How does the Anglican Church in North America really view the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans?
While the Episcopal Church adopted its own version of the Thirty-Nine Articles, it never required its clergy to subscribe to these Articles. Episcopal clergy were not in any way bound to accept their doctrine.In the 1920s the two dominant theological schools of thought in the Episcopal Church, the Anglo-Catholics and the Broad Churchmen, worked together to drop the Articles from the American Prayer Book. The movement would lose its steam with the adoption of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, which in its doctrine and usages is at odds with the Articles.
With the adoption of the 1979 Prayer Book the Episcopal Church would relegate the Articles to the historic documents section of that Prayer Book.
The Anglican Church in North America displays the same attitude toward the Thirty-Nine Articles as the Episcopal Church. The ACNA views the Articles as a relic of the past.
The Anglican Church in North America's constitution and canons use the language of equivocation in their acceptance of the authority of the Articles. The ACNA’s liturgical commission has produced a”theological lens” to guide its work, an ordinal, and eucharistic rites that show for this commission the Articles are not authoritative in the least. ACNA’s College of Bishops not only approved the three documents but also had input into their development.
The leaders of the Anglican Church in North America, like the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Wellby, it would appear, number the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans as one voice among many and dismiss its theological imperatives.
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