in examining, confirming, ordaining, and sending the people of God? I will, the Lord being my helper.

8. Will you show yourself gentle, and be merciful for Christ’s sake, to poor and needy people and to all strangers destitute of help? I will, the Lord being my helper.

These are, naturally, very similar to the questions posed to deacons and priests, but there are some important differences too. The 5th question, for example, is markedly more severe than what is asked of other clergymen. Renouncing “all ungodliness and worldly lusts… that the adversary may be ashamed, having nothing to say against you” is more than we ask of our priests and deacons. And this reflects the teaching 1 Timothy 3:7, which says an overseer, or bishop, “must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil.” Note this is not just about holiness of life, but also of reputation! This suggests that even if a man is innocent but has a tarnished reputation, we should think twice before putting a miter on him and calling him Bishop.

A Context of Recent Historical Confusion

Although these eight vows are the same historic questions and answers put to Anglican bishops since 1662 (and since 1549 with the exception of #7), there is one influential Prayer Book that broke from this pattern: the Episcopalian Prayer Book of 1979. And since that book was the most widely-used among American Anglicans for forty years before the ACNA’s Prayer Book was published, it is worth wrestling with the questions it asked of bishops. Here’s a comparison of the historic Anglican vows against the 1979 rewrite, lined up for comparison by subject matter:

It is worth noting that the departure in 1979 from the historic examination indicates a view of the episcopacy that is considerably more authoritarian and clericalist than what is found in the historic Anglican tradition:

• there are two questions on his calling instead of one,

• it spells out his sharing in collegial episcopal authority,

• it gives him the responsibility of “interpreting the Gospel to” and supporting all baptized people as “chief priest and pastor”.

All this makes the Bishop considerably more involved in various avenues of ministry.

A word for our leaders today

If we are to receive correctives from the classical tradition, which is restored and taught in our 2019 Prayer Book, we are inevitably pointed to a different picture. Instead of a busy bureaucratic micromanager, the Anglican Bishop is to be a man of God who renounces ungodly and worldly lusts more clearly and publicly than the priest is ever asked to do; the Bishop is to be faithful to carry out the episcopal ministry of examining, confirming, and ordaining his people; he is to be an apt teacher of the Word.

We don’t have to spend two questions dwelling on his sense of calling; his vocation has been made clear through the lengthy process of diocesan searching and examination and confirmed by the approval of the College of Bishops.

We don’t have to remind bishops that they are “chief priests and pastors” who need to sustain their priests and support their deacons; they are to be “faithful in ordaining, sending, or laying hands upon others” and be capable teachers of God’s Word for them and diligent exercisers of godly discipline.

At least one small part of our present troubles taking place at the provincial level of the ACNA can be accounted for due to these 1979-style conceptions of the episcopacy carrying over into a system that charitably assumes classically-Anglican bishops. The Bishop’s chief posture is not to be huddled up “with your fellow bishops in the government of the whole Church”, but instead to be ministering God’s Word to his people. I have seen a couple different articles popping up in recent weeks arguing for a reform of ACNA governing polity that takes the College of Bishops down a notch. At first I was indifferent to the idea, but having reviewed the Ordinal as I have presented it above I now see the wisdom in those proposals. Bishops are not meant to be bureaucrats, governors, or senators leading from an office building; the College of Bishops is not meant to be a College of Cardinals meeting in secret. The Anglican ideal, rather, is choosing a Bishop who evidently lives a holy life and has a reliable gift of teaching. If he doesn’t have great administration skills, that’s fine; that’s what the synods, canons to the ordinary, and other assemblies are for.

I don’t write this to condemn any Bishop or leader in particular – like I said before, I don’t know any of the provincial leaders personally. I write this to warn against false perceptions of the episcopacy that have permeated (and perhaps poisoned!) our Church. We mustn’t look to the clericalist authoritarianism of Rome; we mustn’t look to the business-success models of the megachurch movement; we mustn’t look to the cults of personality that surround many men of charisma. Rather, as Anglicans, we should be looking among our priests for the quiet, meek, holy, and faithful teachers whose lives and words proclaim the Gospel with equal measure and integrity.

This is, by the way, why many of our greatest bishops and archbishops throughout history were monks – not because of the early-medieval favoritism often given to the monastic life, but because that is where the men most devoted to a holy life and the Word of God were most often found. Many of the great leaders of the Church had no episcopal aspirations whatsoever – John Chrysostom, Augustine of Hippo, Anselm, and many others much preferred the monk’s habit to the episcopal miter. If we are to rebuild a healthy provincial leadership paradigm, these are the sorts of men we need to be seeking, electing, and consecrating as our diocesan bishops.

No more bureaucrats and mega-pastors! Give me that old time religion! Give me a man who is above reproach, the husband of one wife, sober-minded, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not a drunkard, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. These are the bishops whose discipline and authority will not only be respected by their flocks, but loved.

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In his Oxford Martyrs’ Day Communique on October 16th, 2025, Archbishop Mbanda, chair of the Global Anglican Future Conference, declared,

“The future has arrived.”

We well know the status quo this future supplants:

Over the past several decades, significant portions of the Anglican Communion have succumbed to a hermeneutic that trades the revelation of the Holy Spirit for the Spirit of the Age.

Faithful churchmen throughout the Communion attempted to stop the capitulation to this new and revolutionary spirit, but were ignored or evaded with deceptive phrases like “walking together,” “unity amidst difference,” and “humble listening.” Concrete action to repent and change course never once occurred. Instead of truly walking together, revisionist provinces have walked away from the common doctrine and discipline of the Church. The presenting issues for this departure from the faith and practice of the Church were matters of human sexuality and anthropology, but these were merely symptoms. The root disease is a hermeneutic which is faithless to the traditional understanding of Holy Scripture.

This doctrinal crisis has led to an ecclesial crisis. How can we walk together when we are on two separate paths? How do we know which path is true, which is the ancient and good way where we may find rest for our souls?

In 2008, members of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) produced the Jerusalem Declaration, which establishes sign posts to mark this way. Over the past two decades, GAFCON has established faithful pilgrim communities on that path while calling others out of the ditches on either side. Rather than heed the call to repent, however, apostate churches have continued to abandon the doctrine and discipline of the Church. What was once impaired has now been broken. The Instruments of Communion, which since their inception in 1988 have defined the Anglican Communion, are dead and no longer recognized by a significant number of provinces. Instead, the future has arrived: the Global Anglican Communion, which continues in faithful pilgrimage on the ancient path of faith.

We, in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), are fellow pilgrims with GAFCON on this path. And we desire to be a Church that is shaped, pruned, and directed by the Scriptures interpreted in a “plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading” (Jerusalem Declaration, Article 2).

But what exactly does that mean? What does it look like? What are its implications? Answering these questions is the aim of this new series: “Orienting Toward Jerusalem.”

These questions cannot only be directed outward. We must level the challenge of the Scriptures to ourselves—to examine our own provinces, dioceses, and churches according to this rule of “the plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.” How can we better walk the path established by Holy Scripture?

The Gospel calls each of us to repentance and renewal. May the purifying and cleansing Word of God expose anything within us that is hidden or concealed so that only faithfulness to Christ and his Church remains.

We believe our foundation is secure upon Jesus Christ, in pilgrimage on the same ancient path where saints have trod before us. This ancient path is demarcated by the Global Anglican Communion through the Jerusalem Declaration, and our hope is that through these commentaries we will be edified by the faith that has been entrusted to us through our tradition, repent wherever we have strayed from it, and be emboldened to give thanks—once again—for the faithfulness of our Anglican heritage.

We invite you to walk with us on these ancient paths.

Orienting Toward Jerusalem

• The Ven. Andrew Brashier

• The Rev. Matthew Brench

• The Rev. Kyle Clark

• The Rev. Ben Jefferies

• The Rev. J. Kelman

• The Rev. Brandon LeTourneau

• The Rev. Ron Offringa

• Mrs. Emelie Thomas

• The Rev. Canon Jay Thomas

• The Rev. Hunter Van Wagenen

Global Anglican Commentary

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Dr. Erica Jarrett, in a paper given to the recent Forward in Faith assembly in Dallas, addressed the 1700th Anniversary of the Nicene Creed being celebrated this year. She primarily reminded us of the invitation to the Creed, as found in the historic Eastern Christian liturgies: “Let us love one another, that we may with one mind, confess Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Doctrinal formulation, notes Dr. Jarrett, begins with the community of Christian confessors loving each other. As Paul eloquently describes it in 1 Corinthians 13, without love the Creed is simply empty noise.

In the Liturgy, it is important to remember the placement of the Creed, as the “hinge” between the two main sections of the Mass, the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Faithful. It connects the preceding Scriptural instruction, as applied by the sermon, with the following celebration of the Eucharist, the “agape,” or feast of love. Through the written Word, we receive instruction to intelligently perceive that Word, and then receive it, the real presence of the incarnate Word in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, to carry with us to apply to daily life.

Alas, our Liturgy comes with no such invitation to love so we can be of one mind. It was proposed to the Committee creating the 2019 BCP, but only the liturgiology professor on the Committee endorsed the idea. We are therefore without the inherited wisdom of the phrase, and the profound message behind it. It is true that love without Creed is equally lacking, a vacuous emotion blowing in the wind. The point is, both components are key to Creedal profession. Without confessing the Faith , love is left without its source in the God who is love. Without love, the Creed becomes simply a pile of dogmas to hurl at opponents or exclude the heterodox. Without love, one mind must be arrived at by polemics and anathemas, not through caring and seeking. It is an exercise in division until only a sect of nitpicking “true believers” remain, unable to grasp the catholic context of the Creed.

Perhaps this helps explain the doctrinal mission drift in contemporary Anglicanism, where orthodoxy is defined by sexuality and gender issues, not by Creedal Faith, and love is conspicuous by its absence. One mind has become an increasingly distant and unattainable mirage.

Are sexual and gender issues of no importance and best ignored? Not at all. But neither is one mind achieved, as Jesus prays for in John 17, by endlessly attacking the “other side” with tired and worn slogans meant only to cheerlead “our team” and focused only on sexuality/gender. These issues are penultimate to the Faith, which is why they are not in Scripture (despite some misguided efforts to retro-find them hiding there), nor in the Creed, nor other than marginally in the Fathers, nor the confessional statements of the Reformation era.

Several examples may help elucidate the discussion. First, the conflict regarding women in the priesthood and episcopate is not ultimately about gender, but about what ordination means. For instance, the ordering of a teaching elder in the Presbyterian Church, and the laying on of hands for a priest or bishop in apostolic succession following the catholic sacramental Tradition, is not the same thing. The latter involves the theology of creation, and of ordination as sacrament, as well as standing in the place of Christ in the Eucharist. This is not primarily about gender, but rather quite distinct concepts of ordination.

Second, the dominating conflict about abortion is a reproductive issue. But the term “pro-life” in Christianity can only be understood by its roots in Jesus’ statements, such as “this bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world” (John 6:51). For Jesus, every life is precious enough that he gave his own life on the Cross for it. A commitment to the unborn without a corresponding commitment to the already born is a mockery of Christ’s stated purpose and ultimate sacrifice, the kind of hypocrisy which alienates people from Christianity. To be “pro-life” is to embrace a love for mankind. It means rethinking your views on war, on supporting the starvation of children in Gaza, on lack in America of post-natal care, lack of access to adequate education and healthcare for children, all the things needed for life to thrive, including reaching out to offer life in Christ as the free gift it is, rather than a focus on punitive legislation. These examples are cited, not as definitive statements on the specific viewpoints (more could be said indeed), but to point out the serious mission drift from our creedal Faith into penultimate matters.

GAFCON now thunders against the choice of the new Welsh archbishop, who is a lesbian. But apostasy was denounced in the same Anglican circles by Keble’s sermon in the 1830’s, and he rightly understood it in Creedal terms. The lack of success in rooting out the apostacy in the almost two centuries since that sermon is the core problem. If you cannot do that, you should not be surprised by what happens next, even as GAFCON itself is currently unable to deal with some member churches, who have consecrated women to the episcopate, in direct contradiction to the foundational documents of GAFCON.

So many in the leadership of ACNA have come from the ranks of the Episcopal Church, where endless pronouncements on various iterations of sex and gender have emanated over the past several generations, each setting a new standard, as deemed correct by TEC’s leadership.

Having departed in despair from TEC, the ACNA leadership now proclaims endless pronouncements on various iterations of sex and gender, as the expression of orthodoxy among us. As in the case of women ordained to the priesthood and consecrated to the episcopacy, such discussions reveal a lack of one mind, unresolved and becoming more unresolved. A lack of love might also be detected. For many who fled TEC, it must seem increasingly like “déjà vu all over again,” in the colorful words of Yogi Berra.

Perhaps it is time to worry less about sex and gender. After all, a lesbian heretic is no more or less a heretic than a heterosexual heretic.

Keble, we might be tempted to observe, didn’t know the half of what was coming. Apostacy beyond his worst fears is rampant. The Oxford Anglo-Catholic remedy, birthed with vibrant energy from his classic sermon on the apostasy of his time, is now moribund and declining. It is understandable that many have given up the struggle and moved on to Eastern Orthodoxy or Rome.

Yet, the flicker of life still burns in the embers of Anglicanism. If God will not demolish a city for ten righteous men, as the Old Testament informs us, perhaps he will not forsake us if there are ten orthodox remaining in the Anglican community. The Holy Spirit has not left the premises. If the Holy Spirit will rebuild the catholic community out of the contemporary rubble of Anglicanism, we can be part of the reconstruction team.

The Creedal Faith, still standing after 1700 years, is our lifeboat. And Dr. Jarrett is right: only through love can we achieve the one mind to find the one thing necessary.

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On a sultry day in mid-June I stepped out of my car in front of a stately historic home in Morrisville, North Carolina. Set a few blocks off of the bustling main streets and nestled next to an old train track, it retained an air of a bygone era. This, the Williamson Page House, was the home of my ancestors. As I gazed at the white columns and 19th century edifice, I reflected on something my cousin had said that morning when I announced my intention to visit the home: “The house is hauntingly beautiful. Haunting, because amongst our family who lived so well, there were their slaves. Slaves whose stories we will never know.”

I am a southerner, and the son of southerners. To reflect upon my heritage is an exercise in nuance. My great-great-grandfather, an inheritor of the Page House, was – according to my grandmother – the youngest Captain in the Confederate Army, and his regiment formed right there on the lawn of the Page property. Although his military career was apparently lackluster, after the war he served for over two decades as the Wake County (the capital district of NC) Sheriff. Ought I to be proud of him? As I said, this type of reflection is an exercise in nuance for, as that other great southerner once said regarding the implications of slavery on his native south: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever”1

The justice of God, which Jefferson so rightly feared, did come in the form of the bloodiest war in American history. To read about the founding generation of our Nation, I can both appreciate the compromise that was struck to bring this common cause coalition together to found this union, while regretting – along with so many of the founders – that this compromise was allowed to persist beyond that generation. As America came of age, the scourge of slavery was like an open wound that became infected and allowed to fester. By the time of the Civil War, loyalties had become so entrenched that it took bloodshed to resolve them. We may rightly wonder what may have happened had slavery been abolished in the late-1700s rather than the mid-1800s; an intention that many of the founders advocated for, but my own southern ancestors resolutely resisted. Such musings lead me to ecclesiastical reflections.

There is a remarkable correspondence between the founding of the United States and the recent founding of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) upon these same shores. A founding whose implications has ripples and resonance beyond the Anglican world. Of it, then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote on Pope St. John Paul II’s behalf: “I hasten to assure you of my heartfelt prayers for all those taking part in this convocation … I pray in particular that God’s will may be done by all those who seek that unity in the truth, the gift of Christ himself.”2 In this Anglican founding, too, a compromise was struck. In the American founding the colonists had inherited from the British the controversial Trans-Atlantic slave trade which they agreed-to-disagree on in order to found a union where – as they said – “all men are created equal” (Declaration of Independence). In the ACNA’s founding, these conservative Anglicans had inherited from the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada the controversial practice of women’s ordination which they agreed-to-disagree on in order to found a province which was – as they said – “consistent with the historic faith and order of the church”3

As a priest in the ACNA and an American, I am thankful for both of these foundings brokered upon compromise. But as a southerner, I am deeply chastened. My obstinate ancestors – among others – stood in the way of the vision of all men being created equal. Ultimately, bloodshed was necessary to fully realize that vision. Over the past sixteen years since the ACNA’s founding, that initial compromise which brought together such a providential coalition of diverse Anglicans with a singular gospel mission has become like an infected wound. Our compromise on such a central and visible aspect of ecclesiology desperately needs the antibiotics of godly resolution. Otherwise, it will fester – in many ways it already has – and will certainly result in grievous conflict and figurative ecclesial bloodshed.

When infections are left untreated, often scalpels or saws are required to prevent permanent damage to the entire body. In the U.S., the scalpel of God’s justice was a horrific war. If I might amend Jefferson’s quote to my own context: “I tremble for my church when I reflect that God is just and true; that his justice cannot sleep forever when his truth is obscured.”4 If you will, the question of whether or not women can be ordained has become the ACNA’s slavery. This compromise has shackled us to a unity that can only be obtained through compromise. And this compromise cannot end well because whether this is a justice issue (women’s equality) or a salvation issue (sacramental validity), both justice and salvation are at the core of the Gospel and are thereby first-order issues of the most pressing sort. Neither can both be right; but whichever one is, its resolution demands to be sought at all costs for either side. Or, as the great philosopher of our time wrote: “neither can live while the other survives.”5

But, to continue the analogy, we are still in the late-1700s of our church’s life. There is still time for us to settle the compromise without the necessity of bloodshed. The infection may yet be treated with antibiotics rather than a scalpel. But, time is fleeting; God’s justice and truth cannot sleep forever. In the course of ecclesiastical and salvation history there are innumerable examples of God’s patience staying his justice that his people may repent. But, we dare not try his patience, lest this whole limb of Christ’s Church be amputated for the sake of his truth and the health of his whole body.

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More posts on this topic

Editor’s note: Bishop Boyd serves in the Western Rite Orthodox tradition. For another interaction with Scottish liturgy, see also Dr Keane, The Scottish Liturgy and the Anglican Doctrine of the Eucharist (The Anglican Way).
The previous publication of this essay included generated images, which are here omitted with the author’s permission as part of the ‘human made’ priority of this publication. LLM/AI was not used for writing this piece, but has been used for research & drafting.

by Bishop Joseph Boyd1 (Anglican Vicariate)

In his well-researched article, The Reformed Character of the Scottish Liturgy (June 19, 2025), Lue-Yee Tsang offers a compelling case for reading the Scottish Communion Office through a distinctly Reformed lens. Citing the Nonjurors’ historic relations with both the Eastern Orthodox and Reformed traditions, Tsang attempts to demonstrate that the Scottish Rite, as preserved in the 1764 Nonjuror Liturgy and later transmitted into the American 1789 Book of Common Prayer, remains doctrinally Protestant and theologically consistent with Reformed sacramental theology. He argues that the Scottish liturgy, while elevated in language and structure, never departs from the Reformed distinctives of non-adoration, non-transubstantiation, sola fide, and a symbolic rather than objective understanding of Eucharistic presence.

While the historical citations and theological analysis are commendable for their thoroughness, the article ultimately collapses under its own assumptions. The case Tsang makes rests on a series of false dichotomies, selective framings, and unproven premises, especially regarding what constitutes “Reformed” theology, how liturgy functions doctrinally, and the theological arc of the Nonjuror and early Anglican tradition. In fact, far from undermining a Western Orthodox interpretation of the Scottish liturgy, Tsang’s article inadvertently reinforces the very claims it seeks to dismantle.

This article seeks to offer a respectful but direct rebuttal, grounded in the liturgical history of the British Church, the writings of the early Nonjurors, and the undivided theology of the first seven centuries of the Church.

I. THE LITURGY SPEAKS FOR ITSELF

The 1764 Scottish Communion Office, derived in part from the 1637 Scottish Book of Common Prayer and influenced by ancient Eastern models, contains theological content that simply cannot be harmonized with the essential distinctives of Reformed liturgical theology. Among its features:

1. A clear and explicit Epiclesis: an invocation of the Holy Spirit to bless the elements and make them to become the Body and Blood of Christ;

2. An offertory oblation of the unconsecrated gifts prior to the Epiclesis;

3. A post-consecration “eucharistic sacrifice” of the now-hallowed elements as “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving”;

4. The self-offering of the faithful, described in sacrificial language drawn directly from Romans 12:1;

5. A narrative structure patterned not after Zurich or Geneva, but after the Eastern Anaphoras, especially those of St. Basil and St. James.

This structure is not merely ceremonial but theological. The order of oblation, invocation, and thanksgiving places the Scottish rite in line with the Eucharistic theology of the Fathers, not with the later dogmatic simplifications of the Reformed world. It is significant that even The Book of Common Prayer 1789 in the United States preserved this structure, not out of sentimentality but out of theological fidelity.

II. “REFORMED” BY WHOSE DEFINITION?

Tsang’s entire article hinges on an equivocation: that “Reformed” means “not Orthodox,” and therefore the Scottish Rite must be interpreted so as to remain within “Reformed” parameters. But this simply assumes what it needs to prove.

When the Nonjurors described themselves as “Reformed,” they did not mean they accepted Calvin’s theology as a final authority. They meant that they rejected the papal abuses of the later medieval West, and that they aimed to reform the Church in light of Scripture, the Fathers, and the first Seven Ecumenical Councils, which is precisely what Orthodox Christians affirm. “Reformed” in their context is not a fixed confessional identity but a process of recovery and correction, which led many of them to reconsider Roman errors in light of the East, not Geneva.

Indeed, the Nonjurors were the first Anglicans to enter formal theological dialogue and concordat with the Eastern Orthodox Church. In their 1716–1725 correspondence with the Patriarch of Jerusalem and the Church of Russia, the Nonjurors openly professed belief in the Real Presence, the invocation of the Holy Spirit upon the elements, and the mystery of Eucharistic transformation, all while expressing pastoral concerns about certain practices, such as the kissing of icons (which was not indigenous to the Western tradition), not rejecting them outright.

III. VIRTUALISM, ADORATION, AND THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST

Tsang quotes John Johnson of Cranbrook, whose doctrine of “virtualism” has often been mischaracterized. Johnson did not deny the objective presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Rather, he emphasized that what is received is not Christ’s “natural Body” (i.e., in physical, spatial terms) but His glorified Body, “after a manner which flesh and blood cannot conceive.” This is identical to the language used in the Liturgy of St. Basil, which likewise proclaims that the bread and wine become “the precious Body and Blood of Christ … changing them by thy Holy Spirit.”

To reject transubstantiation (as defined by the Roman Church at Trent) does not entail a Zwinglian memorialism or “symbolic presence.” It is not a uniquely Protestant gesture. It is also the position of all the Eastern Orthodox Churches, which confess a mysterious transformation, not a metaphysical definition based on Aristotelian categories.

The Scottish Rite likewise makes no scholastic claim about the mode of Christ’s presence, only that the faithful receive His Body and Blood truly, in faith, for sanctification and eternal life. That is not “Reformed theology”, but simply the position of ancient orthodox Catholicism.

IV. ICONS, SAINTS, AND THE QUESTION OF ADORATION

Tsang also argues that the Scottish Nonjurors rejected the veneration of saints and images, and therefore must have held to a Protestant minimalism incompatible with Orthodox faith. But this is a misreading of diplomatic language. The Nonjurors were writing in a period of ecclesial negotiation. They did not say these things were heretical, but they said they were “afraid of giving scandal,” “not persuaded at present,” and requested further clarification from the East. The very act of submitting their concordat to the Patriarchate of Jerusalem assumes the authority of the East and the rightness of the Orthodox Church.

In other words, their concern was not with the theology behind these practices, but with their pastoral and cultural application in the English context, where anti-popery was still in full force. Their instinct was not to condemn the East, but to approach it cautiously and respectfully, as legitimate heirs of the apostolic tradition.

That is a fundamentally Orthodox instinct.

V. TOWARD A WESTERN ORTHODOX READING

The Western Orthodox Church is not seeking to impose foreign categories on the Scottish rite. We are rather recognizing in it a liturgical theology that is:

• Epikletic (calling on the Holy Spirit to consecrate the elements);

• Sacrificial (offering both the gifts and ourselves to God);

• Mystical (acknowledging the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist);

• Communal (joining the prayer of the Church on earth with that of the Church in heaven);

• Apostolic (rooted in the practices and theology of the undivided Church).

To read the Scottish rite through a strictly “Reformed” lens is to reduce its theological grandeur to the limitations of 16th-century polemics. But to receive it as a Western Orthodox liturgy, purified from Roman errors, Protestant denials, and modern individualism, is to do what the Nonjurors themselves aspired to: restore the Church of the West to her primitive integrity and catholic fullness. This is our jurisdiction’s project and the fulfillment of many years of intuition, struggle, theological research, and repentance within our Holy Patrimony.

CONCLUSION

The Scottish Rite is not “Reformed” in any narrowly confessional sense. It is a via media not between Rome and Geneva, but between East and West, antiquity and reform, mystery and clarity. It contains within itself the DNA of a Western Orthodoxy, which is rooted in Scripture, shaped by the Fathers, and carried in a vessel both English and ancient.

Tsang’s article does not refute this vision. On the contrary, it proves what we have always said: that the Anglican Patrimony and tradition, at its best, was reaching back not to the heretical Calvin, but to the consensus of the first one thousand years and the Ecumenical Councils. And that is exactly where we, as Western Orthodox Christians, intend to stand.

2024 ACNA Diocesan Growth

Holy Orders and the ACNA

I have updated the old Google spreadsheet which was originally sourced from Anglican Compass in 2018 about Holy Orders and diocesan statistics in the ACNA (this link will continue to refer to the current version):

angloromanticism.com/acnaholyorders

In it you can find parochial report statistics from 2018-2024, and I will keep it updated year-to-year. If you note a typo, feel free to reach out; I am prone to those.

Here’s the snapshot; follow the link for breakdown by year:

A few notes for clarity: there might be many analyses to this, most especially with controversies about the so-called Dual Integrity dioceses purportedly or actually implementing policies against the traditional position. The data above can be read favorably by either side of the aisle, or pessimistically against the other. Whether these numbers are good or bad, I don’t have a ‘take’ on what that means year-to-year especially.

Here’s why:

History

The idea of a numbers race came about after the 2017 Victoria Statement. Before 2017, most of the soft-gerrymandering of diocesan growth was toned down because clergy and parishioners were told that the Holy Orders Task Force was going to produce a report. This is something the Episcopal church never did in the 1960s (when deaconesses were made deacons without reordination) or the 1970s (when those deacons were illegally ordained). And following the counsel of some, such as Bishop Arthur Vogel (a Nashotah professor and sub-dean), because the real problem was that it wasn’t done in proper order. Of these ordinations he said, “validity [of ordination] means ecclesiastical recognition.”,1 and so pushed for ecclesiastical recognition by the province: it was provincially authorized two years later. Validity in this use was institutional validity, thereby creating theological validity. This is the opposite of what those in ACNA were offered: a theological study that would create an institutional reality, reflecting the sentiment ‘If we only take the time to do the theological study then the issue will be resolved.’ So the ACNA went about a study of the issue where both positions could accurately articulate their respective position, and in a college of bishops—the protectors of the catholic tradition—could implement that administrative reality.

Upon the completion of the ACNA Theological Task Force on Holy Orders study, there was some confusion about it presenting sides without a resolution. Some expected that it by design would have no precise conclusion drawn, so as to allow the bishops to resolve the position rather than a committee. Others expected a concrete conclusion,2 which presumably would be affirmed or rejected by the college.

Regardless, the Task Force took the former position as the scope of its study, yet offered clear recommendations.

The Task Force3 report says,

When the Task Force was formed in late 2012, Archbishop Robert Duncan charged us “to lead the College of Bishops in a discussion about the issue of women in holy orders.”

In light of this commission, we have provided the College with the information which we believe is necessary for an informed theological and scholarly discussion of this issue.

It is important to recognize that it was not our task to provide a solution to this controversy. Those who read our work with such an expectation will be disappointed. (p. 313)

The Task Force went on to recommend,

While the Task Force acknowledges that both perspectives on the issue of women’s ordination have anchored their opinions in accepted principles within the Anglican tradition, we advocate continued efforts toward closer unity on this issue. To be content with the current situation would be in violation of our Lord’s desire and prayer that his people be one. (p. 317, emphasis added)

And,

While Anglicans may disagree on a number of matters, the divisive nature of this particular issue, even in the best of circumstances, is an impediment to a unified sacramental ministry of our province. However, a precipitous decision, simply for the sake moving past this issue, would not reflect the love that is required by God’s people. Both positions on this issue cannot be right, but both positions are held by good and godly people. Work toward a resolution of this issue must move forward, but it should be done with patience and the leading of the Holy Spirit. (p. 318, emphasis added)

Following this report, the College of Bishops issued the following statement:4

Having gratefully received and thoroughly considered the five-year study by the Theological Task Force on Holy Orders, we acknowledge that there are differing principles of ecclesiology and hermeneutics that are acceptable within Anglicanism that may lead to divergent conclusions regarding women’s ordination to the priesthood. However, we also acknowledge that this practice is a recent innovation to Apostolic Tradition and Catholic Order. We agree that there is insufficient scriptural warrant to accept women’s ordination to the priesthood as standard practice throughout the Province. However, we continue to acknowledge that individual dioceses have constitutional authority to ordain women to the priesthood.5

In that statement, the College of Bishops moved the issue from a theological issue to a canonical one: there may not be scriptural warrant, but there is constitutional warrant. Again the institutional reality of the Episcopal church had some weight to validity. But then, when we note that the majority of bishops in the college is against a female presbyterate, and contrastingly a majority of membership of the laity reside in dioceses that are for it, we discover a constitutional improbability: to effect change, it must pass both. Which means that growth, not theology, becomes the agent for change; one must win by power, by politicking.

The non-traditional position being faced with an episcopal minority, the resolution was that, in order to effect long-term change as much as prevent a prohibition of the innovation, the progressive diocese(s) would plant as many churches as possible, not just for the gospel, but increasing laity, thereby preventing constitutional change by the majority traditional bishops, and, if growing, then becoming a episcopal majority. Some dioceses have clergy, including soon-to-be bishops, who support the innovation at “all levels of the church.” It stands to reason that, when there is a constitutional change, depending on the party in power, the change will either further restrict the practice from the priesthood, or move to include a gender-neutral episcopate.6

Once numbers became the deciding factor, then spreadsheets like this began to circulate.7 The numbers activists became invested, and quickly, the intrigue and political infighting reminiscent of the General Convention era of The Episcopal Church began. Part of the reason why I also started tracking the numbers was that the language for the initial sheet was framed differently, and I was tired of the sheet being posted all over the internet with a '“see we’re winning” attitude, thereby continuing the campaign of numbers, power, and growth.

Appealing appeals

The traction (appeal?) of last year’s Augustine Appeal was that no constitutional change needs to be made: the collegiality of the Episcopacy is that, save for C4SO, which embedded language in its diocese and enforced in parish bylaws, nearly all dioceses can simply stop an aberrant practice. Numbers, sadly necessary, included 300 clergy (including myself) signing to show that, contrary to social media positioning and attempts at diocesan and provincial level to minimize the importance, this was a really big deal, and not just a passive opinion. Regrettably, the Augustine Appeal was purportedly never discussed among the College, much as it received attention on social media.

Further, the statement has been emphasized variously. For the pro-side: “individual dioceses have constitutional authority to ordain women” and “a recent innovation to Apostolic Tradition and Catholic Order” (innovation is good, right). for the traditional side, “there is insufficient scriptural warrant to accept women’s ordination to the priesthood as standard practice throughout the Province” seemed like a knock-out win. But contrary to what the Task Force explicitly warned against, it amounted to exactly that: the previous status quo, but now with a race to outnumber the opposition.

All that to say, because of this backdrop of moving from a theological study — have patience, we will do a study and figure it out — to a constitutional legislation matter rather than a bishop’s resolution, the 2017 resolution was a disappointment to all for the sake of continuing Always Forward as an institution, in spite of theological non-sustainability.

The Problem with the Diocesan Arms Race

One thing most folks forget—and I do, too—is that ASA, Membership, and Parishes are not a monolithic force. For example: there are many clergy or parishes in the Diocese of the South that are for a non-traditional position, but submit to their diocese’s traditional position. On the other side, there are clergy and parishes in the Diocese of Pittsburgh, for example, that continue hold a traditional position. And within a given parish, attendance does not remotely imply unified theology. These structures speak to administration, which is how the practice was introduced at the 1976 convention.

That said, it gets very complicated when a diocese that allows both positions begins to favor only one. C4SO, to my knowledge, is the only diocese that formally implemented this—recently, in 2023—requiring all clergy to accept sacramental ministrations of all licensed presbyters: including Holy Communion, Confession, etc. alongside a change in all parish bylaws to support this position. This shifted C4SO from what was first a church planting initiative, which truly embraced “both integrities.” The ultimate result made C4SO the antithesis of the Diocese of All Saints, which requires subscription to Forward in Faith to remain in good standing, a subscription now an impossibility in C4SO. While this may be called ‘foul’ by the traditional position, the ACNA canons say nothing of “Dual Integrity.”

Instead,

The Province shall make no canon abridging the authority of any member dioceses 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. (Constitution, Article VIII, § 2)

This means that, since this is a federation more than a communion, change province-wide can happen at the diocesan level.

Which begs the question: what if the ACNA wanted to be in full communion with itself? If it were to become a Communion, then collective voices such as Fort Worth, the Diocese of All Saints, and the REC might be heeded on holding to what has always been (and what is ecumenically requisite for LCMS, Rome, Anglican Continuum, Union of Scranton). The Bishops at the provincial level—or GSFA/Gafcon at the global level—can establish a basis for communion that precludes the practice without a constitutional change. If there was some idea of what lies ahead—of some modest movement towards a resolution—then perhaps anxiety would decrease, and self-understanding towards a federation would become more clear. If there were a not just a de facto, functional federation, but a formal one,8 then ecumenical cooperation could continue across the federation without the underlying tensions of converting one side to the other.

If formalized, Forward in Faith North America in concert with the UK iteration could be the basis for one communion structure within the federation, preserving the catholic charism among its constituent dioceses. On the other side, as C4SO has declared that all within its structure that all—laity, parishes, postulants, and clergy—must recognize the institutional status of its innovative sacraments, irrespective of theology,9 it might also declare impaired communion against those who exclude, and form a communion with like-minded geographies such as the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic.

Either way, once the basis for intercommunion is clear, then various jurisdictions and dioceses can self-sort whether such a federation is an appropriate match to its sacramental use. Some may self-sort by way of change on their previously held policy. For example, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Latvia had wrestled with this issue, first allowing for innovatory practice, but later turning to the traditional position. This has continued to be a notable example of the possibility, given time and theological study, of returning to tradition after innovation.

On what basis is Unity?

As the ACNA continues to have administrative crises, the theological issue of women’s ordination will continue escalate in causing problems in the desire for unity — the question is what is that basis for unity? with the greater Anglican Communion? The Global South? The Catholic Tradition?

May the same College that can quicky investigate contentious procedural claims, so also come to a more sustainable solution, and let lay and clergy, parishes and dioceses adjust to the mind of the ACNA accordingly. May they do so swiftly as tensions continue and trust tested; but as for us, perhaps this from Bishop Chip Edgar,

So, if you find yourself wanting to do something, I ask that you continue to pray—for God’s wisdom, clarity, and grace—for all parties involved, even those whom you might not trust, at every level, as we seek to navigate this situation.

Fr J. M. Kelman

ιμκ

3

Holy Orders Task Force Report, accessed 2019 (I am told there was a silent revision, I think in 2020, but I haven’t had the time for a comparative study):

Holyorderstaskforce Printable

5.76MB ∙ PDF file

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5

ACNA College of Bishops:

2017 College of Bishops Statement

204KB ∙ PDF file

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8

This was done before, FACA, prior to ACNA’s 2009 formation with constituent members in the Reformed Episcopal Church, Anglican Church in America (now ACC), Anglican Province of America (likely to become ACC), Diocese of the Holy Cross (now ACC), Anglican Mission in the Americas (traditional on ordination prior to 2009’s Consecration of Todd Hunter/ACiA formation), Episcopal Missionary Church.

These bifurcated roughly over willingness to work with innovative dioceses-to-be in the Common Cause Parnership, rather than churchmanship (AMiA and REC are very different). Note that EMC enjoys full communion with traditional parts of ACNA while being separate from the innovative.

Acna Emc 2019 Concordat Revised

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This history is important. Since a federation has been attempted before, and therefore can be learned from, rather than repeating outcomes. The Continuum did so with Joint Synods in the aftermath of the jurisdictional cacophony of of the late 20th century.

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9

C4so Posture Regarding Women In Leadership

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The Prayers of the People hit differently when relocated…

Lately I’ve been looking at different orders of service found in different Prayer Books and contemplating (with help from others) the significance of some of the different configurations that are out there. Some changes can be pretty subtle, like how the Prayer of Humble Access has hopped around a few times in the past 500 years. Other variations are a bit more substantial, though, and that’s where the Prayers of the People come into the discussion.

Over the centuries there are three places where they might be located: in the Eucharist Canon, in the Offertory, and in the Liturgy of the Word. Let’s check ’em out.

DISCLAIMER: The term “prayers of the people” is only a feature of modern Prayer Books, and in classical Prayer Book use it’s typically called the “prayer for the whole state of Christ’s Church [and the world]”. Because they are textually equivalent, I’m just going to use the modern title throughout this article. We’ll explore why it makes sense in some cases more than others.

Location #1: Sacrificial Prayers

The 1549 Prayer Book looks like a real oddball in the collection of Anglican Prayer Books. As essentially the first draft, it contains a number of features that promptly vanished, and the location of the Prayers of the People is one of those things. There, the Sursum Corda (“lift up your hearts”) is relatively early in the liturgy, and right after the Sanctus (Holy, Holy Holy) the priest or deacon turns to the people and says “Let us pray for the whole state of Christ’s Church.” And after the familiar ending of that prayer, “Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ’s sake…” he continues immediately with the Prayers of Consecration. No other Prayer Book since has done this, making it feel a rather strange option.

What I recently rediscovered, however, is that this is largely how it worked before the Reformation. In a 1526 version of the Sarum Missal, the Sanctus was followed by a few prayers of intercession, akin to what Catholics today might call “mass intentions.” Indeed, the Sarum prayers were lengthened by Cranmer for the first Prayer Book, perhaps setting the stage for a need to move them elsewhere in the service. In any case, the location of the intercessions here, literally at the altar, spoken by the priest, ad orientem (that is, facing the altar, same as the people), makes the character of these prayers particularly sacrificial. These intercessions are part of the Church’s regular sacrifice of prayer as we fulfill our priestly function in praying for one another and the world around us.

Location #2: Offering Prayers

Prayer Book revision quickly shifted the prayers for the whole state away from the eucharistic canon and landed them in the Offertory, where they remained until the mid-20th century revisions kicked in. This diminishes the sacrificial emphasis of the prayers and moves them more into the realm of the people’s offering. Indeed, this prayer even mentioned “our alms and oblations”, explicitly uniting the offering of our money and ourselves with the offering of our prayers. Thus the intercessions became less of a priest’s intentions at the altar and more of the concerns of a congregation, even though the actual text remained the same. At this point “Prayers of the People” starts to make sense, even though the reader of the prayer was still the priest, and the congregation was still referred to as “they” instead of the modern “we.”

Location #3: The People’s Prayers

In the mid-20th century, in the wake of Rome’s second Vatican Council, a huge movement of liturgical revision and renewal was underway, and no tradition was left unscathed. This novus ordo (literally, new order) rearranged much of the liturgy, and for the Prayers of the People this mean that they were now prayed after the Creed instead of after the Offertory. What’s more, the default reader of these prayers became the Deacon, “or other person appointed”, which implies a layman, not the priest. This was matched with a change of wording from “they” the congregation, to “we” the congregation, such as found in the Anglican Standard Text of 2019. The intercessions were now truly the Prayers of the People in the most literal sense. Gone were the sacrificial undertones of our work of intercession, and even the liturgical offerings sense was dramatically decreased. Rather than a sacrifice or an offering, the intercessions now became a work – the work of the people.

Interestingly, “the work of the people” is one of the ways to render the word liturgy into English (though I would prefer “public work” to better capture its meaning). So in that sense, putting the Prayers of the People more into the hands and mouths of the congregation makes a lot of sense. Furthermore, there is another line of precedent for this: in (at least) English custom, there was a practice of “bidding the bedes” before a sermon, which was essentially calling upon the congregation to pray for various needs in the parish, the city, the region, the realm, or indeed the world. This practice existed in parallel with the “mass intentions” in the proper canon of the liturgy, resulting in two points of intercession in the worship service, one dominated by the people’s concerns, and the other dominated by the Church. Indeed, this practice survived beyond the Reformation, and even popped up explicitly in the 1928 Prayer Book (see its page 71 and 47).

If you survey the various forms of the Prayers of the People in the 1979 Prayer Book (and similar texts put out in other provinces since), you will find that most of them have call-and-response elements, giving increased voice to the congregation. Some of them (including 2019’s own Renewed Ancient Text) are even explicit biddings, not technically praying at all, but instead instructing the congregation what to pray (be it silently or aloud).

Why not both?

This migration of the Prayers of the People over the centuries has revealed that there are indeed multiple places in the Communion liturgy where intercessions can (and should) be profitably made. In proximity to the Scripture Lessons, Creed, and Sermon, the people’s prayers naturally arise as we all respond to God’s Word and bring our own various concerns to bear. In proximity to the Offertory, a set of intercessions make sense as the congregation offers united prayer to God as part of its collective work and service. And in proximity to the consecration of Holy Communion, the Church accomplishes a priestly service, bringing to God a sacrifice of prayer, as is our bounden duty and our joy.

Given the history of our English liturgical heritage, we know that we don’t have to choose just one spot and stick with it. We can have intercessory prayers in the modern location (after the Creed) as well as in the medieval location (after the Sanctus). We don’t have to pick one or the other, or the compromise middle location (after the Offertory). All three locations have historic precedence, devotional value, and liturgical sensibility.

One easy way to experiment with this, using a modern Prayer Book such as the 2019, is to use the call-and-response Prayers of the People from the Renewed Ancient Text in the modern location, emphasizing congregational input, and then having the celebrant read the Anglican Standard Text’s Prayers of the People straight through (without responses) either after the Offertory or after the Sanctus. This way we have both the homegrown spontaneous heartfelt congregational prayers and the scripturally rich, authorized, priestly prayers of intercession for the Church and for the world. Together, these complementary postures of prayer teach all of us more about the significance of prayer in the Christian life, and shape us to pray both formally and informally, generally and specifically, as individuals and as one body.

The Rev. Matthew Brench, Vicar of Fitchburg

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This essay is cross-published from Earth and Altar (APA), with Fr Jefferies’ and E&A editor’s permission.

Revocare. I take it back. I have changed my mind on Nicea II. I believe it is ecumenical.

It was so before I saw it to be, of course, but since I had previously objected to the ecumenical status of Nicea II in public, my conscience obliges me to explain my change of mind publicly.

Several internal inconsistencies began to emerge as cracks in my intellectual foundation, furthered by a series of thoughtful pushbacks from gracious interlocutors: Fr. Chad Hatfield, former St. Vladimir’s Theological Seminary president, and a number of thoughtful young men and women who pushed my thinking with astute questions at the recent (and excellent) Anglican Way Institute conference. There was also Fr. Matthew Kirby, in the comments on Archbishop Mark Haverland’s blog, and above all, Fr. Mark Perkins in his gracious, thoughtful, detailed, and generous series of essays on Earth & Altar back in 2020. I gave a paper against Nicea II at the AWI conference, but over the last few weeks, I came to the inescapable conclusion that I have been in the wrong. Where I was wrong, and why I think I was so, I shall try to sketch here. (It is still coming into focus, admittedly.) If a closer attention to the details of the catholic faith is accomplished through any of this, then that is a gain. Where I have sown confusion or created false trails, for that I repent. And I ask the reader who may have followed this exchange to graciously consider these new thoughts, to weigh them against what I have written in the past, and to change their mind also.

Let me begin with the third anathema. It is the one that mandates the veneration of icons, and it has long been my chief concern about Nicea II: “If anyone does not salute such representations as standing for the Lord and his saints, let him be anathema.” For the past several years, I have found myself in a funny position. When a crucifix is processed with in church, do I not reverence it? Do I sometimes reverence it? Should I encourage my children one way or the other? I must admit that I have had no problem kissing the relic of St. Bernard’s tomb that I possess nor the portrait of our Savior painted by Murillo that hangs in my prayer corner. I bow before the altar each time I pass it. Why am I getting hung up on the mandating of this veneration? I have gotten real heady, such as when the processional crucifix passes by, I try to make a mental act of salute without any bodily gesture. It’s been weird.

In contemplating the anathema, I wondered whether it would be better to pass by an image of Christ without saluting it much in the same way that we treat mere art on the wall, which eventually becomes background and forgotten through familiarity. Does not saluting lead to more or less love for our Lord Jesus? I could not escape the obvious conclusion that it would lead to less love for him—and that this is a profound problem.

The more I studied how the anathemas function in the first six ecumenical councils, the more I became unpersuaded by Fr. Mark Perkins’s (and C.B. Moss’s) argument that they are not a part of the horos—the definition). They absolutely are. But I have been misinterpreting the third anathema of Nicea II in a few ways. First, the word in question is aspazomai, not proskynesis (usually translated as bow in English). The gloss for aspazomai is salute, but it could also be greet or embrace. Sure, the presiding metropolitan, Patriarch Tarasius of Constantinople, in the attached conciliar documentation says that bowing (proskynesis) is a normal form of saluting, but it is not an exclusive synonym. Nicea II only enjoined (on pain of anathema) saluting, and this is a mercy. If it had made bowing mandatory on pain of anathema, I think I never could have reconciled this with the catholic faith. But the fathers of Nicea II did not. Saluting, on the other hand, is necessary. It is necessary to recognize the glory of the prototype being represented: The Incarnate Word himself. To insist on the permissibility of icons (as I have done in the past), but to be silent on saluting them is to miss the logic of the argument for icons in the first place. I kiss the Gospel book because the contents it makes known leads to eternal life. I also kiss icons because what is portrayed leads to eternal life.

In other words, Christians have saluted icons in different ways depending on their cultural and social contexts. Consider that proskyneo primarily meant obeisance or bowing (a point I have leaned on heavily in the past) in Late Antiquity. In the Byzantine Church, however, the sense of the word shifted to embrace or kiss, according to the 1908 edition of the ancient Pedalion (otherwise known as The Rudder in English translation), a compendium of ecclesiastical law normative for the Orthodox. In its commentary on Nicea II, the editors write:

In the case of holy icons adoration and salutation (commonly called kissing) are one and the same thing. For, in the ancient Greek language, the main verb kyno (in the compound verb proskyno, meaning to adore) means “to embrace and kiss.” The preposition pros indicates an intensification of the meaning “embrace and kiss” and implies longing and yearning. Hence, in order to express the full meaning of the Greek word in English we should have to employ some such circumlocution as “to embrace and kiss longingly and yearningly.” That is why the present Synod [Nicea II], in its Act 7, said “in all respects to accept and recognize the venerable icons, and to adore them, or, more explicitly speaking, to embrace and kiss them.”1

I have indeed been overly wooden and litigious in my approach to the anathema, especially in the light of the way in which the church has actually (not) enforced it. Contrary to my implications, they do not, for example, excommunicate church members who walk by an icon and do not venerate it with a specific gesture. Moreover, when the Synod of 843, the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” as the Eastern churches know it, recapitulated Nicea II, it focused almost exclusively on simply being anti-Iconoclastic, with only a passing reference to the proper modes of veneration. This can be seen in the Synodikon of Orthodoxy and it is also obvious in the Moscow Statement (1976) and the Dublin Statement (1984), both of which came out of ecumenical dialogues among Anglicans and Eastern Orthodox. In short, the anathemas have suffered (in my earlier treatments) from an overly literal interpretation that neglects the real and living tradition of the Church that actually sits under the seventh council.

Is there a danger of idolatry in venerating icons? Is there a danger in misusing them and allowing veneration (of whatever form) to lead to hyper-veneration that is in fact latreia, making the icon a magical talisman? Yes. My fear about this has been a driving factor in my thinking till now, and I have had to muffle all along my remembrance of the ancient principle: The abuse does not nullify the proper use. Indeed, the corrective to abuse is the proper use, which requires catechesis and pastoral care. Indeed, I have been really struck by the Council of Trent on this front. Session 25 of Trent is the first time that Nicea II is explicitly received in the West, and the Tridentine bishops very helpfully frame Nicea II (albeit, not entirely accurately) with a caution against misuse:

Moreover, that the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints, are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and that due honour and veneration are to be given them; not that any divinity, or virtue, is believed to be in them, on account of which they are to be worshipped; or that anything is to be asked of them; or, that trust is to be reposed in images, as was of old done by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols; but because the honor which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which those images represent; in such wise that by the images which we kiss, and before which we uncover the head, and prostrate ourselves, we adore Christ; and we venerate the saints, whose similitude they bear: as, by the decrees of Councils, and especially of the second Synod of Nicea, has been defined against the opponents of images. [...] And if any abuses have crept in amongst these holy and salutary observances, the holy Synod ardently desires that they be utterly abolished [...] Moreover, in the invocation of saints, the veneration of relics, and the sacred use of images, every superstition shall be removed.

The phrases “utterly abolished” and “every superstition shall be removed” leave some room for interpretation. A misused image could be stored out of sight for a time. Perhaps it could also be destroyed, if necessary. Whatever the particular solution in each case, there is clearly a place, if not for aniconic Christianity, at least for iconic minimalism such as characterizes Cistercianism as well as Anglicanism. If the Tridentine teaching can be characterized as the norm for Western reception of Nicea II, this is certainly something I, as a catholic-minded Anglican, can get on board with.

Speaking of the western reception of Nicea II, I have made much of the Synod of Frankfurt which in 794 rejected Nicea II. I considered this history in the paper I gave last week, and I was unsettled by what I found. First of all, contrary to how I first learned of it, the Frankfurt Synod was not convened for this issue. It was a regular meeting of the far Western bishops (England, Spain, Frankia, et al.). The condemnation of Nicea II was not even the first item on their list; it is addressed in the second canon. Moreover, the language with which they repudiate Nicea is remarkable:

The question was introduced of the recent synod of the Greeks on the worship of images held at Constantinople. There it was laid down that those who refuse to pay service and veneration to the images as to the divine Trinity should be judged anathema. Our most holy fathers, absolutely refusing that service, held them (i.e. the Greeks) in contempt and unanimously condemned them.2

These bishops and scholars, including Benedict of Aniane, Alcuin of York, and Smaragdus, were no dummies and were more than capable of distinguishing between degrees of “worship” (even if they were hamstrung by having only the one word, adoratio). (Which, as an aside, I only have very lately learned is a fact of Latin lamented as early as St. Augustine.3) Here the bishops seem to be dealing quite shrewdly. Charlemagne, as the presiding king, who is motivated to contradict Pope Adrian I, who had given his approval to Nicea II. The Bishops agreed only to a very conditional and therefore limited rebuke: that if the council that met in Nicea II anathematized those who do not pay to images the same worship as is given to the Trinity, then it must be condemned. But Nicea II expressed exactly the opposite: “Certainly this is not the full adoration (latreia) in accordance with our faith, which is properly paid only to the divine nature.” I had not actually examined the records from Frankfurt until now, and this was a rather big blow to my mental case.

Incidentally, two larger questions about the history of the church and theology have also shifted in my mind. The first pertains to the authority and reception of the ecumenical councils generally, which ought to be understood as a dynamic historical process, each successive council ratifying and reifying the one that came before it. Take Nicea I (325). It was not certain at the time that the homoousios would win the day and that it would be necessary to unite the orthodox against the Arians. It was not certain, to begin with, that the word could be reappropriated from its earlier usage among the modalist Sabellians. It is conceivable that a Eusebian creed that had all the same elements as the Nicene Creed, minus the homoousios, could have become the bulwark to defend the catholic faith. But as the middle decades of the fourth century rolled on, and Arianism persisted and grew under different leaders, some of whom hid behind a Eusebian creed, it became clear to orthodox bishops that Athanasius was right in his argument the church needed homoousios in order to ward off Arianism. The Cappadocian solution of assigning ousios to the oneness of God, and hypostasis to the threeness of God, made homoousios permanently safe from Sabellianism. Constantinople I (381), then, reaffirmed the Nicene Creed as the orthodox confession and included an expanded clause on the Holy Spirit against the Arian-inspired pneumatomachi.

Having articulated the full divinity of the Son, the Church then moved on to the collateral question of how full divinity and his humanity exist in the one person of Jesus Christ. When Cyril opposed Nestorius at Ephesus in 431, the Council mentioned nothing about Constantinople I (381) nor its creed, but it did read aloud the Nicene Creed, which had been ratified by Constantinople. A portion of the followers of Cyril went to an extreme, led by Eutyches, whom the Synod of Ephesus (449) attempted to exonerate. Against this, Chalcedon was called in 451, setting an upper-limit to Cyrilline theology and proscribing monophysitism a la Eutyches. At Chalcedon, Ephesus and the Creed of 381 were affirmed, thus clarifying and reifying the first, second, and third ecumenical councils and marking itself as the fourth. This method is no accident; it is the norm of ecumenical councils: The proof of a council’s ecumenicity is established in the decades that follow it. I realize now that my previous view on the councils was indeed overly simplistic (as Fr. Perkins pointed out), and indeed, while St. Paul and St. John and St. Peter all believed in the same God as we do: A God who is a Trinity in Unity, and who worshipped the same Lord: Christ Jesus who is both fully God and fully man. It would have taken them a little time and thought to sift through the controversies of the fourth and fifth centuries, just as it takes us now a little time and thought.

If we place ourselves mentally in the year 788, it is not immediately apparent that the council that met in Nicea in 787 was ecumenical. Had not Hiera (754) already claimed to be so? Like homoousios in the fourth century, it took time for the Church to discern which view of images would was necessary (or at least helpful) to defend the catholic faith. In retrospect, the iconoclasts are clearly wrong (as I have always contended), and some of them alarmingly Eutychian. Jesus clearly made himself visible, and therefore representable. In this much, St. John of Damascus is clearly right: To defend the making of images is to defend the incarnation—the full, visible, portrayable humanity of Jesus.

I struggled with the veneration of these images. But, since the image really does represent the prototype, while I am not certain the veneration of an image automatically is received by the prototype, I am sufficiently convinced of the opposite: To ignore an image of Christ, without paying reverence to the prototype, is to form a habit of cold indifference to the Lord himself; as if Christ Jesus were merely an ornament in the cosmos, easily ignored. Nicea II anathematized those who refuse to greet an icon—and this is actually a catholic sentiment. Image-saluting is not in the Bible, but neither is the homoousios. Both were developed by the Church to safeguard different aspects of our catholic faith. And in so doing, they did so rightly, and ecumenically, and therefore authoritatively.

I also became increasingly troubled by the violence used by the Iconomachs against the Iconophiles, and was horrified to recently learn that Emperor Leo III attacked monasteries (the monks were all iconodules), closed them down, and forced monks and nuns to marry each other. This is not the action of a godly leader, to put it mildly.

So, what about the mixed reception of Nicea II in the West that I have leaned so heavily on in previous writing? I now see this in a different light as well. The facts are there, as I put them, but the meaning of those facts I now interpret differently. On the one hand, Nicea II was formally rejected on the basis of a strawman argument at Frankfurt. This teaching, that images should receive the same worship as is given to the Trinity, is indeed to be rejected, and this is why Nicea II continued to be regarded with suspicion until the renaissance. There is a great loss in this. I see now that the Western portion of the suffered profoundly by not having a formal “ceiling” set to the devotion that is paid to images, a ceiling that Nicea II definitely institutes in proscribing latreia to images. As well as allowing statuary (instead of two-dimensional paintings) to flourish unchecked, the extravagant and un-Christian folk-piety that attached to images (mostly, statues) in the West might have Church received a healthy corrective long before Trent if Nicea II had been received rightly in the eighth century.

Accepting Nicea II as ecumenical raises important questions for Anglicans about doctrinal authority in the Church. Plainly, the Book of Homilies brooks no quarter to Nicea II. On this point it is, therefore, wrong. This has been hard for me to admit. For the longest time, I did not want my immediate canonical authority (the canon I am actually under) to compete with historic catholic authority. My Continuing brothers have accurately accused me of attributing greater authority to the Book of Homilies than to the ecumenical councils. But the Book of Homilies is a hodge-podge, derivative authority, hyper-linked to the Thirty-Nine Articles, themselves a historicized authority (via the United States amendments of 1801, etc.). I have been giving it too much weight. Nicea II is heavier. Though it smashes my earlier aspiration, I admit it.

I see now that I aspired in two directions, which I see now to have been misguided. First, I wanted a black-and-white rule by which I can say that I, as an Anglican, am right, and that the Roman Catholic Church is wrong. If I don’t have that, I have been worried that I or others might simply swim the Tiber. By accepting Nicea II as ecumenical, and minimizing the weight of the Book of Homilies, I now have a less sturdy barrier between my own position and Rome. But also, in this, the question has flipped (and here, Fr. Perkins’s thoughts have again helped me). The proper approach to Rome is not to insist that they are absolutely wrong and we are right, but rather to point out they have overstated some things and there is nothing that compels us to join them. Or, as Fr. Perkins put it, “The strongest answer to Roman and Eastern claims is not their theological errors nor our Anglican distinctives. It is simply in the Anglican Church’s valid claims to full Catholicity and Apostolicity.” My mind has changed to agree with Fr. Perkins in this now also. This leaves a squishier and more easily-surmountable barrier between ourselves and Rome, and I am learning inwardly to be ok with that. If folks go to Rome, so be it. I don’t think it is necessary nor the best course of action, but I no longer have the footing to stand as strongly against it as I once did.

Animating my desire for anti-Roman Anglican distinctives was a wishful aspiration that I might be able to find and make common-cause with my 1662-only, Anglicanism-as-Established brethren. If we could have an articulated and robust Anglican magisterium (like the Westminster Confession notionally is to Presbyterianism), then maybe we could have a point of unity as well as a clarified locus of truth. But I have learned along the way that this was an impossible project. My own willingness to bend the Thirty-Nine Articles (I have always kept the sacrament on reserve in the parish, I elevate at the consecration, I kiss relics, etc.), coupled with the general anti-catholic and narrow spirit often fostered among that school meant it was a non-starter. Speaking of relics, I also began to see, thanks to conversation with Fr. Brandon LeTourneau, how relics (which have strong biblical precedent: Elisha’s bones4, St. Paul’s handkerchief in Acts5, etc.) and images are somewhat linked together. They are condemned in the same Article of Religion, and their practice is linked in the catholic church. This was a pickle I was just living with incoherently, and now a little more coherently.

Lastly, one of the stumbling blocks in my mind for a long time has been the following: What is the practical difference between latreia and doulia? If before images we light candles, offer incense, bow, etc., what actions of worship are reserved for God alone, that could be observed as latreia distinct from doulia? For many years this was an empty box in my mind, and the idea that a different intent of the heart suffices did not satisfy me. But just last week it hit me: Our words express our latreia. The Church never sings “We praise you, O Icon.” Thas would be latreia, and would be offensive to God. We sing each day the Te Deum “We praise you, O God” Verbal praise—the fruit of lips, the sacrifice of thanksgiving—this is latreia that the whole Church gives to God. I am unaware of the Eastern Church ever offering this to an icon in an approved liturgy. Additionally, this opened to my mind the other layer of “the sacrifice of thanksgiving”—the memorial offering of Calvary in the Eucharist—this is offered to God alone, in his invisibility, and is never offered to an icon. There were things in this category! I had just been unable to see them because I had dug myself into an intellectual corner where they were beyond view.

I continue to have what might be called a protestant apprehensiveness about the liability of images being thought of superstitiously, but I have been encouraged to learn that this is also held among some Orthodox. In his little book on the Seventh Council, C.B. Moss cites an Orthodox ordinal, “I will take care that that the homage due to God be not transferred to holy images nor false miracles be attributed to them whereby the true worship is perverted and a handle given to adversaries to reproach the Orthodox; on the contrary, I will study that images be respected only in the sense of the Holy Orthodox Church as set forth in the Second Council of Nicea.”6 Fr. Chad Hatfield also told me that it has become a standard Orthodox practice that when someone claims a miracle-working icon, a bishop will typically exorcise it, lest it be a diabolical sign and not of the Lord. It is, I believe (and this has always been a part of what animated my former arguments), right to be jealous that correct worship be given to God and that images not be used superstitiously. But, as I mentioned above, the correction for this is good catechesis, not attempting to de-throne Nicea II. As C.B. Moss puts it, the instinct to treat objects superstitiously is ubiquitous. “True Religion and rational education,” he writes, “are the remedies for it.”7

Animating my nervousness about Icon-devotion is a personal nervousness about the excesses of folk piety generally. But folk-piety exists everywhere; it never goes away, it stands always simply in need of canaling. The excesses of folk piety of my own culture are not as noticeable but can be equally as dangerous to true and living faith. This came home to me when I visited a nearby mega church, with its lightshow and rock band identical to the concerts held down the road at a big concert venue. This was a folk piety of entertainment, just as dulling to life in the Spirit as superstition can be. My wariness of superstitious use of images is therefore an alloy of theological judgment and cultural prejudice, and I should be more careful and charitable with it.

Anyway, forgive me, dear reader, for these wandering and self-oriented ramblings. I speak from the disorientation of a sea-change.

– The Rev. Fr Ben Jefferies

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Appendix: Article History8

Note that most of these have comments sections, including discourse between the respective authors.

• October 29, 2019 (Jefferies)

• October 30, 2019 (Walker)

• November 1, 2019 (McDermott)

• November 7, 2019 (Jefferies)

• November 11, 2019 (Walker)

• November 13, 2019 (Perkins)

• November 24, 2019 (Perkins)

• January 23, 2020 (Jefferies)

• October 30, 2020, part 1 (Perkins)

  • Part 2

  • Part 3

  • Part 4

  • Part 5

  • Part 6

• May 30, 2022 (Devereux)

• June 6, 2022 (Jefferies)

• June 8, 2022 (Perkins)

• July 25, 2022 (Jefferies)

• 2024 FiFNA change of statements

• January 17, 2025 (+Haverland)

• May 19, 2025 (+Haverland)

• May 29, 2025 (+Haverland)

{part of a series}

Archbishop Rowan Williams, writing Thomas Cranmer: A Prayer Book Catholic? for the Prayer Book Society UK journal Faith and Worship #93, has written a gem of an essay.

In it he admirably gives the sensibility (vibe?) of a Prayer Book Catholic.

A Prayer Book Catholic?

Prayer Book Catholic, for those who haven’t heard the term are, as Williams humorously recounts, those whose use of the “Book of Common Prayer [is] ‘mangled in a funny, High Church sort of way’.” More practically speaking, a Prayer Book Catholic is one who identifies primarily as a Catholic, but views the Book of Common Prayer as a sufficient spiritual framework for English (Anglo-) Catholicism. To be a Prayer Book Catholic means that the BCP is not a insufficient form of worship, and “mangling” it in a funny High Church sort of way is a helpful addition according to that spiritual framework, but not a corrective to insufficient liturgics. Luminaries such as Percy Dearmer & the Alcuin Club (a band name if there ever was one), C.B. Moss, Staley, B.J. Kidd, all connect to this English Catholic form of worship. The term is partially due to the advent of the Ritualists forming a primary spirituality around the practices of Rome, as though the English Church, most especially the Caroline Divines and others in the Anglican Counter-Reformation of the 17th century.

So while Ritualists, seeking to regain continuity with the Medieval as much as Patristic and Reformed spirituality, brought then-contemporary Latin prayers into their practice, Prayer Book Catholics typically use either the Prayer Book alone, or the Prayer Book ‘mangled with High Church’ ceremonial and prayers.

The Tractarians of the early-mid 19th century —primarily a theological ressourcement of English Catholicism, including reading some post-Reformation divines as ‘Reformed’ Catholics— were the theoretical basis. But at the time there was little in the way of recovery of the ceremonial or liturgical continuity the Tractarians sought. Since then, much of Anglo-Catholicism has looked first to Roman (which is to say Tridentine) ceremonial, for in the 19th century the most readily available “extras” were those of Rome or the East.

But it would be the late 19th and early 20th Century Catholic Anglicans that would counter-balance then-contemporary Roman practice with synthesizing English 1549 use1—not the Puritan-minded obligatory laicization of priestly vestments to choir-dress—alongside the post-Reformation reality of the Church in England. The Alcuin Club remains the great resource for this sensibility, alongside Percy Dearmer, and Warham Guild.

I have considered myself a Prayer Book Catholic for as long as I have been a priest, which last week marked seven years. But, as with all “churchmanships,” there is a vacillating propensity towards rigidity or laxity, especially which BCP? and how much/little one can mangle?.

Archbishop Rowan Williams says in his usual eloquence what I have been trying to put my finger on for a number of years: Prayer Book Catholicism is not Prayer Book Fundamentalism:

What exactly Cranmer or others might have meant by the words of particular prayers, or even by the ordering of particular elements of the liturgy, matters rather less, I dare to say, than the fact of an invitation to inhabit such a world. And what the tradition of Prayer Book Catholicism in Anglicanism represents is, above all, an attempt to receive flexibly and imaginatively the legacy of the Prayer Book’s words and structures; to ease and resolve some of the tensions that arise; to smooth out the edges of controversial sharpness in phrases and practices, and to illustrate how it’s possible, once again, for liturgy to be both profoundly anchored in a common and creative past and to be flexible and responsive in the present.

We know that the purpose of establishing the Prayer Book Society was not Prayer Book fundamentalism, and that’s an important point. We’re not actually talking about a sacred text that fell from heaven. We’re talking about a very remarkable historical and spiritual experiment. And like all good experiments, when it is repeated, it may adjust itself to deal with imbalance; to deal with areas where it is not as successful as it might be. It continues to provoke questions about itself and to renew its own life. It’s part of a wider process of how the Church thinks and rethinks its worshipping identity across the centuries.2

This explains the ethos I have had with liturgy, as I have tried to find my liturgical footing: then learning, the tendency is to find a specific structure and entrench. And many voices would like for you to follow the Prayer Book their way, the one and only. Some, going full Laudian, advocate a degree of conformity in the particulars3 that the Anglican Church, both then and now, did not and does not uphold.4

This is of course not to say that there should be chaos, or so much change as to make a tradition unrecognizable: this was the error or the popular interpreters of the Liturgical Movement, as well as the Convergence Movement (origin of Three Streams Anglicanism). There is an abundance of critique of the post-1960s ways of free expression of the service (viz 1979 BCP Rite III or Three Streams Worship), so will not be taken up as much here. However, it does mark the other pole of two extremes: one which creates a structure, and the other which eschewes it. To balance these, one must lean on Tradition.

A Living Tradition

Jaroslav Pelikan said of Tradition:

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.

Liturgical is one of the most appropriate adjectives to apply to this quote: Liturgy, too, can be the dead faith of the living, or the living faith of the dead.

When I was active at an Eastern Orthodox parish, I found that I could visit many different parishes, and all were familiar—even harmonious—such that worship was undistracted, yet, the choreography, musicality, and devotional custom (joyous, somber, rigid, casual) varied significantly. And this was Good. While I discerned I was not called to serve in the Eastern Orthodox church, I have continued to benefit from the experience.

I had read my way into Orthodoxy, but found on the ground experiences wildly different — divergent— from my reading; not in the liturgy but in theology and pastoral care. By contrast, I did not read my way into Anglicanism, I was discipled into it. Because of this my archetype was not according to a critical text, a specific reading of a prayer book, or a social media narrative, but an invitation to live within the tradition, the living faith.

This last week was the seventh year of my ordination to the priesthood, following my tenth year as a deacon. Most of my sense of Liturgy and worship is founded on Orthodox theology, translated into Anglican contexts by the bishop who mentored me, Winfield Mott, as I prepared for the diaconate, and in the subsequent years as I prepared for the priesthood. Through passing down his episcopal teaching—not with textbooks or YouTube videos, but by communicating the living faith in dialogical conversation, in harmony with Meyendorff and Schmemann— he presented a catholic orthodoxy in a Western “Anglo” context which provided me a sensibility for integrating “liturgical continuity” without “liturgical fundamentalism” (a term equally applicable to some Missal Anglo-Catholics as much as some 1662/1552 Low Churchmen5).

Back to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (again)

This means that while I am a strong advocate for familiarity with the 1662 I do not think it should be the only text a church uses for worship, much less the best one for all contexts. And even if 1662 were the only Book, it does not mean that one must always do only what the 1662 prescribes and proscribes. The history of the 1662 itself contradicts this interpretation. For example, a ruling in 1789 deemed that the First Lord’s Prayer of the Holy Communion may be omitted, but the rubrics were never modified to reflect that. Services were authorized to be shortened in the 19th century, again without rubrics modified. Other ‘uses’ of the 1662 have since become accepted organically, without compromising the ‘norm’ the 1662 establishes as a foundation for other subsequent Prayer Books. Authorization in this way becomes an economia of the liturgy, a pastoral application of a rule without a compromise of it.

Thankfully while the 1662 bears the indelible mark of Cranmer, most especially in eloquence, it is not the liturgical product of just Cranmer. Its subsequent revisions are in the continuity of bishops and theologians, including the liturgical prowess of the Caroline Divines,6 like Bishop Cosin who helped with the 1662 revision. While not ideal to many on the established church side, what was retained was still a catholic text for public worship. As a compromise document, much like the 39 Articles, it is nuanced insofar as how the intention and celebration of the book is to be applied.

In this way, contemporary books that incorporate the use of the Book of Common Prayer since then, such as Bishop Paul Thomas, SSC, Using the Book of Common Prayer for the Prayer Book Society UK,7 are such a boon for Prayer Book Spirituality: they make a text into a living document. To be clear: rubrics should be followed8 and are there for good reason,9 just as in the Ordinal bishops are to be obeyed10, but in that there is more room for “mangling” devotion than most rigid views of the [right] Anglican way allow for.

And this rigid view is not only not the way of Anglicanism, it is not the Catholic, and it is not the Orthodox. People and cultures are diverse, at local community level as much as national or ethnic group; even if the liturgy is the same, devotional practice varies. Conformity to using a Prayer Book is not the same as uniformity to one expression of it, and in most contexts, it is not uniformity to only one book. While the 2019 is the provincial revision of the prayer book, the constitution includes many lawful books.11

In fact, 1662 itself, even in its first decades, while under an Act of Uniformity (1662), did not have uniform worship so much as an agreed Prayer Book to abide by, even before the Toleration Act of 1688: there were churchmanship parties, and emphases, which found expression around the use of one prayer book.

The Classical text is valuable because it participates in the Great Tradition; not ignoring the Reformation, but celebrating what it brought to Christendom. But the Classical text is not the end-all of liturgy: it was a point in time, and providence has deemed it to be “a standard,” through which the Missal tradition and the Liturgical Movement have brought their own Catholic and Ecumenical insights, respectively.

To see the Classical text as the cohesive core to the English church’s liturgy, which could not be distilled more minimally, allows one to re-incorporate devotions appropriate for churchmanship. For the Ritualist or Tractarian, that would be adding devotions excised in the controversy of the canonical century of the Reformation. For the evangelical, it could be including extemporaneous times of prayer and devotion within the permissible portions of the liturgy (e.g., “Prayers of the People”) or prayers for healing as a devotion following the taking of communion. For others, that might mean a re-valuation if the 1549, as in the Anglican Service Book, American Missal, and customary of Missionaries of St John, and as permitted by the 2019 BCP rubrics.12

Accepting diversity

But is there precedent for such a ‘broad’ liturgical perspective?

Most notably, there is a difference between contradicting the Prayer Book, and having devotional supplements: as long as what is advocated has precedent in Scripture or in Tradition (being prior authorized prayers, themselves scriptural), localized Eucharistic devotions do indeed have precedent in the church’s tradition, and especially in the English church’s tradition.

One can see this in how Andrewes celebrated the liturgy in his chapel, which resembles the 1928 more than 1662, deviating from the 1559.13

Or as Palmer and Hawkes note in Readiness and Decency (1946), on the use of the 1662 Prayer of Oblation before the distribution of Communion (like 1928/1979/2019 ) instead of after, which Cranmer most certainly did not intend in his 1552 revision.:

This Prayer of Oblation would be a great aid to devotion if said immediately after the Prayer of Consecration. Can it legally be used at that point? Many holy and learned men have thought so. Bishop Overall (d 1619) used it there. (Cosin, Vol. v, p. 114.) Bishop Cosin (d. 1672) advocated it. Dr Thorndike (d. 1672) advocated it. (Works, vol. v, p. 246.) Archbishop Sharp (d. 1712) preferred it there. (Life, vol. i, p. 355.) The Scottish Liturgy of 1635 placed it there again. The Non-Jurors restored it to this place. It became the Use of the Scottish and American, the South African and other Missionary Churches. Bishop Wilson (d. 1775) desired it. (Works, Vol. v, p. 73.) The Convocations of Canterbury and York have approved it in connection with Prayer Book revision.

And in the Missal tradition, The Society of the Holy Cross (S.S.C) took this liturgical philosophy up after the later Tractarians:

In 1685, a clergyman named Sparkes was prosecuted in the Court of King's Bench for using "other prayers in the Church and in other manner" than those provided in the Prayer Book. He was acquitted on the ground that he had used "other forms and prayers" not instead of those enjoined, but in addition to them. S.S.C. therefore was introducing no innovation when it turned its eyes elsewhere for guidance in those matters which the Prayer Book omitted, but nowhere prohibited. And where more fittingly could it turn its eyes than to the prevailing Western Rite? — The Catholic Movement and the Society of the Holy Cross (1931) (emphasis added)

The Society of the Holy Cross of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, through the devotion of its members, provided us with what became The English Missal, which was designed to provide Catholic (at times Tridentine-Roman, other times “Sarum”) devotions to the 1662, while still keeping the Prayer Book as the book.

Finding Continuity

In a way, Prayer Book Catholicism is a kind of Anglo-Catholicism, in that it accomplishes the Great Tradition by worshipping with the Book of Common Prayer—hopefully classical—considered as a sufficient, valid catholic text, in which additional historic devotions do no harm, nor “make more valid” the text, as some ritualists, past and present, often assert in relation to 1662 (or 1979, or 2019, for that matter).

It is out of this that Common Prayer so often repeated as “Uniform Prayer” (common: “shared equally by two or more”) is more Prayer in the Commons (common: “public” or “widespread”), as opposed to private/privy prayer. In this way true Common Prayer is not uniformity of the present, whatever committee happens to invent new liturgies (as in 1979 Prayer C), but Public Prayer, in harmony with the Community of Saints throughout the age of the Church. Common in this way is Catholic: “that which has been believed everywhere, always, and of all people: for that is truly and properly Catholic.” (Vincentian Canon). To have Common Prayer means it must recognizably participate in—inhabit, to use Williams’ word—the Catholic Faith as much as the book of one particular era. This test gives boundaries to reject some (e.g., 1979 Prayer C), but continue to support others (e.g., a high church use of 1662).

Martin Thornton, in the preface to English Spirituality

At the heart of Anglicanism is the insistence on historical continuity; if our claims are true then our spirituality, that is our total expression of Christian life, as well as our theology, liturgy, and polity, must be retraceable through the medieval and patristic ages to the Bible. I have tried, therefore, to portray the English School as a living tradition, drawing its inspiration and character from all ages, while set within the glorious diversity of Catholic Christendom. Rather than preoccupation with the past, I believe that it is this comprehensive view which can inspire creative insights into the spiritual needs of the twentieth century: a good tree, especially an ancient one, bears new fruit only when attention is paid to its roots.

Fundamentalists would have many believe that all parishes are to be exactly uniform, is to ignore that history is not so univocal or static: but being in continuity with the “glorious diversity of Catholic Christendom” as the English/Anglo expression of the catholic faith (in contrast to Roman)14 does predispose towards a continuity and integration of that which came before, most especially being connected to the classical Prayer Book tradition.

Fr J. M. Kelman

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13

Benedict Anderson:

“Within the Prayer of Consecration, Andrewes restored the old manual acts, retained in 1549 but omitted in 1552. Perhaps more importantly for the development of the Anglican Liturgy, Andrewes skillfully reordered the prayers of the 1552/1559 Liturgy, so as to transform it from being a series of Communion devotions into a true Liturgy, after the patterns of Christian antiquity. The following chart shows Andrewes' order as compared to 1549 and 1552:”

What is the Historic Lectionary?

It has been variously titled Classical Lectionary, Ancient Lectionary, One-Year Lectionary, &c., all of which are accurate titles. I expect I will use all of them in the course of this essay.

The history of the Ancient church both East and West has followed a general use of Epistle and Gospel for the readings for the Liturgy of the Word (or Liturgy of the Catechumen), the first half of the Eucharistic service, or Divine Liturgy. This lectionary, varying by jurisdiction, has been generally uniform in respective East and West use since around the 700s.

During the Reformation, the Reformers, specifically Cranmer, changed a few lections or tweaked a few prayers to illustrate the spirit of the age. Some classics, such as the Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent was new for the 1549 Book of Common Prayer:

Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.

Yet, it retained the same readings (Romans 15:4-13 and Luke 21:25-33) and as the Roman & Sarum Missal of the day. In short, where Reformation seemed expedient, minor revisions were made to emphasize the principles held by those Protesting Rome. What was unreformed expressed a certain perspective of Catholic, patristic continuity valued by Cranmer, upheld by the Caroline Divines and later the bishops such as Bishop John Cosin, who negotiated the final form of the 1662.

Enter the 20th Century Revisions

The 1928 was a movement text: it was moving the liturgy forward in a direction, and the drafters of the revisions immediately set out to make for a further revised text, to take effect 50 years later. This period was a time of ecumenism as well as revolutionary scholarship. This was expressed through various movements: the Parish Communion Movement (It is good, actually, to take communion every Sunday), and the Liturgical Movement (Following Gergory Dix, let’s reassess our idea of Liturgy and structure of services). The fruit of this is seen most prominently in the results of Vatican II with the Novus Ordo service (with aesthetic revisions such as let’s think about minimalism vs maximalism), as well as a similarly revolutionary American 1979 Book of Common Prayer, which pushed the church outside of the English Catholic tradition and more into modern Ecumenical. Good things are in the book, but whether good or bad, it was seen as a revolutionary text, very observable in Marriage, Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion liturgies. All of which expressed the theological trends of the 1960s and 1970s. For example, the (infamous) Eucharistic Prayer C:

At your command all things came to be: the vast expanse of interstellar space, galaxies, suns, the planets in their courses, and this fragile earth, our island home.
By your will they were created and have their being.
From the primal elements you brought forth the human race, and blessed us with memory, reason, and skill. You made us the rulers of creation. But we turned against you, and betrayed your trust; and we turned against one another.
Have mercy, Lord, for we are sinners in your sight.
Again and again, you called us to return. Through prophets and sages you revealed your righteous Law. And in the fullness of time you sent your only Son, born of a woman, to fulfill your Law, to open for us the way of freedom and peace.
By his blood, he reconciled us.
By his wounds, we are healed.

It is impossible to not see this prayer, and by association the editorial decisions, as expressing Theological Modernism of the 20th Century.

Along with these changes was a shift in culture and attendance, flagged by the various movements. People were not coming to church three times per Sunday, or even twice! The shift to industrialization meant that working hours took precedence, and church attendance began to be a Sunday Morning experience, with biblical literacy generally dropping as secularism increased through the natural processes of Modernism. At the same time, the Roman church was looking to bring about a reappraisal of Scripture in the life of the believer, as well as communicating in the vernacular—a key contention in the Reformation, but always practiced in the East. The Ancient Western Lectionary, venerable as it is, is not a comprehensive reading of Scripture. So the philosophy of liturgical revision was transferred to giving as much possible scripture to the people for the approximate hour or two they attended on Sunday. This is a good motive! As biblical literacy drops, it is good to expose people to more scripture.1

The historic lectionary followed a distinct pattern: the church year, with Trinitytide—the season from Trinity Sunday to Sunday Next Before Advent—focusing on the life of the church militant and discipleship of the believer. In short: the One-Year shows Jesus clearly, and what we are to do with his teachings, especially in relation to right preparation for the chief end of the liturgy itself: the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. Epistle and Gospel lessons were tightly contextualized by the Collect for that week. The theme was unambiguous.

By contrast, the 3-year lectionary sought to roughly follow the church year, but instead of a focused, tight approach of Epistle, Gospel, Collect, generalized the approach with a priority toward greater exposure to scripture. Years A, B, and C would follow Matthew, Mark, and Luke, respectively; with John interspersed. Epistle readings would attempt to prioritize following whole books, Philippians, Ephesians, Galatians. This was designed without the Daily Office of Anglicanism in mind, for Roman use as it deprecated Latin as a service language.

So the two lectionaries have two different priorities;

One year: One particular narrative for one particular purpose, with the expectation of catechesis and reading in addition to the homilies and readings at the Holy Communion. While most of Church history has been on the one-year Ancient Lectionary, it is primarily2 the Anglican tradition (in the official BCP of most Anglican provinces: 1662; and in the St Louis Continuum in the 1928/Anglican Missal) still preserving this western tradition.

Three year: A more comprehensive, but broad, approach to the Gospels as well as Scripture, with the idea of introducing the Sunday-only attendees to as much scripture as possible through readings, with homilies more prominently walking through continuous readings. Most of the Western church, through Roman use is now on the 3-year Lectionary, or some derivative (Revised Common Lectionary, ACNA 2019 Lectionary).

One thing is clear: the Gospel is communicated whichever one uses, as it is Christ who is our Saviour and Sacrament, not the liturgy, lectionary, or another ‘formulae’ for relationship with God.

Arguments for the Historic Lectionary

At the beginning of Lent this year, with my bishop’s permission, I began trialing the Historic 1-year Lectionary. In the ACNA, there are a few cases that could be made for the right use of the Lectionary—all solid—and some arguably not needing Bishop’s permission, as its use is specifically upheld by the province (but I am not a canon lawyer and I asked my bishop; you should probably ask yours too!):

1. As the Standard: In an ACNA context, the 1662 is the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship,3 so no permission or limitation is needed, provided the standard is followed, which means that 1662 would be the expected prayer book alongside the lectionary. As the only specific edition enshrined in the Constitution, it is the least-limited book in the ACNA: some dioceses have banned (for a time) the 2019, and it is at the discretion of the province to deprecate the 2019 for a new revision.

2. As a sermon series: BCP2019, p. 718: “The Bishop of the Diocese is to be consulted where a regular pattern of fewer than four lessons is adopted as the Sunday customary of a Congregation, or when a pattern of alternate readings or a “sermon series” is proposed. The rector of a Congregation may direct that an appointed lesson be shortened or lengthened, provided the plain sense is retained.” This argument makes the case that the one-year lectionary is a sermon series, a repeatable, one year series. Supplementing with the OT Supplement of the PBS Canada also addresses the concern for many — clergy and lay — about having “only” two lessons at Holy Communion.

3. As conforming to prior use:

   BCP2019 p. 7 “the ordering of Communion rites may be conformed to a historic Prayer Book ordering”;

   BCP2019 p. 104 “The Anglican Standard Text may be conformed to its original content and ordering, as in the 1662 or subsequent books”

   The 1979 was a revolutionary text, which, along with other mainline denominations, the Episcopal church participated in a great achievement of ecumenism: the Revised Common Lectionary. Rome, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, all began using a similar, new lectionary, alongside many adopting elements of the ICEL Eucharistic texts following Vatican II. But this was a wholesale, revolutionary changing of the Anglican tradition: not only were the rites aggressively modified, but the lectionary and collects were redone so as to dismiss the ancient provenance of the Anglican patrimony.

   A communion rite is not complete without a Eucharistic Lectionary, so there is a solid case to be made that the Collects and Lessons are part of the Communion Rite itself. By conforming 2019 to the content of the prayer book(s) that preceded it, one aspect ignored is that one could conform the church year and readings to the Eucharistic cycle the church celebrated 1549-1978, the lessons and collects after 1549 only slightly differing from the Western use since about 700 .

4. Using a previously authorized book:

   From the ACNA Constitution and Canons Title II, Canon II, Section 1,

   “The Book of Common Prayer as set forth by the Church of England in 1662, together with the Ordinal attached to the same, are received as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline, and, with the Books which preceded it, as the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship. The Book of Common Prayer of the Province shall be the one adopted by the Anglican Church in North America. All authorized Books of Common Prayer of the originating jurisdictions shall be permitted for use in this Church.”

   From the founding jurisdictions of the ACNA included the BCP editions of 1549, 1928, 2003REC, and Anglican Missal; as well the 1979 and Anglican Service Book. Some in considerable minority use (1662, Anglican Missal), but all of these, including Lectionary, are authorized in the province.

5. It is the entire use of some jurisdictions of the ACNA:

   The normative Lectionary of the Reformed Episcopal Church, a self-running sub-jurisdiction of the ACNA founded in 1873, and the American One-year Lectionary remains its use. Given this, the One-Year is not an obsolete vestige, but one of current uses within the ACNA.

Unsurprisingly, I find the “1662 as standard” the most compelling argument in terms of permissibility, but as one who prefers 1928 and 1549 editions to the 1662, there are strong arguments using these as the basis of conforming the 2019 to these authorised Prayer Books where possible.

Old Testament Supplements

However, the ancient lectionaries include only two lessons: Epistle and Gospel. Many in contemporary parishes expect an Old Testament, and a Responsive Psalm (which is not the same function as the reading of Psalms in the Daily Office.)

There are a few options, one following strictly the 1928, 1662, or REC 2003, which is to supplement the First Lesson of the Sunday Morning Office to the Eucharistic Service. Samuel Bray, editor of the 1662:International Edition wrote a compelling case for this, which supports Keble’s Tract 13 , insofar as the Old Testament readings following their own, separate logic from the Holy Communion and a different cycle within the church year.

However, two challenges present when using these. First, many of the lessons are contrastingly long compared to the Eucharistic texts. This gives disproportionate weight to them during a service, where the length would be more expected in the Morning Office itself. Second, they are not matched to the readings, and it may be desirable to follow a synthesis of the old and new lectionaries: retain the historic Epistle/Gospel but integrate the RCL Track II approach by thematically connecting an OT passage to the lections, in order to support the homiletical focus within the lectionary.

In 2024 the Prayer Book Society Canada released a One-year Lectionary, which addresses both concerns. However, the use of these texts has no classical precedent, so counsel from one’s diocesan authority should be definitely be sought. Even though the case for the Collect, Epistle, and Gospel is strong, these are new, trial texts.

Permissible, but what about expedient?

There are many reasons for favoring the ancient pattern, but a good synopsis is most concisely covered in the introduction to the Prayer Book Society Canada’s One Year Lectionary Book, as well as more generally in a recent Prayer Book Society USA article by Gary Thorne on Prayer Book Catholicism.

The tipping point for me was living in “Ordinary Time” in the Revised Common Lectionary for many years: the lectio continua with what felt like generally mis-matched collects.4 It began to make preaching more of a drain — not because of the text but the incongruity and apparent ahistoricity of the philosophy behind the selection of the texts. It didn’t feel as natural for Holy Communion compared to the passages I read in the one-year lectionary.

A few years of consideration—study—has only increased my affinity for the more ancient lectionary, inasmuch as it seems of greater spiritual importance than a particular edition—or language—of a prayer book. It is part of the lifeblood of the Western Catholic spiritual tradition, which the English Church providentially preserved from ancient times, through the Reformation, and into the mid-20th century.

The fact that this was not reformed—when the eponymous 16th century revolution took hold—speaks to its universal (catholic) importance.5 It is not essential to the church, for globally the majority of the western church has moved to a 3-year lectionary; and in the East, a different one-year cycle is retained. And all use Holy Scripture to communicate the Gospel. So it isn’t all-or-nothing, but preservation of the spiritual treasures we have been given. In this way, Gary Thorne, writing in the Prayer Book Society USA’s magazine speaks to the universality of the Anglican use retained in the one-year lectionary:

“Indeed, in all of catholicism in the twenty-first century, Anglicanism alone preserves the one-year Eucharistic lectionary that had been fully developed by the church by the seventh century.” – from Robert Crouse and Prayer Book Catholicism

As parish priest, there are non-academic, pastoral reasons for supporting this alternate cycle, and without these, it risks a LARPy approach to tradition: if it is to be retained, it must have pastoral use within the mission and theology of the parish. My reasons are:

1. Catholic: as Chesterton says in Orthodoxy, “Tradition is the democracy of the dead. It means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes: our ancestors.”

   Just like the tradition of our classical prayer book, within the 1662's collects and lections is the ancient Western tradition; the 1662 in this respect offers worship and preaching of scripture within the continuity of all the saints and faithful who have come before us, Early, Medieval, Reformation, Anglo-Catholic.

   As part of the Anglican Tradition, amid the many changes and revisionism in culture, a key missionary asset to outreach is a stable foundation upon which our church and worship is built: we have a firm foundation in history, not just rooted in the changes of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. I believe that the prayer book tradition provides a stable foundation-- a chain of custody going back to the 16th century, but with the lectionary back as far as the early church, where in some cases Luther may have preached on the same lection as St Augustine, as well Andrewes, Keble, Pusey. This rootedness is in-keeping with a core reason to follow in the apostolic faith: that our catholic worship, faith, and practice is familiar to Christians 500 years ago, as well 1000 years ago, that it might correspondingly be familiar to the same 500 years from now, if the Lord has not yet come. This is part of my belief in robust, hopeful Anglican identity being rooted in the maintenance and support of the classical prayer book tradition as much as the apostolic deposit of faith in the validity of our sacraments.

   1. Confessions of a one year lectionary convert, Rev Mark Surburg (LCMS):

      "The three-year lectionary has destroyed the coherence of the whole series of propers, making services thematically chaotic and the individual lessons, including the gospel, essentially immemorable. 'St Augustine and Luther wrote sermons on the same texts for the same Sunday, a marvellous sign of the invisible continuity of the Church over time and space, despite the cruelties of schisms. A Bach cantata, though composed for the Lutheran context, can usually be more or less directly transplanted to the Roman or Anglican context, and it still fits perfectly [because of the historic one-year lectionary].'"

   2. On Changing Lectionaries (PBS Canada), Revd. Jonathan R. Turtle, Prayer Book Society Canada:

      "I contend that the ancient lectionary of the Western church –dating back one thousand years if not more –better "shows" us Jesus in the Scriptures. To borrow an analogy from Irenaeus, it accomplishes this by arranging the readings in such a way as to display the face of our Lord. Or, to mix my metaphors and borrow from Origen, the key to opening the door to one room of Scripture is hidden in another room of Scripture. As such the traditional Eucharistic lectionary teaches us to read Scripture rightly by doing so in light of Scripture's true end, an encounter with the risen and living Jesus himself."

2. Theological: There is a time tested coherence to the collects and readings of the Epistle and Gospel, that the themes are tightly woven towards a particular end and sequence, the coherence of which is not shared in the 3-year Lectionary, one Sunday's collect which must roughly thematically match 12 readings (4 lessons x 3 years, if staying on RCL track 2 or ACNA). “Ordinary Time” (Trinitytide) seems to suffer most from this. But more importantly, the purpose of the 1 year lectionary is purported to prioritize Christian discipleship in relation to the church year, rather than broad scattershot approach towards scripture.

   1. Fr Matthew Oliver, writing for the Living Church:

      1. "The purpose of lectionaries, along with liturgies, creeds, and dogmatic statements, is among other things to provide for the church more concise articulations of "the fullness of saving doctrine" (to quote the Rev. David Curry's essay on the three-year lectionary). Thus, one has to ask whether more Bible in the liturgy has actually brought about a better knowledge of the Bible and, even more importantly, a better grasp of "the fullness of saving doctrine." – Why the RCL is killing churches

      2. "The problem that the [3-year lectionary] faces is simply the impossibility of providing at the eucharist what can only be properly provided through the offices." – Why the RCL is killing churches

      3. "The RCL sometimes proposes texts that are superficially "at odds" with each other, creating theological tensions that the preacher must then attempt to solve or leave unaddressed.' … 'Public recitation of these huge swathes of Scripture, all of which are basically unrelated to each other, can easily have a detrimental effect on nascent faith." – Why the RCL is killing churches, and what you can do about it

3. Educational

   1. One year with the 1928 lectionary - The Living Church, D.N.Keane (PBS / TEC)

      "With less text at each service to mark, learn, and inwardly digest, I found it far more likely that the sermon would touch on everything read and that I would walk out of the service remembering it. Less proved to be more.' … 'I also began to feel a more thematic unity across the Propers. This unity is something I often wanted but felt was lacking in the RCL." –

   2. In Discipling children a problem with the three-year lectionary, Father Richard Peers, Church of England, writes that modern educational methods rely on repetition, which modern lectionary, taking three years to repeat does not provide; the one year repeats in parity with the cycle of the church year. Of the five options towards providing a repetition of scripture for the purpose of educating children, the fifth—that of reintroducing the historic one-year lectionary—is the most practical.

   3. Save the Lectionary, Save the World, Andrew Sabisky

      “Educational psychology is rarely mentioned in discussions of liturgy, perhaps for good reason. Yet the three-year lectionary and the modern form of the Mass contravenes some basic principles of the discipline. Cognitive load theory argues, on the basis of the empirically well-founded theory of working memory, that since we cannot simultaneously hold more than ten chunks of information in mind at once, teachers need to focus on direct instruction, repetition, and the committing of information to long-term memory, from whence it can be more easily recalled and manipulated. The modern Mass, with its proliferation of readings, stretches the cognitive capabilities even of the most intelligent congregation members beyond what they can bear.”

4. Homiletical.

   Finally, provided these claims from other academics and pastors proves missionally and formationally fruitful for the parish as much as my own study, there develops a homiletical challenge, if used well would strengthen a preacher: maintaining repetition without monotony.

   1. I have heard complaints at the year-to-year rut of some one-year lectionary preachers. But as I see it, I hope that I might become so familiar with the passages that my homiletical style can improve by way of leaving the manuscript and becoming more extemporaneous insofar as preaching for the people for that particular day and time. This is achievable in any repeated lectionary, but is more achievable when encountered every year versus once every three years.

   2. The challenge, too, is that one must preach afresh having encountered a text repeatedly, and one must be sure to know well the gaps of the lections. There are gaps, and one must educate and walk through the biblical text in supplementary sermons and catechesis where the historic lectionary might lack a particular teaching. For example, the 1-year is light on the Bread of Life discourse, so the homiletical challenge is to bring that text in where the lectionary points to it but does not quote, as well as be willing to form theology outside of short Sunday homilies, both in bible study and catechesis.

Personal Reflections

My own experience on the lectionary has been inconsistent. I was formed primarily within a 1928 BCP context (Reformed Episcopal/former APA, and other continuing churches). So as a listener, I took in the historic lectionary early in my formation (when I cared little about lectionaries a all: the fact they existed at all was enough).

Yet while as a priest I was primarily formed in a 1928 BCP liturgical context, I was not exposed much to the one-year lectionary in practice; even the traditional prayer book churches often moved—or were moved—to the new lectionary. Some with the new collects, some inconsistently retaining the 1928.

My interest and study of the historic lectionary was initially out of historical interest: reading and researching on preaching in the Victorian era brought me to the texts that were read, then. Through this I have been intellectually persuaded of the usefulness of the one-year, even though it deviates from the majority practice in the West. Not just preservation for the sake of preservation, there is a solid case for its use—both in permissibility to adopt it, as well as the missionary/discipleship (Matthew 28:19-20) basis for doing so. After years of reflecting on the lectionary and its merits, I have decided to not just give it an intellectual treatment, but a practical trial.

So far engaging with the historic lectionary has been an incredibly freeing experience. Though only properly preaching for Lent6, I am already enjoying the well of wisdom of the saints having preached on many of these passages, as much as the tight connection of the lections with the collects. While I lost some go-to RCL resources I found quite helpful in homily preparation, the lections themselves have felt more appropriate and natural for a homily than my prior RCL Lent preaching. It feels as though these pericopes are designed to preach people towards Christ and in so doing, the Eucharist.

And as part of my trial, I have been supplementing the 1662 Eucharistic Lectionary with the Psalms (taken from 1662: International Edition), and Old Testament according to what the Prayer Book Society Canada developed. I chose to favor the 1662 lections vs 1928 because of the Fundamental Declarations of the ACNA (point 6), as above.

As I am in a diocese where this is not universal practice, and so connected with other churches and a godly bishop, which most prepare sermons on the ACNA or RCL cycle, I have made the following commitments in using this lectionary:

1. This is a trial, not an inflexible commitment; at that, one with reflection and analysis. If it is not working at the parish—bearing fruit in the way posited, argued for, and hoped for—pastoral responsibility requires that I examine why and adjust accordingly.

2. At any point where there is a visit or emergency necessity, whether episcopal visit or priestly supply, I remain strongly in support of following the RCL / ACNA lections for those occasions of expediency and convenience of the clergy visiting who are not familiar, etc. In that the Traditional Lections remain an option.

In fact, my chief complaint about the ACNA 2019 BCP is that it does not explicitly follow the 1662 it upholds to provide an option for the historic communion service. TLE would have been the ideal book to include two appendices: A) p.142 Service Order B) Historic Collects with table of one-year Eucharistic Readings. Thankfully, we still have the option, even if less accessible and whether in primary use at my parish, I am heartened at the new clergy moving towards the same tradition. It is part of the mission of Anglican.Center to continue supporting some of these lesser-resourced classical and catholic uses within a pan-Anglican context.

Fr J. M. Kelman

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I was chatting with a priest-friend about the 1662: International Edition of the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), and he playfully remarked to me that I must be the only Anglo-Catholic priest in America that likes the 1662IE. He classified it as having mostly a Reformed-Calvinist following. I don’t think this is necessarily the case, but it occurred to me that I should write out some of my reasons for supporting it—or more broadly the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

The International Edition of the 1662 BCP was commissioned by the Prayer Book Society USA to be a book to succeed the 1928 BCP,1 since both ACNA and TEC have not retained key elements of the classical Prayer Book tradition. While the former’s 2019 is a conservative revision of the 1979 book, the 1979 was the starting text from which revisions were made, not the classical 1928/1662 tradition. Indeed, neither ACNA nor TEC retain many classical Anglican elements in their prayer books, regardless of Traditional or modern language. Most prominently, this is found in the 1979-influenced collects and the modern 3-year lectionary brought about by 20th Century Liturgical Movement.

The 1928 BCP, used by (tens of) thousands worldwide in the Continuing Movement; and the 1662, used by millions worldwide in the Anglican Communion/Gafcon, are among the few “uses” preserving the ancient lections of the Western Tradition.

The 1662:IE makes adjustments for those not in the Commonwealth, as well an appendix (III) allowing for pointers as to how the book has been used over the centuries. It includes a glossary and an abundance of additional prayers that exceed those of 1928 and harmonize with 2019. With these, I have found it exceeds the practical usefulness of the American 1928 BCP. That said, the 1928 has a greater variety of Canticles and a more Lancelot Andrewes-infused Holy Communion service order.2

But the larger question: Why the 1662? Personally, it is not because of stylistic or aesthetic preference; rather, it is a book that for me solved a recurring question of Anglican Identity amidst the cacophony of “Anglicanisms.”

Anglican Identity

The Rev. Canon Robert Bader, a priest in the Diocese of the Holy Cross, now part of the Anglican Catholic Church succinctly writes:

“It is my contention that there are essentially three types of Anglicanism in the world today […] Canterbury Anglicanism, GAFCON Anglicanism, and [Affirmation of St Louis] Anglicanism.

[…]
Canterbury Anglicanism needs little explanation. It is the prevailing ideology in the Church of England, the Episcopal Church, other First World Anglican provinces, and some Third World Anglican provinces. […] Many of its adherents maintain aspects of Evangelicalism or Catholicism, with the glaring exceptions noted. But it is fundamentally open to revisionism on any issue of faith and morals.

[…]
GAFCON Anglicanism is the ideology associated with the Global Anglican Future Conference, the 2008 meeting of bishops from mostly Third World Anglican provinces, which was instrumental in the creation of the currently named Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).
[…]
[St. Louis Anglicanism] is the ideology set forth in the Declaration of Scranton and the Affirmation of St Louis […] St. Louis Anglicanism is what N.P. Williams described in Northern Catholicism: “Catholicism which is neither Roman nor Byzantine; which is non-Papal, but at the same time specifically Western in its outlook and temper.”3

In terms of spirituality (lived theology; not ecclesiastical authority), these are overlapping Venn-circles, though the latter overlaps least because of its earlier self-separation from the larger body. In Canterbury Anglicanism, there remain those who might be better defined as St Louis Anglicanism in terms of belief and spirituality. In ACNA/Gafcon, there are churches and dioceses that are in many respects more in-step with the Episcopal Church (Canterbury) on many issues, yet there are churches that also would align more strongly with St Louis Anglicanism.4 And some St Louis Anglican churches are more Protestant Episcopalian than non-Papal Catholic.

The state of Anglicanism over the last 50 years was born out of a sort of divorce, first begun in the 1970s, continued globally in 1992, both over the ordination of women to the priesthood; and again breaking in 2003-2009 over the issue of human sexuality.

In the ACNA, because of very real differences over first-order issues, some dioceses are not universally conferring valid sacraments,5 nor do all dioceses exist in full communion with one another.6 The question looms whether 20th century changes to the church are those which are catholic: if the authority of the church is rendered doubtful over legislated heresy ,7 then how should one feel about other aspects of the last 50 years that are shaping Anglican identity, such as prayer book liturgy, worship, doctrine?

For those new to “Anglicanism,” one might be surprised that a very diverse group of people claim to be Anglican, often in contradiction with one another.

One question an inquirer might ask is, “how much does a particular ‘Anglicanism’ participate in what could be called The Anglican Tradition?”
Or , “how much does an interpretation of the Tradition maintain the Catholic deposit of faith?” — a deposit that, many argue, providentially survived the Medieval, Reformation, Anglican Counter-Reformation,8 and Restoration, at great cost to many godly bishops and the martyrdom of a monarch, St Charles, King and Martyr?

It is true that each century has had factions that hold particular characteristics of their shibboleth, whether it be the High Church versus Low Church, Oxford Movement versus the Latitudinarians, Evangelicals versus the Ritualists, and so on. And in the 20th Century, many of these categories shifted into social/moral categories rather than modes of worship, some of which brought about by liturgical change. But there is a core to which we can all look to “hold the center” of the tradition.

I submit that living within the foundation9 of the 1662 BCP best prepares one to pray and worship10 within the center of such a venn-overlap: to exist within the best of Canterbury, Gafcon, and St Louis Anglicanisms.

Why the 1662 Book of Common Prayer?

Before I was Anglican, I was mentored by a godly priest in the Eastern Orthodox church. What I saw among fellow inquirers was a desire for confidence (i.e., validity) in apostolic sacraments, worshipping in historic consistency (stability), alongside and in a like manner to an expanse of fellow Christians, past and present (global). In other words, to be within the broadly Catholic tradition (cf., Vincentian Canon ‘by all, always, everywhere’). The 1662BCP represents well the English use of the same.

It has provided me the answer to the question: “How can one be faithfully Catholic within the Anglican Tradition—insofar as prayer, liturgy, and spiritual formation—without diverting to provincialism?”

It is Catholic in Sacrament.

While the 1662 in America seems to have following of those who would be more Reformed-Calvinist, or what the continuum has called “Canonical Century,”11

there is no reason for Anglo-Catholics to avoid the 1662’s ancient catholicity because of divergent theology of other proponents. That their fight for the 1662 is rooted in a historical narrative hostile to Anglo-Catholics is not the book’s fault.

The 1662 is largely the same book that the Caroline Divines used, who being Reformed, were nevertheless not “Presbyterians with Prayer Books.” This is also so with the Tractarians and 19th Century Ritualists that produced the Anglo-Catholic movement. The Prayer Book used by Pusey, Neale, Keble, was the 1662. So too with Maurice, Lowder, Dearmer. When a Tractarian, Newman even wrote a case for keeping the 1662 as it is. 12

There are likely few American Anglo-Catholics who use 1662, but it may be of interest as an alternative to 2019 TLE or the 1928, following the example of the Prayer Book Society UK,13, and the Diocese of Oswestry, Bishop Paul Thomas, SSC to celebrate the 1662 BCP as a fully Catholic liturgy, and support its use.14

The 1662 may have some deficiencies, but as many have noted, such may be supplemented with additional devotions, as SSC has supported15 and SSJE’s Palmer and Hawkes outline.16

The 1662 represents a providential aspect of Anglicanism: it is the distilled minimum liturgy, following the spirit of the Reformation. While one should be wary to remove material from a minimum, it may be right to augment—restore—prayers, ceremonies, and devotions which may not carry the same “Romish” connotations now. This is especially helpful in recovering ancient traditions of the church, largely purged from consciousness during the canonical century, dimly remembered in some quarters in succeeding years, but rejected in few quarters today, thanks the Oxford Movement and those spiritual children the movement birthed. Indeed, the Roman Catholic Ordinariate issued a Commonwealth Daily Office Breviary that is more or less the 1662 with additional devotions, including the same 1961 Lectionary the International Edition includes.

It is stable in history.

It is important to note that the 1662:IE is popular especially to those outside the Anglican world, proving its own inherent appeal to those interested in prayer and spiritual formation within the Anglican tradition. This interest is not what was written as revolution in 1979, or reaction to the same in 2019, but a tradition approaching 400 years of use. While few would say it is a perfect book,17 it has proven the test of time, much as the King James Version of the Bible has.

The 1662 remains a foundation for most of Anglicanism, both in the history of the Anglican tradition and in millions of adherents today.

The late Fr Peter Toon (Prayer Book Society USA president) noted in 2007:

“The use of The BCP 1662 as the standard text and base line seems to be a real possibility for a large sector of would-be orthodox American Anglicanism and through it may come the restoration of the authentic Anglican Way as Reformed Catholicism and part of a global Family. For parishes with a solid musical tradition, the use of The BCP 1662 opens up massive possibilities of classic and modern sung services and of course with this Prayer Book comes a tremendous devotional and theological literature, together with marvelous poetry and special services (Advent Carol Service etc.). Not least with this tradition comes the missionary zeal, exhibited in the past by the major evangelical missionary societies of England—e.g., Church Missionary Society.”

Since then, this has been largely true, within the ACNA, Gafcon, and the orthodox few in the See of Oswestry (part of Forward in Faith UK). The 1662, even if not fully utilized, remains a standard for faithful, orthodox Anglicans worldwide in a way no other single prayer book has achieved. This represents nearly four centuries of stability in prayer, liturgy/worship, sacraments, and prioritization of scripture.

This foundation, I believe, is compelling in a way that provides a missionary narrative for the Anglican Tradition in a way that emphasizes our identity, without looking to Presbyterians, Eastern Orthodox, or Roman Catholics, but respecting each. It means that we have out own history, as the Byzantines do: the 1662 as a base text provides us western roots to the ancient, patristic church in ways that is often lack in many Roman parishes, as well Anglican parishes that follow the 20th/21st century zeitgeist revisions.18 Stability is part of what attracts converts to Orthodoxy and Rome, and lack of stability—being recent social-doctrinal developments exemplified in liturgical revision—what repels people from contemporary Anglicanism.

I contend that, of the multitude of Anglican-adjacent jurisdictions (Anglican Communion, Gafcon, St Louis Continuing, Western Rite, Ordinariate), the 1662 represents a historic cohesive core to the tradition that retains a personal traditional Catholic Anglican identity—which is to say, a Benedictine-influcenced pattern of spiritual formation, prayer, and participation in sacraments—irrespective of a particular diocese, jurisdiction, or movement of culture. In its stability (including the Ordinal), it assures catholicity amid a myriad of changes and revisions of what is now called “Anglicanism.”

It is global in use.

The 1662 is not just a book for England, or the Commonwealth. It is a book used in 50 countries, 150 languages, and one using it can confidently worship in continuity not just with many hundreds of years of saints before us, but also those around the world presently:

1662 in English Anglo-Catholicism

Fr Thomas Plant writes of the 1662’s use in revitalizing English orthodoxy in Word, Worship, and Sacrament:

Bishop of Oswestry has reorganized and revivified a tired and demoralized See, which lost its last bishop to Rome, and has become a beacon for traditionalist Anglicans in England and abroad. Oswestry aims for what he calls “total evangelization,” driving hundreds of miles weekly to lead his people and pastors in prayer and catechesis. He brooks no “fakery,” and while he may have the voice and vesture to rival anything on in the West End, he is no pantomime dame.

What is more, unusually among Anglo-Catholic bishops in England, Oswestry is an ardent supporter of the quintessentially Anglican liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer.

[…]

The Prayer Book Society [UK], under His Majesty’s patronage, is enjoying a consistently larger and younger membership every year. It encompasses conservative Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics, as well as some “Broad Church” latitudinarians and liberals from both ends of the churchmanship spectrum.19

1662 in Gafcon

“Gafcon is a global movement within the [Anglican} Communion which represents the majority of all Anglicans.”

From Gafcon’s 2008 Jerusalem Statement:

We rejoice in our Anglican sacramental and liturgical heritage as an expression of the gospel, and we uphold the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer, to be translated and locally adapted for each culture.20

1662 in the Traditional Anglican Communion (Affirmation of St Louis)

The 1990 Traditional Anglican Concordat of 2003:

This Communion retains and approves the formularies of the classical Anglican tradition authorized prior to the emergence, within some Churches or Provinces of 'The Anglican Communion,' of those departures from orthodox Faith and Practice which made necessary and precipitated the Congress of St. Louis. The standard of Faith and Worship of this Communion is that expressed in the first Book of Common Prayer, and Ordinal, of Edward VI and in the following revisions: [1662, 1962, 1928, 1963, 1926, 1954, and The Church of England Deposited Book of 1928]21

The Anglican Catholic Church, which is not part of the Concordat, authorizes the American 1928, English 1549, South Africa 1954, Canadian 1962, India 1963 Books of Common Prayer; the last of which contains the 1662 Holy Communion liturgy.22

1662 in the Episcopal Church

From the Intervarsity Academic Press page on the 1662: International Edition

Is the IE authorized for use in public worship?

As a general matter in the Anglican Communion, the "The Book of Common Prayer 1662 is the normative standard for liturgy." That quote is from Principle 55(1) of The Principles of Canon Law Common to the Churches of the Anglican Communion (Anglican Communion Office, 2008). But the answer to this question will differ from church to church. Different Anglican jurisdictions have different means by which texts are authorized for use in public worship.

In the Episcopal Church (USA), a diocesan bishop may authorize a congregation to use the 1662 IE as an alternative to the 1979 Book of Common Prayer under the terms of Resolution A068 of the 2018 General Convention, which authorizes "experimentation and the creation of alternative texts to offer to the wider church" under the supervision of the diocesan bishop. For the Communion service specifically, the 1662 rite may be used in place of the 1979 rite under the terms of 2015 Resolution D050.

In the Anglican Church in North America, diocesan bishops have oversight of the liturgies used within their jurisdictions (Canon 2 of the Constitution and Canons). According to the same canon, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer is one of the prayer books that "shall be permitted for use in this Church," and it is the prayer book identified as the "standard" for Anglican doctrine, discipline, and worship.

1662 in ACNA

The ACNA, including the REC and those in Forward in Faith, support as a provincial foundation the 1662 BCP, from Fundamental Declarations of the Province (contained in the Constitution of the Province):

We receive The Book of Common Prayer 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.

Further, Title II, Canon 2, states:

The Book of Common Prayer as set forth by the Church of England in 1662, together with the Ordinal attached to the same, are received as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline, and, with the Books which preceded it, as the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship. […] All authorized Books of Common Prayer of the originating jurisdictions shall be permitted for use in this Church.23

Why not use the standard?

While I am not advocating that 1662 be used in all cases, in all places, I hope that advocating for it, and producing materials to encourage the accessibility of it—especially including the 2019:TLE with 1662 Service Order—will help the mission of the church where it is expedient: to make disciples and preach the good news; and to worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness.

///

Fr J. Kelman

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1 Church of England liturgy now

The authoritative liturgy of the Church of England, despite a preponderance of sanctioned alternatives, remains the Book of Common Prayer in its 1662 edition. This traces its origins back to the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer’s original Prayer Book of 1549. A survey of its contents reveals Cranmer’s intentions to bequeath within its pages a concise but comprehensive rule for the spiritual life of the English people. The Prayer Book prescribes daily, the communal recitation of Morning and Evening Prayer, in the course of which the Psalter is read once monthly and the whole Bible annually; weekly, the respective fast and feast of Friday abstinence and Sunday Holy Communion, with a Litany to be prayed then and on Wednesdays to mark that day’s penitential character; seasonally, the patterns of the Church, civic and agricultural year, including the marking of Lenten penance and fasting, prayers to mark the accession of the Sovereign, and pleas and thanks for good harvest; annually, the celebration of the saints of the Church; and, at the scale of the human lifetime, the orders for baptism, matrimony, visitation of the sick and dying with private confession and communion; and finally, when occasion demands, the order for ordination of those to serve as deacons, priests and bishops of the Church. Holy Communion is at the centre of the book, its pole star, as it is at the centre of the life of the Church and of every Christian; baptism is closely oriented towards it, and together these make the two sacraments “generally,” which is to say universally, necessary for salvation. Such is the outline of the Christian faith lived according to the Prayer Book rule, and it is a life unapologetically liturgical. The trappings of the liturgy, such as ornaments of the church and ministers, liturgical furnishings and orientation, and the use of organs and choirs have varied over the centuries and caused much debate, even to the extent of bloodshed. But the Anglican way, as the kind of Christianity derived from Canterbury came to be known, is indisputably liturgical. The Prayer Book is not merely an antiquarian curiosity to be scoured for proofs of doctrine: it is the guidebook for the Christian way of life, written not just to be read, but to be used. 

2 Opponents of liturgy

The liturgy of the Church of England has not, however, enjoyed universal approval over the centuries. For many loyal to Rome at its original propagation, it had gone too far into the realm of popularism, likened by one wit to a “parlour game” in comparison with the Latin rite of old. In principle, Latin was replaced with English on the grounds of being “a tongue not understanded of the people,” as the Church of England’s 24^th Article of Religion has it. A worthy principle, surely: but when imposed on the Cornish and Welsh, for whom Latin was better “understanded” than English, a principle confounded in practice. For that matter, the English of the Prayer Book, in those centuries long before the homogenising effect on language of audio broadcasts, grew more distant from the English people spoke the further the book travelled from London. Not that most could read it anyway. We cannot pretend that the English Reformation was a grassroots movement: it was imposed from above by an intellectual elite on an often begrudging people who valued their old ways. Nor can we pretend, however, that the English liturgy marked an absolute breach with those old ways to the extent of complete unrecognizability. The principle behind Christian life in English remained liturgical and retained the essence of the older tradition.

Indeed, it is precisely the continuity between the Prayer Book and the older tradition which incurred ire from the other, opposite quarter. If those loyal to Rome scorned the Prayer Book for straying too far from tradition, there were yet many keener sons of the Reformation who scorned it all the more for not straying far enough. From 1553-1558, it was banned by the Roman Catholic Queen Mary on the former grounds; exactly one hundred years later, from 1653-1658, the Puritan Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell banned it on the latter. Worship, the Puritans thought, should be guided by the Bible alone. Liturgy was a merely human tradition, constraining genuine and free entreaties to God. The order of bishops, priests and deacons was also a human conceit, to be abolished. Henceforth, people could worship God as they wished, as long as it was not according to the Book of Common Prayer.

In the modern Church of England, more than in other Anglican provinces, there are so many permissible variations on the liturgy that in many churches, any remnants of the Prayer Book tradition are barely perceptible, if at all. In some quarters, the Puritan perspective has won. Even the official organs of the Church have conceded much to the Puritans’ rhetoric, blithely deploying phrases such as “worship styles” and multiple “traditions” within the Church, as though it is simply common sense to suppose that liturgy is nothing more than a take-it-or-leave-it matter of personal taste. Some prefer Evensong, some prefer Messy Church or Celtic praise: and harm none other, do as thou will. So, hostility towards the traditional liturgy of the Church, whilst properly a subject of theological dispute, has been shifted somewhat disingenuously into a polarity between sunny-dispositioned, easy-going liturgical liberals for whom anything goes, versus Prayer Book-carrying old grumps of the retired Colonel type. In an age obsessed with “optics,” the victor for the attention of desperate bishops is not hard to predict.

Was Cranmer, then, on the wrong side of history? Were our forebears in the faith rigidly attached to the dead repetition of words, slaves to man-made tradition? Is liturgical worship something to be conceded to the elderly 8am congregation until they die out, then gladly disposed of as the Church enters a bright new dawn of spirit-filled freedom? Is liturgy, in short, a matter of passing and possibly bad taste, or is there something lasting and God-given about it? To find out, we will need to consider the origins of worship.

3 Ancient Jewish Liturgy

Since the exile from Eden, the defining aspect of worship offered to God has been sacrifice. Prevented, for our own safety, from re-entering God’s presence by an angel’s sword of fire, humans made burnt offerings of animals in the flames as our representatives. The second human act recorded after the exile is the sacrifice made by Cain and Abel, showing how God receives such sacrifices as are made with a true heart (Gen 4:3-4). After the flood and subsequent renewal of creation, the first thing Noah does is to set up an altar and offer sacrifice (Gen 8:20). Abram set up an altar on arriving at Bethel (Gen 12:8). In time, God would liberate the Hebrews under Moses by means of the sacrifice of the first Passover lamb. He would later give detailed instructions in the Law for proper sacrifice, stressing the offering of blood as the life-force of the animal (e.g. Ex 12:13). Eventually, in the time of King David, the Temple was designed as a permanent place for making such sacrifices and built under his son, Solomon, who dedicated it with thousands of sacrifices (1 Kings 8:61).

Sacrifice, which literally means “making holy,” was and remains the purpose of Israel’s worship: the sanctification of creation and restoration to that harmony and oneness with God that was lost at the Fall. The Divine Word meticulously lays out the orders, which is to say the liturgy, for this divine service throughout the Torah and beyond. The precise dimensions of the Ark of the Covenant and all its furnishings, including images of gold, are included in the divinely given blueprint. The plans for the Temple, too, were handed from David to Solomon “in writing from the hand of the Lord” (1 Chron 28:19). As the Temple was prepared, the Psalms became God’s gift to David and his line for recitation at the daily morning and evening offering of incense there. Musical instruments, including cymbals, strings and horns, were used in offering worship to the presence of God as the Ark was brought into the Temple, there was communal recitation of a liturgical formula from the Psalms, “Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good, for his mercy endures forever,” and the Temple was filled with smoke, possibly incense (2 Chron 5:11-13). The worship of the ancient Jews was sacrificial and liturgical, not as a matter of personal whim, but as decreed by God.

4 Early Christian Liturgy

Even granting that ancient Jewish worship was ritual and liturgical, one may legitimately ask whether Christian worship should also be so. Did not God announce through his prophets his hatred of empty ritual, vain sacrifice and insincere marking of feast days (e.g. Hos 6:6, Am 5:9-27, Mic 6:1-8)? Indeed so: but only of the empty, vain and insincere kind! Holy writ cannot contradict itself so baldly as in one breath to prescribe feasts and sacrifices and in the next to deny them. God is not fickle: in His eternal light there is no shadow of turning.

This brings us to the controversial and sensitive question of the relationship between the Old Covenant and the New. To what extent is it one of continuity or of abrogation? Answering either way causes problems which have historically contributed to the Christian persecution of Jews. We might say that, since the Temple was destroyed by the Roman Empire in AD70, Christian worship is the continuation of that Temple worship, replacing the hereditary Jewish priesthood with the Apostolic priesthood instituted by Christ; or alternatively, that the worship of the Temple was definitively ended, never to be resumed. In either case, it is hard to escape from some form of “supersessionism,” that is, the claim that Christianity has replaced Judaism. Aside from the lamentable historical consequences of either perspective, the latter additionally implies that God has withdrawn the Old Covenant, and that His promises to the chosen people were only provisional: in other words, the Jews are no longer chosen, and God has rescinded His promises. This seems doubly objectionable, and while it is not a question I can hope to answer here, it would be incautious to pass it by without comment, especially since those who hate the Jews will grasp for any ammunition they can find.

Evidence suggests that the early Christians considered themselves inheritors of the Temple tradition rather than its abolishers. It is clear from Scripture that Jesus took part in Temple worship, and the Apostles, continued to do so after He had died, risen and ascended. St Peter preached in Solomon’s porch (Acts 3:11). St Paul took a traditional Jewish ascetic vow (Acts 18:18) and went to the Temple to complete it with an offering, only to be accused of having taken gentiles within (Acts 21:28); while there, he had a vision of God while praying (Acts 22:17). All this is indicative of the very much Jewish identity and practice of the early church in Jerusalem.

When the Apostles gathered in AD 49 at what is known to posterity as the Apostolic Council in Jerusalem, they discussed the extent to which gentile converts should observe Torah. The city’s first bishop, St James, who presided at the Council, cited the prophet Amos (Acts 15:16-17, Amos 9:11-12), through whom God promised to return and rebuild the Temple, “so that the rest of mankind,” i.e. the gentiles, might “seek the Lord.” To this end, James decreed not that the gentile converts should simply ignore the Law altogether, but that they observe only those parts which apply to non-Jews, namely abstention from “things polluted by idols, sexual immorality, things strangled, and blood” (Acts 16:21). Circumcision would not be necessary for them, but their destination was the reconfigured Temple, and the liturgical worship for which it both literally and figuratively stood.

The first large tranche of Christian converts reported in Acts, around three thousand in number, observed a mixed practice of worship in households and in the Temple. St Luke tells us that they “continued steadfastly in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship [koinōnia], in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers… continuing daily with one accord in the Temple, and breaking bread from house to house” (Acts 2:42, 46). One sometimes hears talk of a primitive, pre-liturgical Christianity, bearing a remarkable resemblance to modern house-church movements, where fellow Christians casually gathered for a prayer meeting including scripture reading and a meal. This is misleading on both textual and archaeological grounds.

Textually, the word “fellowship” is koinōnia, used also to indicate Holy Communion; further, “prayers” in the Greek is prefaced with the definite article — “the” prayers — hence more likely referring to specific liturgical prayers than to ad hoc ejaculations. The worship was Eucharistic, and required an Apostle to be present, rather than the lay-led service typical of modern house churches. Further, the numbers recorded as attending such worship imply that only the large houses of wealthy people might be used to this end. St Paul’s stern admonition to the Church in Corinth about turning the service into a drunken feast — “Do you not have houses to eat and drink in?” (1 Cor 11:22) — suggests that it took part in some separate room from normal domestic use.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest Christians worshipped not only in large houses, but also in the catacombs and at the gravesides of martyrs, and even in bathhouses, as need arose in times of persecution. There was no particular emphasis on the domestic setting, as though the early Christians were deliberately opposing themselves to the liturgical practice and sacred space of their Jewish contemporaries and forebears. On the contrary, the desire to pray at the sites of martyrs’ relics suggests a developed sense of sacred space in continuity with Second Temple belief and practice. Liturgical furnishings were also in use. The earliest extant evidence of an actual church dates to AD 230, including an elaborate mosaic floor and dedicated space for an altar and the use of specific eucharistic chalices adorned with the sign of the Cross is attested to by Tertullian at the beginning of the second century.

There is a far clearer continuity between early Church worship and the ancient liturgical worship of the Temple than there is to modern house church groups. Christian worship was grounded in the breaking of the bread, which the earliest tradition ascribes only to the Apostles and their chosen successors, and which originated in the context of the Passover. Christ offered Himself on the Cross as the new Passover lamb, and the means He gave His Church of participating in that offering was the Eucharist He instituted the night before He died. Given that the Last Supper itself, as a part of the Passover celebrations, was itself a liturgical celebration, it should be unsurprising that the Apostles commissioned to continue that celebration should also do so liturgically.

By the mid-second century, Justin Martyr in Rome alludes to established liturgies of baptism and the Eucharist; slightly later, Origen and Clement of Alexandria refer to comparable practices in the Greek-speaking churches; Cyril, Bishop of Jerusalem, makes extensive reference to liturgical practice in the 4^th-5^th centuries. Although there is no extant example of complete written liturgies in Apostolic times, the Didache composed around AD 60 comes close, and it is more reasonable to suppose a continuity between the liturgical practice of the Jews at the time of the fall of the Temple in AD 70 and that of Christian churches attested as little as 80 years later than to suggest on the basis of an absence of evidence that Christians of Justin Martyr’s generation deviated from presumed primitive apostolic practice and plucked their liturgical practice from thin air. That the supposed apostolic practice of casual, non-liturgical, non-hierarchical house church meetings so neatly conforms to modern sensibilities should further make us doubly suspicious of it.

5  Liturgical Britain

We must skip through some centuries if this post is ever to reach Britain’s shores. By the time St Augustine had reached Canterbury in AD 596 to bring the Roman hierarchy there, there had already long been Christian communities. There is record, for example, of British bishops present at a Church Council in Arles in AD 313. The older British Christianity was of a monastic character, influenced by the ascetic desert fathers of Egypt via the works of John Cassian, and based mostly in the hard terrain of the western isles. The monks’ round of worship stressed the old Temple practice of recitation of the Psalms, in some cases the entire psalter being read every week. The Roman envoys, after much and bitter dispute about the dating of Easter, conformed the British Kalendar to their own, adding many native saints to its roll.

By the high Middle Ages, the recognisable round of daily Mass and offices sung by robed choirs with due ceremonial was well established. Its worship was undoubtedly beautiful, but the Church itself was not without corruption or fault. Those faults were pointed out perhaps too emphatically by the Augustinian Friar Martin Luther in the early sixteenth century. The recent advent of the printing press carried his objections to England, where they found cultured sympathisers. King Henry VIII, however, was not one of them. He may have been a monster and a wife-killer, but he had no intention of breaching God’s law or leaving God’s Church. It is commonly said that he broke from Rome on the issue of a divorce. This is not so. He sought an annulment, that is, the proclamation by the Pope that his marriage to Catherine had never been valid in the first place, on the grounds that he had married his dead brother’s wife, a practice forbidden by Scripture. He saw her failure to bear a male heir as God’s punishment for this sin. The Pope had granted annulments to other nobles on far flimsier pretexts. The reasons he would not hear Henry’s case were less than spiritual. Catherine’s nephew was the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, and the Pope needed his continued support.

Cranmer was the man who would help Henry break from Rome. His motivations were different from his sire’s. Henry wanted only local independence, a Catholic church under his jurisdiction rather than that of the Pope. Cranmer wanted reform. His first Prayer Book of 1549 was a relatively conservative translation of the older Latin liturgies, trimming down the many books needed to offer divine service into one volume, easier to use and easier to propagate so as to enforce a single liturgy across the realm: a book of prayer “common” to the whole kingdom. The revisions of 1552 moved in a more Protestant direction, but it barely had time to cool from the press before Queen Mary abolished it the next year. Queen Elizabeth’s 1559 edition moved slightly back in the older direction and offered a bare-bones liturgical order which could be dressed as fleshily or sparsely as one’s ecclesiastical proclivities required. There were those who used it as a strictly spoken office book, without music or vesture, in Calvinist style. These were not much pleased at how, in contrast, the Queen herself used it, as one such in 1560 despaired:

What can I hope, when three of our lately appointed bishops are to officiate at the Table of the Lord, one as priest, another as a deacon, and a third as subdeacon, before the image of the crucifix, or at least not far from it, with candles, and habited with the golden vestments of the papacy; and are thus to celebrate the Lord’s Supper without any sermon?

Battles continued between those who would enrich the Church’s liturgy, emphasising its continuity with ancient tradition, and those who wished to dispense with such tradition entirely. This was true not only in England. Archbishop Laud, serving under the High Church King Charles I, drew up the 1637 Scottish Prayer Book, restoring the older 1549 form of the Eucharist. The first attempt to use it in Edinburgh’s St Giles Cathedral resulted in a riot, with books being thrown at the priest, and the words of the market trader Jenny Geddes echoing to posterity: 

The book, among other causes, ecclesiastical and political, resulted in war and the decapitation of the King. Its more Catholic emphasis would, however, exercise a lasting influence on later international Prayer Books, among that that of the Japanese church.

We return at last to Cromwell. He was overthrown and the monarchy happily restored, along with the deposed bishops and the deposed Prayer Book. In 1661, the new King Charles determined to hold a conference in Savoy to mediate between the bishops and the Puritans who had held sway in Cromwell’s time and so revise the Prayer Book. This is the pristine state to which the Puritans wanted to return:

Prayer, confession, thanksgiving, reading of the Scriptures, and the administration of the Sacraments in the plainest and simplest manner, were matter enough to furnish out a sufficient Liturgy, though nothing either of private opinion, or of church pomp, of garments, or prescribed gestures, of imagery, of musick, of matter concerning the dead, of many superfluities which creep into the Church under the name or order and decency, did interpose itself.

Note that they did not call any longer for the wholesale abandonment of liturgy, but regarded as unbiblical and undesirable much of what enriches it, including vesture, images and music. Even the sign of the Cross in baptism was deemed a “papalistic” superstition.

The Bishops retorted that the Puritans’ interpretation of the Reformation was flawed:

It was the wisdom of our Reformers to draw up such a Liturgy as neither Romanist nor Protestant could justly except against. … For preserving of the Churches’ peace we know no better or efficacious way than our set Liturgy … when the Liturgy was duly observed, we lived in peace; since that was laid aside there hath been as many modes and fashions of public worship as fancies. … If we do not observe that golden rule of the venerable Council of Nice, ‘Let ancient customs prevail,’ till reason plainly requires the contrary, we shall give offence to sober Christians by a causeless departure from Catholic usage…

The bishops prevailed and gave the Church the 1662 Book of Common Prayer still current in England today. Most, though not all, of the Puritans’ demands were rejected.

Over the next century, the Book which had been perceived as a radical and revolutionary departure from ancient practice now became the hallmark of the liturgical and Catholic-oriented conservative. Various services were added over the next century and a half, including the commemoration of the executed monarch as St Charles, King and Martyr; a memorial service of the Great Fire of London; and, in 1714, an order for the consecration of church buildings. None of these were typical of Puritan concerns. Though never formally abrogated by the Church or Parliament, these services gradually faded out of the Prayer Book at the whim of Victorian printers. However, it is in the Victorian age that the greatest liturgical renewal of the Church of England took place, with lasting consequences to this day.

I speak, of course, of the Oxford Movement, generally dated from 1833 and the priest John Keble’s Assize Sermon given at the University Church of St Mary, provocatively entitled "National Apostasy.” Since non-Anglicans had recently been permitted to become members of parliament, this meant that the doctrine of the established Church was being decided by people who were not its members, including some even hostile to it. Keble preached against this development, arguing that the Church’s true authority must rest not on Parliament but on the bishops, as legitimate successors of the Apostles. Inspired by Keble, fellow Oxford men John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey began the scholarly work of defending the continuity of the Church of England with the wider Catholic Church. They unearthed the ancient liturgical sources behind the Prayer Book, demonstrating ingeniously, if sometimes a little tenuously, that they were not merely innovations, but were derived from and consistent with the practice of the ancient Church.

While the proponents of the Oxford Movement focussed mostly on reinterpreting the doctrine of the Prayer Book, the next generation saw the need to match their doctrinal interpretations with liturgical practice. Citing the Ornaments Rubric of the Elizabethan Prayer Book as justification — “such Ornaments of the Church, and of the Ministers thereof, at all Times of their Ministration, shall be retained, and be in use, as were in this Church of England, by the Authority of Parliament, in the Second Year of the Reign of King Edward the Sixth” — they reintroduced candles, incense, vestments, robed and surpliced choirs, altar plate and crosses, as well as enriching Anglican worship with new translations of ancient hymns to ancient melodies. The recovery of Merbecke’s setting for Holy Communion and much of today’s English hymnody comes from this period and those churchmen who would come to be called “Anglo-Catholic.”

These restorations of ancient liturgical practice, once enjoyed by Queen Elizabeth I, seem nowadays quintessentially Anglican and uncontroversial. In Victorian times they were exotic enough to stoke riots. 1844-5 saw the two-year Surplice Riots in Exeter, following the Bishop of that Diocese’s enforcement of the garment’s use by all clergy. In the 1860s, priests went to gaol for using wafer bread and having lighted candles on the altar. The situation was regularised only in 1906 with the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastic Discipline, which recommended further revision of the Prayer Book, hindered by the advent of the Great War of 1914-18. This threw Army chaplains into situations where the lengthy services of Common Prayer were unsuitable. Their voices added to the Anglo-Catholic party’s call for reservation of the Blessed Sacrament for distribution to the sick to be legalised, and for the offering of Requiem masses, thereby restoring the hitherto forbidden practice of prayer for the dead. Ironically, as Keble had forewarned almost a century before, these proposals were rejected by Parliament thanks to objections by non-Anglicans, to the bemusement of a young Winston Churchill who reported somewhat ironically on the proceedings. The proposed 1928 Book of Common Prayer was thus never universally authorised, though permission was given for its use by individual bishops within their dioceses, and the 1662 remains in legal force to this day.

6 Anglican Liturgy Today

The Anglican Communion is now far larger than the Church of England alone, and the liturgy of the mother church is no longer normative throughout the churches. The churches themselves are in schism, divided over the authority of Scripture, particularly regarding sexual ethics, which, we noted, were strictly stipulated as early as the Jerusalem Council of AD 49. The Church of England is now part of a minority communion. Some 80% of Anglicans, mostly in the Global South, are instead represented by the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). In both communions, there is a general fault-line between conservative Evangelicals and liberals. Anglo-Catholics fall somewhat uncomfortably into both of these spheres. However, it is noteworthy that outside the Church of England and those parts of GAFCON influenced by the anti-liturgical Diocese of Sydney, Evangelicals are increasingly turning back to more conservative liturgical practice, taking the Book of Common Prayer as a touchstone of Anglican practice and identity. Incense is not found much outside Anglo-Catholic churches, but it is no longer the case that vestments, candles, crosses, choirs and organs indicate a particular church party: there are Evangelical churches, such as those of Singapore, in which all of these are used. Parts of the non-Anglican Reformed world are also embracing the Prayer Book and its liturgy. Conversely, nor are more modern musical settings, hymns and songs restricted to the Evangelical world, and guitar-driven worship bands can be found in the midst of ritualistic High Masses. Beyond England, we are seeing something of a synthesis between Anglo-Catholic ritual practice and the Evangelical emphasis on Scripture.

Some have prophesied the demise of the Oxford Movement within our lifetime, and there is no doubt that it has declined considerably in recent decades. This may be premature. The liturgical influence of the Oxford Movement lives on, albeit in surprising places, and the Prayer Book continues to inspire new generations with zeal for God and a clear rule of life to guide them towards His grace.

Fr Thomas Plant 

https://substack.com/@frthomasplant

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Holy Orders in the ACNA

A Public Appeal to the College of Bishops of the ACNA

The Augustine Appeal

As the College of Bishops prepares to elect a new Archbishop, we celebrate with gratitude the 15th anniversary of the Anglican Church in North America, recognizing the Province’s steadfast commitment to orthodox Anglicanism and gospel mission.

While we are hopeful for the continued fruitfulness of orthodox Anglicanism in North America, we believe that the unresolved issue of women’s ordination to the priesthood imperils the mission of our Province. As ACNA clergy, we wish to restate the biblical and consensus position of the Great Tradition. We hope that this statement will unify clergy seeking to articulate the Faith once for all delivered, and chart the direction we pray our next Archbishop will lead us.

1. We affirm the College of Bishops’ 2017 Vancouver Statement that the ordination of women to the priesthood is a “recent innovation to Apostolic Tradition and Catholic Order,” and we affirm the theological conclusion that the practice has “insufficient scriptural warrant.”

2. We believe the teaching of Holy Scripture, as interpreted by the consensus of the Great Tradition, that only men may be ordained to the priesthood. With humility and filial affection, we pray that our Bishops will conform to this teaching and practice. 

3. We receive from our own Church the method by which this conclusion is reached: The Bible must be obeyed “in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading” (Jerusalem Declaration, Art. 2). That is, Scripture should be interpreted according to the “Church’s historic interpretation” (To Be A Christian, Q. 33). This hermeneutical principle rightly prevented our Church from allowing same-sex marriage. This same principle likewise makes no allowance for the ordination of women to the priesthood.

4. We affirm the inherent dignity and equality of women, made in the image of God, and reject any ideology that devalues God’s good creation of both male and female. Any conception of ministry that renders sexual difference meaningless, or that values women only insofar as they conform to male norms, opposes God’s created order. 

5. We advocate for the further development of a robust biblical anthropology, underwritten by the Great Tradition, that elucidates the significance of sexual difference, especially as it pertains to both Holy Matrimony and Holy Orders. 

6. We assert that a flourishing Church welcomes and values the spiritual gifts of her daughters as well as her sons, as evidenced by the men and women honored in our Calendar of Commemorations (BCP 2019). We reject clericalism which holds forth ordained ministry as a superior form of serving Christ. We desire to see a renewal of lay ministries of men and women equipped for the work of ministry and building up of the body of Christ. 

7. We pray for the unity of Christ’s one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We long for the reunion of a divided Christendom. We believe, however, that such unity never comes at the expense of Apostolic Tradition, Catholic Order, and scriptural warrant; rather, it is through these that the Church will realize the full and fruitful unity for which our Lord prayed.

8. We interpret the legal stipulations of our provincial constitution to be non-constraining of our Bishops in their stewardship and teaching of the Catholic Faith (ACNA Constitution, Art. X.1). Therefore, we are hopeful that the College of Bishops, led by the Holy Spirit and exercising their God-given authority, can find a creative solution to restore orthodoxy to Holy Orders prior to any constitutional amendment. 

Gracious Father, we pray for your holy Catholic Church. Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace. Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in anything it is amiss, reform it. Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ your Son our Savior.  Amen.

The Feast of St. Augustine, first Archbishop of Canterbury, 2024