Updated Friday evening
There is a report from Rwanda: Three Bishops Consecrated for American Dioceses
Kigali — The Episcopal Church of Rwanda has elected three new Bishops to serve in one of the provinces of the Anglican Church in North America.
The election took place on Saturday 13 at the Anglican Diocese of Kigali…
Here is the official statement on the website of AMiA:
A COMMUNIQUE FROM THE HOUSE OF BISHOPS OF THE PROVINCE OF THE ANGLICAN CHURCH OF RWANDA
Meanwhile, ENS reports that
Two Episcopal Church bishops, one active and one retired, are among the members of newly-announced committees of a proposed Anglican Church in North America, which is holding what it is calling its “inaugural provincial assembly” later this month…
See Southern Illinois bishops serving as committee members for proposed Anglican province.
Friday update See this Press Release from the Episcopal Diocese of Springfield concerning the role of Bishop Beckwith in ACNA.
The assembly mentioned above has its own dedicated website which contains a large amount of information about the new ACNA organisation.
News, video, photos and documents from the Inaugural Assembly of the Anglican Church in North America is now available. The new website is also optimized for web capable cell phones…
Additional website changes will mark the creation of The Anglican Church in North America. The Common Cause Partnership Website, at www.united-anglicans.org, will be relaunched as the homepage of the Anglican Church in North America on June 22. Key features of the old website, such as the parish map, will remain in place. With the relaunch will come a domain name change to www.theacna.org.
I wonder how many dollars the Rwandan Church leadership get for their mission assistance? This is barely a step up from episcopal vagantes. Meanwhile a denomination is born which affirms the 39 articles in their ” grammatical and literal sense” and has several dioceses , parishes and Bishops who pray to the Virgin Mary, and for the dead.. claim to offer the sacrifice of Mass and worship the consecrated elements..admit churches set up with statues ..yet the Diocese of Sydney is behind all this! The standing Committee of Sydney has just endorsed ACNA. Indeed ACNA proudly proclaims we are Biblically… Read more »
Is Ruanda’s action here a sign of the irrational actions we might expect to come from the leaders of the African Provinces who have decided to back up the dissidents in North America? Akinola’s recent advice that African Churches could no longer take an active role in headship of the ACNA group would seem not to have been taken on board by all of his compatriots. It would seem that such irrationality might yet thwart the ambitions of the newly-emerging fiefdom of Robbie Duncan and Co., who must be desperately trying to unify the radically divergent praxis and theological objectives… Read more »
Not much gracious restraint around in Rwanda, then.
“affirms the 39 articles in their ” grammatical and literal sense””
If I’m not mistaken, this is the language which describes how fundamentalists read Scripture. Taken to its extreme, it commits the reader to a flat earth that is about 4,000 years old, around which the sun orbits, among other things.
But how would this affect how one reads the 39 Articles? Is there a symbolic way to read On Predestination? An ungrammatical way to read it?
I’m serious – if anyone can enlighten me about the use of that phrase regarding the 39, I’d like to hear from you.
….and the web address is so close to acne.org …there is Monty Python potential there….
You have a point there ;=)
Will ACNA have any priests or deacons, or will all their clergy be bishops?
(For that matter, will they have any laypeople, or will all of them soon be consecrated, too?)
Cynthia, in my opinion the language of fundamentalism “plain and literal sense” is applied to the Bible in reaction to some of the 19th century developments in Biblical Criticism to which Fundamentalism was responding. In the same way, an urge to reading the Articles in this “plain sense” way is probably a reaction to the inventive readings developed by the Oxford Movement (also in the 19th c.) that allowed Anglo-Catholics to continue to do the very things the Articles were intended to suppress. However, given the strange mix of High, Broad and “Snake-belly” Low in the present ACNA combine, it… Read more »
Cynthia Gilliat wrote: I’m serious – if anyone can enlighten me about the use of that phrase regarding the 39, I’d like to hear from you. — I’m not really sure what the ACNA folks mean… but in 1841 such a declaration would certainly have been directed against Newman’s “Tract 90” (http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract90/). Newman’s tract is a “fun” read for someone who enjoys seeing a brilliant mind try to make a text say the exact opposite of what it actually says! As someone else pointed out above, the ACNA folk are going to have a tough time deciding on what the… Read more »
“…pray to the Virgin Mary, and for the dead.. claim to offer the sacrifice of Mass and worship the consecrated elements..admit churches set up with statues ..yet the Diocese of Sydney is behind all this! The standing Committee of Sydney has just endorsed ACNA.”-Robert Ian Williams Robert Ian Williams’ formulations above are among the reasons why I’m an ANGLO Catholic and not a ROMAN one! “Pray to” the Virgin Mary? I have no problem ASKING the Blessed Virgin to PRAY FOR ME. “Claim” to offer the sacrifice of the Mass, Robert? Of course, Anglicans OFFER the Eucharistic sacrifice. “Worship the… Read more »
Cynthia, you might be interested in Newman’s “Tract 90,” in which he examines the Articles in their “grammatical and literal sense.” At least, what he considers to be their grammatical and literal sense. I suspect that ACNA is engaging in a bit of fudging by the use of the phrase in question, to allow both Catholics and Evangelicals to claim adherence to the Articles.
http://anglicanhistory.org/tracts/tract90/
“….and the web address is so close to acne.org”
Ah, but it is also close to acme.org, which is, of course, the web address for the famous Acme Company. It provided Wiley Coyote with all the fizzling rockets, squiblike TNT, and other gadgets that fizzled as he attempted to get Road Runner.
Thanks for reference to Tract 90 – last time I read Newman was in a grad school course in Victorian prose, so I’m a little rusty. It wasn’t assigned to the class, but was in the anthology we used, and I was curious and plowed through it. Thanks for the enlightenment.
Kurt, I think you’ll find that there are “Anglo-Catholics” who would claim to agree with the ROMAN Catholics against you on all the points you listed. Unless I am mistaken, this would be true of the two soon-to-be ACNA bishops I named above. Be that as it may… the curious thing is that there are folks soon to become part of ACNA with those bishops who would assert that it is WRONG to ask dead people for their prayers, who would insist that the Eucharist is ONLY “our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving” and NOT the sacrifice of Jesus Christ,… Read more »
When ACNA fiddles the plain and literal meanings of words, it is just because they are generous believers trying to get along with one another in a new conservative venture. If or when anybody else does it, fie on them, pagans, modernists, and deniers of Jesus of Nazareth. On the ground, there will be plenty of fodder for food fights in ACNA, provided their swell habit of hanging together in common cause against (any number of different) enemy targets fails to actually cohere them across their own internal hot button distinctions. ACNA is engaged in the odd bit, trying to… Read more »
Re “literal and gramamtical”: Newman is but quoting “His Majesty’s Declaration,” that prefaces the Articles: That therefore in these both curious and unhappy differences, which have for so many hundred years, in different times and places, exercised the Church of Christ, We will, that all further curious search be laid aside, and these disputes shut up in God’s promises, as they be generally set forth to us in the holy Scriptures, and the general meaning of the Articles of the Church of England according to them. And that no man hereafter shall either print or preach, to draw the Article… Read more »
“Kurt, I think you’ll find that there are “Anglo-Catholics” who would claim to agree with the ROMAN Catholics against you on all the points you listed. Unless I am mistaken, this would be true of the two soon-to-be ACNA bishops I named above.”–William K You very well may be right, William. It’s just that American Anglo Catholicism/High Church traditions are a bit different from those of the UK. Anglo-Papalism, for example, has never been a strong trend here or had the influence it has in England. And while the Oxford Movement was generally welcomed and supported here by High Churchmen… Read more »
Kurt, actually, I’m a member of the Episcopal Church, and an Anglo-Catholic, and I’m referring to views of (some) Anglo-Catholics in the Episcopal Church… and some of those now out or about to be out (Iker and Schofield, for example). Sorry that that wasn’t clear. Your point about the Articles of Religion and the rubric of the 1662 BCP is, of course, absolutely right. But that’s just my point. This new ACNA organization is delaring the Articles and the 1662 as their basis of faith… which is quite “un-American”… and an odd thing for Anglo-Catholics to do unless they are… Read more »
“Your point about the Articles of Religion and the rubric of the 1662 BCP is, of course, absolutely right. But that’s just my point. This new ACNA organization is declaring the Articles and the 1662 as their basis of faith… which is quite “un-American”… and an odd thing for Anglo-Catholics to do unless they are willing to commit ecclesial perjury.”–WilliamK Yes, William, it is an odd thing for American Anglo Catholics to do, isn’t it? But Sydney (which no doubt is bankrolling ACNA at least in part), interprets the Articles in a Calvinist way, don’t they? Very odd indeed. (As… Read more »
Sydney interpret the 39 articles in the way they were understood for the first 300 years of Anglicanism.
In 1559, altars were destroyed and replaced by wooden tables in the chancel.The minister no longer officiating facing eastwards.
Tabernacles pyx’s, water stoups were destroyed.
A few of the latter , embedded ino walls of medeval churches survive.Some of the murals have been uncovered from the lime wash.
Wall murals whitewashed. Statues , crucifixes
( apart from one in Elizabeth’s private chapel )burnt and eucharistic vestments cut up for dresses for clergy wives.
To re-focus the discussion somewhat – Does the statement from the Evangelical Alliance that they are in communion with this new body and its new bishops carry any weight? Can a suffragan bishop, like the Bishop of Lewes, declare himself in communion without the direct consent of his diocesan bishop?
So, RIW, are you implying that this therefor nullifies any claim Anglicans might have to catholic tradition? So, let’s look at Rome’s abandonment of basic humanity in her treatment of her opponents, of native people in the Americas and beyond, her dividing up the world between the kings of France and Spain, and on and on. Can we say that such obviously unChristian behaviour, some of which continues into our own time, nullifies Rome’s right to call herself Christian? It would seem tit for tat: stop looking catholic for 300 years, never call yourself catholic again, stop behaving like Christians… Read more »
Robert Ian Williams says: “Sydney interpret the 39 articles in the way they were understood for the first 300 years of Anglicanism.’ This is Sydney’s CLAIM. The REALITY is that the Articles have always been interpreted variously by different factions (e.g. Low Church, High Church, Broad Church) since they were written. “In 1559, altars were destroyed and replaced by wooden tables in the chancel. The minister no longer officiating facing eastwards.” That may have been true in the most Protestant leaning parishes, but the Laudian reforms of the early 1600s decisively reversed this. “Tabernacles pyx’s, water stoups were destroyed. A… Read more »