AMiA pulls back from joining third province movement in North America: The Church of England Newspaper, June 4, 2010 p 6.

The ACNA College of Bishop

First published in The Church of England Newspaper.

The Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) has pulled back from full membership in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) and has asked to be affiliated with the breakaway province in formation as an ACNA “Ministry Partner.”  The announcement weakens the third province movement in the United States and Canada, but will not likely prove to be fatal its supporters say.

On May 18 Archbishop Robert Duncan of the ACNA and Bishop Chuck Murphy of the AMiA, also known as the Anglican Mission, released separate statements saying the downgrading of the AMiA’s relationship with the ACNA would take affect following the group’s June bishops meeting.

Bishop Don Harvey of the Anglican Network in Canada, a diocese of the ACNA, stated that he did “not see this as good news, in fact it is a sad development in many ways.”

However, the assumption of Ministry Partner status “seems to be the best solution for now given the relationship” between the AMiA and the Province of Rwanda, he said.

Formed in 2000 with the consecration of Bishops Chuck Murphy and John Rodgers in Singapore by the Primates of Southeast Asia and Rwanda, the AMiA has grown to 156 congregations in ten years and comprises nine of the twenty nine dioceses of the ACNA.

In his letter to the ACNA, Archbishop Duncan stated the decision to pull back from the ACNA was due to a “January resolution by the Rwandan House of Bishops objecting to the dual membership of Rwanda’s missionary bishops in the [ACNA] North American College of Bishops.”

Archbishop Duncan stated the constitution of the ACNA was written to permit the AMiA to be a member of the North American third province while “sustaining [its] identity as a missionary outreach of Rwanda.” However, “The jurisdictional approach has led to a number of areas of confusion for bishops and congregations of the Anglican Mission,” he said.

The AMiA stated the “dual citizenship” was not working, and was inconsistent with the constitution of the Church of Rwanda.  “Practically speaking, this jurisdictional/membership status became untenable and non-sustainable.”

The immediate effect of the downgrading of status for the AMiA will be that its bishops will lose their seats in the ACNA’s college of bishops.  However, local congregations will be free to transfer between the AMiA and the ACNA with the permission of their bishops, and allows clergy to move between the two groups.

The structural differences between the AMiA and the ACNA made the separation likely, commentator Robin Jordan noted on his website as the “current structure and form of governance it would be very difficult for the AMiA to integrate into the ACNA and Ministry Partnership status may be the best way of maintaining a relationship with the ACNA”

The AMiA is “structured more like Roman Catholic archdiocese” than an Anglican ecclesiastical entity while the “canon governing the relationship of the Primate of the Rwanda to the Primatial Vicar[Bishop Murphy] is based upon the canon of the Roman Catholic Church governing the relationship of the Pope to that church,” Mr. Jordan noted.

“To fully integrate into the ACNA, the AMiA would have to dismantle its existing structure and form of governance and disrupt the existing lines of authority and relationships of power in the organization,” he said as the ACNA has adopted the “conventional” Anglican “diocesan structure and form of church governance”

Archbishop Duncan stated “the vision of a biblical, missionary and united Anglicanism in North America remains the vision of every North American Anglican. Jurisdictional integration also remains a future hope as Rwandan canons do provide for the transfer of the Anglican Mission to the Anglican Church in North America when the time seems right.”

Bishop Harvey observed that “the good news” was that this “change will not hinder our working together both to bring the Gospel of Jesus Christ to people who desperately need our Saviour and to plant churches in Canada and the US.”