Continuing Anglican Movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).

The Continuing Anglican Movement is a group of Christian churches which follow the Anglican tradition but which split from one or another province of the Anglican Communion because of its perceived rejection of orthodoxy. The movement originated in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA) and the Anglican Church of Canada. Related churches in other countries, such as the Anglican Catholic Church in Australia and the Church of England (Continuing) were founded later. The issues which most contributed to the founding of "Continuing" churches were approval of women priests and the introduction of revised versions of the Book of Common Prayer.

In 1976, the General Convention of the ECUSA voted to approve the ordination of women to the priesthood and to the episcopate and also provisionally adopted a new and doctrinally controversial Book of Common Prayer, later called the 1979 version. During the following year, 1977, several thousand dissenting clergy and laypersons responded to those actions by meeting in St. Louis, Missouri under the auspices of the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen and adopted a theological statement, the Affirmation of St. Louis. The Affirmation expressed a determination "to continue in the Catholic Faith, Apostolic Order, Orthodox Worship and Evangelical Witness of the traditional Anglican Church, doing all things necessary for the continuance of the same".

Out of this meeting came a new church with the provisional name of Anglican Church in North America (Episcopal). The first bishop of the church, the Rt. Rev. Charles D. D. Doren, was consecrated by a retired bishop of ECUSA, the Rt. Rev. Albert Chambers, along with a bishop of the Philippine Independent Catholic Church as co-consecrator. Although expected to be the third bishop participating in Doren's consecration, the Rt. Rev. Mark Pae of the Anglican Church of Korea sent a letter of consent instead. Consecrations of bishops normally involve three existing bishops as a guarantee of the candidate's worthiness, but there are many cases in church history of a single consecrator, and these are not considered invalid consecrations for lack of the customary three.

During the process of ratifying the new church's Constitution, disputes developed which split its several dioceses into two American churches and one separate Canadian church. These are the Anglican Catholic Church, the Diocese of Christ the King (later renamed the Anglican Province of Christ the King), and the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada. Several years after this, the United Episcopal Church of North America was founded in opposition to the alleged inhospitality of the other jurisdictions towards Low Churchmen.

The continuing churches are generally Anglo-Catholic in approach, and their liturgies are usually more high church than low church. Most of them use the 1928 Book of Common Prayer that preceded the prayer book adopted by ECUSA in 1979, although some use Missals and other forms. The use of the Authorized Version of Holy Scripture (also known as the King James Version) as opposed to modern translations, is a distinguishing mark of most continuing churches.

The principles of the Affirmation of St. Louis and the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion provide some basis for unity in the movement, but these jurisdictions are numerous and often splinter and recombine. Reports put their number at somewhere between 20 and 40, mostly in North America, but fewer than a dozen of the churches popularly called "continuing churches" can be traced back to the meeting in St. Louis. The 2005/06 Directory of Traditional Anglican and Episcopal Parishes, published by The Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen, contains information on over 400 Continuing Anglican parishes which requested to be listed.

Contents

[edit] Other Anglican churches

Other such bodies not in communion with Canterbury include the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) in the United States, which left the Episcopal Church in 1873 in opposition to the advance of Anglo-Catholicism; the Free Church of England, which was founded in 1844 for similar reasons; and the Anglican Orthodox Church, another Low Church body that was founded in 1963.

These churches are not always considered to be Continuing Anglican churches, although the REC has recently moved to associate itself more closely with them by entering into agreements with a number of Continuing churches such as the Anglican Province of America. Both of them also have formal agreements in place with several provinces of the Anglican Communion that have been critical of ECUSA.

[edit] List of churches

The following is a list of churches commonly called "Continuing Anglican," with the approximate number of North American parishes shown in parentheses. Some have additional affiliates in other countries.

[edit] Further reading

  • Divided We Stand: A History of the Continuing Anglican Movement by Douglas Bess, Tractarian Press, 2002, ISBN 0-971-96360-6. Revised edition, Apocryphile Press, September 2006, ISBN 1-933-99310-3 This book received a positive review in the June, 2004, journal of Anglican and Episcopal History. Described as the "best published book on the Continuing Anglican Movement" by John P. Plummer, author of The Many Paths of the Independent Sacramental Movement.

[edit] External links

  • List of churches not in the Anglican Communion, at anglicansonline.org. Includes weblinks for most of the Continuing Anglican Movement churches, some former churches now defunct, and some churches which are not Anglican but do have bishops.
  • This map locates some of the Continuing Anglican parishes in the United States along with other Anglican parishes not affiliated with ECUSA. (You can limit the map to a particular jurisdiction by changing the ShowAll parameter to Province=APA, for instance. See the list of province acronyms at the bottom of the map.)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../c/o/n/Continuing_Anglican_Movement_af29.html"