For the record, here was his speech from the just concluded Provincial Council: https://anglicanchurch.net/archbishop-beachs-address-to-provincial-council/ Perhaps it should have a thread of its own because of how good it is. It speaks on the divisive questions of race and revolution in a clear, apostolic, and gospel-centered way. But with our progressive friends over at Reddit, this is not how they saw it. Some of the statements people made: “on an institutional level ACNA increasingly seems to be, sadly enough, simply a conservative mirror image of TEC/ACoC with all its internal anarchy and obsession with culture war identity politics.” “The way that ethnic issues is talked about in this letter seems like racial-colorblindness in many parts, which is totally bizarre to me given the Floyd letter. This, paired with the bishops' guidance to use language that is less pastoral than the Roman Catholic Church when it comes to gay folks make it feel like the ACNA is, on the whole, apart from perhaps the Churches For the Sake of Others' (C4SO) diocese, not going to be able to contextualize conservative/traditional Christianity well in western culture at all if it continues in this direction.” Indeed, how dare his Grace promote color-blindness and unity of mankind. Shall we join the marxist racism of Critical Race Theory instead? Less “pastoral” (ie. more definitive & unambiguous) than Roman Catholics? Yup. Less “integrated” into modern Western society? Thanks be to God! C4SO as a last holdout of progressive liberalism: yup. Need to work on that. Anyway here is the thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anglicanis...e_16_archbishop_beachs_address_to_provincial/
We are also in dialogue with several Black leaders who are seriously considering and working toward bringing their denominations into the ACNA. They discovered Anglicanism and would like to become part of us. The ACNA has an opportunity to get this right if we will make the effort. Does anyone know more of this?
Amen and amen, Archbishop Beach. It's astonishing to me that this actually needs to be said, but here we are. Preach it, brother! I am so glad he's the leader and public face of my church. There are some cautionary notes, however. ACNA leadership is proliferating committees and working-groups and initiatives at an alarming rate, and all while problems continue to fester in the dioceses (the WO issue, getting ACNA better organized at the provincial level, increasing local outreach in each diocese, church planting, the list goes on). I'd also like to see more unity around the 2019 BCP as a driver of church practice; whether your church is high, middle, or low, it should be conducted according to the 2019 BCP and ordinal. I'd like to see a Province-wide push for catechism of new members move forward. I'd like to see more church discipline applied to wayward priests and bishops, or else we court the same disaster we ran from in TEC. We've got plenty of problems apart from the culture-war stuff. It's important not to let the machinery of the church grind to a halt while we're focusing on other things. Still: a good and robust speech.
From what I have seen, one of the big areas of focus of this Provincial Council was to solidify the canons around disciplining Bishops.
I own the 2019 BCP and have enjoyed doing the daily office and lectionary readings. With that being said, I love the KJV and would hate for the 2019 to be made mandatory over the 1928 (which I do not own yet). Hopefully, the traditional language version of the 2019 will be coming out soon.
I'm only superficially familiar with the 2019 (though much of the commentary from those in the Episcopal Church who have reviewed it has been quite positive); did the 2019 not include a "Rite I" option like the 1979 did?
It has the Anglican Standard Service and the Renewed Ancient Text both in modern language. A traditional language book is set to come out and it is already out in pdf format. http://bcp2019.anglicanchurch.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/BCP2019.pdf
One of the things I love about the 2019 BCP is that it uses the Coverdale Psalter rather than the ESV or traditional KJV translation. The Coverdale has always been my favorite.
That's interesting that they're coming out with a traditional language book. Can you clarify what the Anglican Standard Service and the Renewed Ancient Text consist of?
From my own, very limited reading on the subject, it sounds like the 2019 has taken some elements from the 1662 and 1979 as well as from the 1928. I'm sure that helps with achieving wide appeal. Are there any borrowings from other Anglican traditions in the new book?
The Anglican Standard Text is drawn from the traditional Anglican Eucharist Rites where the Renewed Rite is a mismash of the Hippolytian rite and other influences.
If I were a metropolitan myself, I'm not sure I would do things all that differently. On divisive topics like WO, the patient strategy is the right one. Ten years ago, the WO wing of our province was much stronger, and the Province in its architecture was very brittle; had the war been declared then, it would've broken the ACNA and with it any hopes for a new Anglican province in North America. Ten years later, it feels like the ACNA has always been here; people don't even understand how fragile it was 10 years ago. So we've solidified immeasurably. And meanwhile the WO wing is not on its best footing anymore. There has just been such an infusion of orthodox traditional converts, refugees from other denominations. And furthermore the traditionalist wing has found ways to build communities, grow allies. There are several Anglican media outlets with a decidedly traditionalist bias now, when there weren't 10 years ago. The patient and steady strategy is working. On other divisive topics like race relations, and gay marriage the House of Bishops issued a strong statement back in February, and Archbishop Beach issued a searing strident speech a few days ago, to refocus us back from divisive secular frameworks, and focus us back on Church language, and the Biblical understandings of race and marriage. So the progressive wing there too is on a retreat, while more traditionalist exiles are eying converting into ACNA as a result. And in terms of the committees, they seem to be doing their job admirably. The Catechism committee produced a serviceable catechism a few years ago. The Prayer Book committee delivered the 2019 Prayer Book that is serviceable. The Marriage and Single Life committee has been shoring up that aspect of our social teaching (although the Bishops were solid on that from the beginning; no priests who have divorce in their past have been allowed to become bishops). In terms of mission, I am not sure that centralized committees are the best place to do that. Stewart Wicker (director of the SAMS missionary society) made it clear that centralizing missions was a huge mistake made by the Episcopal Church in the 20th century. Prior to the 1920s or so, they too had a mishmash of non-centralized missionary societies, as ACNA does now. We're talking a good 20-30 societies, as of 2021: https://newwineskins.org/agmp But it's when they forced all these societies to be grouped up under a centralized Office, that corruption set in; the missions over time had ceased, and all private missionary initiative had evaporated. Missions have always done best when they were a non-centralized, non-hierarchical initiative. That's how we've evangelized Africa, Asia, the world really.