The leaders of four Continuing Anglican Churches have announced plans for Joint Synods to meet in Atlanta, Georgia, the week of October 2nd to 6th. At the conclusion of the week it is the intention of the Churches to sign an agreement establishing full communion (communio in sacris) among the four bodies as well as a pledge to pursue in a determined and deliberate fashion increasingly full unity. The Churches also will discuss common plans for mission and evangelism. Each Church will hold its own mandatory business meetings and Synods, but the four will join together throughout for common worship and social occasions.The number cited of 300 "congregations", while subject to the usual exaggeration, does lend itself to comparison with the Anglican ordinariates. If we assume that the OCSP has about 40 groups and parishes, we can discount this number by recognizing that some of these are tiny, moribund, or completely inactive. Some number of the 300 "continuing" "congregations" must certainly be the same. The bottom line, though, is that the larger "continuing" denominations worldwide together represent some multiple -- let's say five times -- the total of equivalent ordinariate groups on three continents.The four Churches and their episcopal leaders are the Anglican Church in America (Brian Marsh), the Anglican Catholic Church (Mark Haverland), the Anglican Province of America (Walter Grundorf), and the Diocese of the Holy Cross (Paul Hewett). The Joint Synods will meet at the Crowne Plaza Atlanta Perimeter at Ravinia in north Atlanta.
The four Churches have grown increasingly close in recent years, and look to the Congress of Saint Louis (1977) and The Affirmation of St. Louis as common historical and theological touchstones. The Churches are united by commitments to credal orthodoxy; to traditional Anglican worship, rooted in the historic Books of Common Prayer; to the three-fold Apostolic ministry of male bishops, priests, and deacons; and to traditional morality in issues affecting the sanctity of life and human sexuality.
While all four Churches seek closer relations with other ecclesial bodies with Anglican backgrounds, they differ from most of them in a firm belief that innovations since the mid-1970s such as modernist liturgies and the purported ordination of women to Holy Orders constitute unacceptable developments that remove Anglicans from the central tradition of the Undivided Church of the first millennium.
The four Churches have about 300 congregations in the United States as well as larger memberships in Africa, South America, Oceania, Asia, and England. [These latter are laughable hype.]
Another point that sticks out is the ages of the primates. Brian Marsh is about 67. Mark Haverland, the youngest, is about 61. Walter H Grundorf shows as 74 in web searches. Paul Hewett appears to be about 68. If the groups move toward unity, it's likely that the winner who becomes archbishop will be the one who simply outlives the others, but I strongly suspect there is little depth in the hierarchies. This is probably reflected in the ages of the laity as well.
The move toward unity among "continuing" groups is a reflection that the movement overall is shrinking and subject to the laws of actuarial science. This is also true of the ordinariates -- it appears that some number of OCSP parishes and groups will become inactive in coming months as their pastors retire and no replacements can be found. The number of OCSP seminarians, currently three as I understand it, will be sufficient only to replace retirements in the top tier of OCSP parishes.
This goes to my fairly recent conclusion that Anglicanorum coetibus, with its predecessor, the Pastoral Provision, is simply a part of the "continuing" movement as defined in the press release above. It suffers from exactly the same problems, especially aging clergy and an inability to attract replacements.
