Two small persevering with Anglican church buildings have ended a full communion settlement that dates to 2007. They cited variations in churchmanship and the authority of the “Affirmation of St. Louis,” a 1977 textual content that performed a central function in launching the Persevering with Anglican motion.
Provocative social-media posts, and the choice of the United Episcopal Church of North America to discover fellowship with a conservative German Reformed denomination, heightened tensions with the Anglican Catholic Church.
“I imagine you may have staked out a place for the UECNA rooted, not within the Affirmation’s declare to kind the interpretive lens for viewing and appropriating Anglican formularies, however reasonably in what appears to me to be Anglican muddle,” wrote Archbishop Mark Haverland of the ACC to Presiding Bishop Peter Robinson of the UECNA in an August 1 letter that appeared within the September/October situation of The Trinitarian, the journal of the Anglican Catholic Church.
The “Affirmation” was authorised by the Congress of St. Louis, a gathering of two,000 Episcopalians of various churchmanship who shared a standard opposition to theological liberalism, the ordination of ladies, and prayer-book revision. The congress licensed the creation of a brand new Anglican church, to be provisionally generally known as the Anglican Church in North America (Episcopal).
4 bishops have been consecrated for the brand new church in January 1978, and the Anglican Catholic Church was established in October 1978. Division quickly set in over the ACC’s predominant Anglo-Catholicism. One of many 4 authentic bishops, Charles D.D. Doren, ultimately left the ACC’s ministry and based the smaller UECNA, which is usually broad and low church in ceremonial, in 1981.
In 2007, the 2 church buildings put aside their longstanding distinction and signed an intercommunion settlement. “We acknowledge in one another the presence of the necessities of the Christian Religion, Catholic Order, Apostolic Succession, Anglican worship, and Christian morals,” Haverland stated on the time.
Since then, there have been vital efforts towards better cooperation and proposals for unification of the 2 church buildings. However the relationship started to fray within the final a number of years, after Robinson started exploring fellowship with the Evangelical and Reformed Synod, a tiny denomination that traces its roots to Calvinist church buildings established in colonial North America by German immigrants.
The biggest of those German church buildings, the Reformed Church in america, skilled a high-church revival within the mid-Nineteenth century referred to as the Mercersburg Motion, for the denomination’s seminary in Pennsylvania. The Mercersburg Motion was roughly contemporaneous with the Oxford Motion, and was influenced by related tendencies. By the mid-Twentieth century, the Evangelical and Reformed Church, because it was then recognized, had a predominantly liberal ethos, and counted outstanding theologians Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich amongst its main lights.
In 1957, most of its congregations joined with one other merged church, the Congregational Christian Church, to kind the United Church of Christ, however some resisted the merger or left the United Church of Christ because it grew to become extra progressive, and so they shaped a number of small conservative denominations. The Evangelical and Reformed Synod was amongst these, claiming the liturgical and sacramental heritage of the Mercersburg Motion and embracing an episcopal polity.
In a 2023 article for the conservative Anglican weblog The North American Anglican, Robinson described the Evangelical and Reformed Synod as “our German cousins,” citing the affect of the Mercersburg Motion and Lutheran and Reformed affect on the formation of the E-book of Frequent Prayer.
“Total, the Evangelical and Reformed Liturgy feels very shut in theology and ambiance to the E-book of Frequent Prayer,” Robinson wrote. “Doctrinally, each Evangelical and Reformed Orders of Holy Communion are very shut, if not equivalent to the E-book of Frequent Prayer.” If the Episcopal Church had not wound up with a “liberal Catholic” mindset, he prompt, a union between Anglicans and Reformed church buildings would appear extra logical.
By then, Robinson had already been pursuing such a union for a number of years, receiving a number of Reformed pastors and their congregations into fellowship with the UECNA. That motion proved to be divisive amongst his fellow UECNA bishops, and when Robinson’s Missionary Diocese of the East elected the Rev. Aaron Erastus Lengthy, pastor of Paul’s Chapel Reformed Church in Lexington, North Carolina, as a suffragan bishop in 2024, the denomination’s Home of Bishops refused to ratify the election.
Lengthy’s harsh feedback on social media about Anglo-Catholicism was doubtless a priority for a few of them. “We should proceed to sentence and reject the Anglo Catholics and their papist [Brethren],” Lengthy wrote in a February 2024 Fb publish through which he additionally opined that the “Pentecostal/[charismatic] motion is a type of witchcraft similar as papism.”
After the failed consent, Robinson shifted technique and agreed to consecrate Lengthy in September 2024 as “Presiding Bishop and President because the Evangelical and Reformed Synod,” which Robinson referred to as “a hopefully quickly separate physique.” Lengthy has described the construction of the synod, which lists 20 church buildings in america, Haiti, Kenya, and Tanzania on its web site, as a “bishop in classis mannequin,” primarily based on Hungarian Reformed precedents.
“Sadly, as Anglicanism within the USA will not be given to both ahead pondering or speedy motion, and is far too inclined to permit personalities to dominate over coverage, it was not potential to create a construction inside the UECNA inside the time obtainable,” Robinson wrote on Fb after the consecration.
Robinson has additionally expressed frustration with the “Affirmation of St. Louis,” which he thinks overemphasizes Anglo-Catholicism. “The drafting committee was largely Anglo-Catholic, or at the least sympathetic to that place, and so they appear to have believed that Broad and Low Churchman, reasonably than Biblical Criticism, societal decay, and liberalism have been the origin of the Episcopal Church’s [apostasy],” he wrote in a Fb publish, “What Went Flawed with Persevering with Anglicanism,” on June 30. He wrote that the “Affirmation of St. Louis” expects a perception in seven sacraments, a distinctly Anglo-Catholic place.
All of this was alarming to the ACC, a firmly Anglo-Catholic church. Haverland wrote that on the time of the 2007 communion settlement, Presiding Bishop Stephen Reber stated there have been no vital theological variations between the 2 church buildings and that the UECNA agreed with the “Affirmation of St. Louis.”
Haverland stated in his assertion that ACC bishops gave him the authority to finish their intercommunion settlement in 2023, and he lastly determined this was mandatory. He additionally wrote that another excuse the ACC bishops have been sad was their perception that “the UECNA was not cautious in fulfilling its freely undertaken obligation to not ‘poach’ our clergy or parishes.”
In line with Robinson, “The Affirmation of St. Louis was framed with the intent, as one senior Persevering with Anglican bishop put it to me, of guaranteeing that ‘…Anglo-Catholics would by no means be the minority within the Church once more.’ Not solely did it achieve that purpose, but it surely additionally marginalized different churchmanships, and together with a few of the personalities concerned, helped to divide the post-1977 Continuum into a number of dozen small competing jurisdictions, the biggest of which has roughly 5,500 communicants.”
The UECNA’s web site lists 22 parishes and chapels throughout america and Canada, though a few of these seem like personal oratories. The Anglican Catholic Church is extra widespread, with 40 dioceses around the globe, and over 70 parishes in america, although a few of these additionally seem like very small.
Greta Gaffin is a contract author primarily based in Boston. She has a grasp of theological research diploma from Boston College and a bachelor’s diploma in economics from the College of Massachusetts Amherst.
