ACNA gathers for its formal launch in Texas: CEN 6.19.09 p 6. June 24, 2009
Posted by geoconger in Anglican Church of North America, Church of England Newspaper.trackback
The third province movement in North America will take legal and physical form next week at the inaugural convocation of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) at St. Vincent’s Cathedral in Bedford, Texas.
Some 232 delegates along with approximately 750 other participants are expected to endorse the constitution and canons of the ACNA, creating a new Anglican province in the United States and Canada.
“This is a new Province. It is not a new Church,” said Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan, the archbishop-designate of the ACNA. “Our hope” is that the ACNA “is the re-constitution of a faithful—that is biblical, missionary and united—Church in Anglican form.”
While the ACNA will not automatically be seated at the Anglican Consultative Council as the Communion’s 39th province, representatives from over a dozen Anglican provinces, representing two thirds of the active membership of the Anglican Communion are expected to endorse the new group—recognizing its legitimacy.
The new province will gather together much of the disparate Anglican diasporas in North America, reuniting groups such as the Reformed Episcopal Church—which quit the Episcopal Church during the High Church/Low Church battles of the Nineteenth century, with breakaway congregations and dioceses that have left the Episcopal Church over the past decade.
The new province will be formed into 28 dioceses and ministry clusters. With over 700 congregations and an average Sunday attendance of over 100,000 the ACNA is larger than 13 of the Communion’s 38 provinces, including the Church in Wales.
Meeting from June 22 to 25, the ACNA will hold several “up and down” votes on the new provinces canons. Bishop Duncan stated six principles “stand out” in the new canons: confessional unity, expressed in matters of Faith and Order; subsidiarity in administration; a missionary focus; flexibility; disciplinary reforms; and collegial accountability.
“Constitution and Canons are not meant to be exciting, only a framework,” Bishop Duncan said. “What is exciting is the rebirth of the biblical, missionary and united Anglicanism in North America for which so many have prayed for so long and that the proposed constitution and canons represent.”
Plenary speakers scheduled to address the meeting include the Rev. Rick Warren, the pastor of California’s Saddleback Church, and Metropolitan Jonah of the Orthodox Church in America.
