So What About The ACNA?

When I noted in passing the Anglican Church in North America, founded in 2009 due largely to objections to the 2003 election of openly gay Bishop of New Hampshire Eugene Robinson, it started a new train of thought. The ACNA, as I mentioned, has not completely decided on whether to ordain women, and my guess is that it will either never quite make the decision or defer it as long as possible, both traditional Anglican responses. (Since it already has women priests grandmothered in, as it were, a traditional Anglican response is all the more necessary!) In addition, it uses the 1979 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, which of course is anathema to "continuing Anglicans".

However, the ACNA has clearly seized the market for the next generation of dissident Episcopalians. It's very difficult for me to imagine a parish (much less a diocese) newly dissatisfied with The Episcopal Church on whatever grounds deciding to go into the ACA or any of the dozen or so other "continuing" groups from 1977. Consider the options of the traditionalist former Episcopalians in the Diocese of South Carolina, with their bishop. On one hand, as I understand it, the obstacle to their entering the ACNA as a body is that the ACNA already has a Diocese of South Carolina. On the other hand, consider whether Bishop Lawrence would remotely contemplate joining the ACA, where wannabes like Brian Marsh and Stephen Strawn would treat him like a second-class citizen!

I think this actually says a great deal about the future of the ACA, which is bleak indeed. The issues over which the "continuers" left The Episcopal Church are 40 years old, and, except among those same "continuers", now of advancing years, no longer controversial. The 1928 Book of Common Prayer is a fossil, like it or not, and the ACNA does not seem to see it as a serious option for general use. My own view is that the election of Eugene Robinson is too vague an issue on which to build a denomination, but that's my view -- and Episcopal priests whom I respect have said that, just as the issues that led to the Affirmation of St Louis in 1977 are no longer controversial in The Episcopal Church, the Robinson problem, even more vague, will fade as well.

Sincere people in the ACA (that is to say, not the bishops) will reply that of course this stuff isn't controversial in TEC, all the people who didn't like TEC have already been forced out. The problem there is simply that the "continuum" has been a miscalculation from the start: as Douglas Bess put it, the people who left post 1977 were few enough that TEC didn't notice, and certainly didn't change its course. I just don't see a future in Episcopal schism, even if Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori seems to be little interested in avoiding it. It hasn't been a recipe for success among the "continuers". It speaks volumes that they seem to be in complete denial about this.