Too Hot To Handle

How Christianity Today Reported on the ACNA

Yesterday I remarked on one outward and visible manifestation of how the Christian Thought-Leaders of today are not leading very many sheep anywhere in particular, but seem stricken with a desire not even to be associated with sheep at all, but rather to write National Review articles explaining that it’s actually possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps without any transcendent cultural or spiritual truth giving shape to all your efforts. The way you can know they’ve failed at such a time as this is that everyone is grasping for whatever they can get—in this case the presciently articulated heart-cry of Ain’t Gotta Dollar. Today I want to pick up the thread in the smaller, more intimate, less popular corners of American Christianity—the ACNA.

Photo by Artem Maltsev on Unsplash

For, indeed, Anglicans, though no one would say they are culture shapers or world changers, are a little bit like the proverbial frog in the pan of water on the stove. The heat is gently increasing, and some of the frogs are jumping this way and that.

Just to give a touch of context, which cannot possibly go amiss, the Anglican Church in North America was founded in the 2000s when The Episcopal Church (TEC) decided to defy the rest of the Anglican world by consecrating as bishop a man who was in an unrepentant sexual relationship with another man. I wrote about the matter most recently here. The unraveling of the Anglican Communion, as a result of that action, has been, as the young people say, a whole thing. I can’t go into it all today, except to say that origin stories do matter. If you forget them, you forget who you are. They have to be told over and over again both for the people who were there and the people who were not there. This is why the fights about America’s founding should not be dismissed as inconsequential. People are trying to remember, and in remembering, shape the narrative to account for their current views of how things should be.

Most recently, two ACNA congregations left and joined TEC, one in Texas, and one in Indiana. Being such a small denomination, these departures merited some examination in Christianity Today.

Now, I must say, I have written occasionally for CT—mostly book reviews, which I enjoy doing immensely. I’ve reviewed Michael Horton’s book, and forthcoming, Kevin De Young’s excellent Impossible Christianity. What I am about to say here should not be taken as a critique of all people who write for this journal, for that would include me, which would be, in the words of Amy Peeler simply too audacious. Still, because of how this story was told and is being told, I cannot leave the thing alone, I must put my hand into the very hot water and try to pull the frog out, before it boiled to death. Besides, frogs shouldn’t be boiled. They are far more delicious sauteed—legs only—with butter and a soupcon of garlic. Here is how the article begins:

Formed in 2009, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is known for taking in breakaway Episcopal congregations and clergy, though these two departing churches—Resurrection South Austin in Texas and The Table in Indianapolis—didn’t have previous ties to the Episcopal Church. Both were church plants belonging to the Church for the Sake of Others (C4SO), an Anglican church-planting movement that predates ACNA and, for the past decade, has functioned as a diocese in the denomination. Its parishes span across California, Texas, the Midwest, and the South. Very few of its clergy or churches were Episcopalian before, and many of its members come from evangelical backgrounds.

We cannot go on without drawing attention, as the paragraph does, to the crucial fact that not many of the churches in the Diocese for the Sake of Others came out of TEC. Most of them, in fact, did not. And that is fine and good, of course, as long as the Diocese for the Sake of Others stops doing what it is doing—elevating rectors and other kinds of church leaders who are committed to undermining the ethos of the ACNA. The ACNA is not TEC. It left TEC because TEC had ceased to be a faithful church. That Shawn McCain Tirres and Matt Tebbe were nursing within their bosoms parishioners who reject everything the ACNA convictionally holds is really shocking. Unhappily, the reporting by Christianity Today doesn’t draw out this crucial kernel of information. In fact, the manner of the reporting makes it seem as though these churches were just carrying on in the usual way, and then the mean old ACNA refused to get with the times.

Some Anglicans see C4SO as less conservative than others in the denomination due to its focus on justice and since it’s among the dioceses that ordain female priests. Clergy at the departing churches attributed their decision to a range of issues where they felt out of alignment with the ACNA as a whole and for which they faced backlash from fellow Anglicans online.

The reason that “some” Anglicans see C4SO as “less conservative” is that these sorts of departures seem to be always on the cusp of happening. The envelope is always being pushed so far across the desk that it is in danger of falling all the way off. But that is not the real issue with this little paragraph. Whether or not you are very online or only occasionally so, you should be able to spot three glaring problems. The first is the inelegant phrase “due to its focus on justice”. How can such a vague, and indeed baseless, accusation land there on the page? “Justice”? Really? So the ACNA, as a whole, doesn’t care about “justice?” I beg you will define the term. What do you mean? Certainly, some congregations within C4SO have adopted a view of “justice” that coheres most comfortably with the progressive version of that word. “Justice” in this way of thinking is shaped by the color of one’s skin and not the actual verifiable particulars of one’s circumstances. Second, it is disingenuous to say that “it” is about WO. Other dioceses ordain women in the ACNA. There is significant internal conflict on this issue, which might be resolved in one generation or two if it is not ideologically weaponized and made into a “justice” issue. And third, we see that people in these churches not only felt “out of alignment with the ACNA” which is a good enough reason to leave, but they also “faced backlash from fellow Anglicans online.”

In other words, they felt that they should have been allowed to say and do whatever they wanted, without other people in the ACNA pushing back on them. Their sense of justice etc., they felt, should have carried the day. When other Anglicans protested—online—they were aggrieved, but more than that, embarrassed to be associated with those kinds of Anglicans who continue to believe and propagate the original theology and ethos of the ACNA.

They cited their convictions around the inclusion of women in leadership, hospitality toward sexual minorities, opposition to white supremacy, treatment of people of color, and response to abuse victims in the church (including a contentious investigation in the Upper Midwest Diocese). Though LGBT inclusion was not named as the primary impetus for either church’s withdrawal, it became the impasse for the more theologically conservative minority who decided not to stay during the transition to local Episcopal dioceses.

I’m not going to comment on the “contentious investigation” which has some breaking news, I think. The official and unofficial ACNA pages have information if you want to check it out. Instead, let me pause for a moment on the line “hospitality toward sexual minorities” as well as “opposition to white supremacy.” First of all, the word “hospitality” has become one of those concepts rendered skeletal and meaningless by ideological corruption. The fact that CT uses it without offering a long explanation is exasperating to me. To put it next to “sexual minorities” without pausing to explain anything is baffling in our current divided moment. “Sexual Minorities” is not a Christian category. To place it next to the term “white supremacy” should be shocking—and yet, at least for the writer and editor, there appears to be no shock.

For Christians, there are only two kinds of people—repentant sinners and unrepentant sinners. Claiming some preferential identity based on sexual proclivity is a novel idea and is already unraveling as a way of conceptualizing personhood. Moreover, claiming to “oppose” white supremacy is ridiculous. Other people in the ACNA are not white supremacists. Not accepting current ideas of “justice” doesn’t make you into a hateful racist bigot. Anyway, skipping down a bit:

Hunter will visit Austin this weekend to meet with the dozens of Anglicans “left behind” by Resurrection South’s transition. During an initial gathering following the parish’s vote, C4SO leaders hosted a time for lament, Eucharist, and healing prayer. “There are people who are brokenhearted. They lost their church—and not just the place where they meet every Sunday, but their community,” Hunter said. “They feel abandoned theologically because they thought they had joined something that was orthodox on human sexuality.”

I have a lament. I wish this hadn’t happened. I wish McCain Tirres and Tebbe had done more research before joining the ACNA at all. They could have gone straight to TEC and their preferred and increasingly obsolete marriage of progressive politics with the little bits of scripture which are, for them, the least offensive. I’m glad Bishop Hunter is holding the line on human sexuality. I’m so grieved for those faithful Anglicans who are now churchless. I hope Bishop Hunter is lots more careful about this issue and doesn’t make so much space for those who think it is ok to slander everyone else in the church.

Jeff Walton, Anglican program director for the Institute for Religion and Democracy, said the departures from ACNA—each from church plants in urban centers—may reflect deeper divides in a denomination largely comprised of Christian transplants. “These departures are indicative of a disconnect between two groups within the ACNA: former mainline Protestants, including former Episcopalians, standing against revisionist theology, and post-evangelicals reacting against cultural hallmarks of their prior church homes, such as complementarianism or Christian nationalism,” Walton said. “The Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others is among the largest and fastest growing dioceses in ACNA partly because it can speak to those originating from an evangelical, charismatic, or Pentecostal context. These three departing parishes were all within C4SO, but this isn’t exclusively a C4SO problem. It’s a post-evangelical problem.” Walton refers to the ACNA as a small but “heavily transited parcel of ecclesial real estate.” As of June, the denomination includes 1,003 congregations, according to Gross. Its last annual report indicated a membership of nearly 125,000. As a historic mainline denomination, the Episcopal Church has a much longer scope. Its last report, from 2021, tallied around 6,300 congregations and over 1.6 million members. But it’s also experiencing ongoing declines that accelerated during the pandemic, with one in three Episcopal churches reporting a drop in attendance by at least 25 percent since 2019.

Why doesn’t CT report TEC’s Average Sunday Attendance? Instead of just saying “ongoing decline.” I think it might have fallen under 400,000 but I can’t remember. Anyway, Walton is right. This is a post-evangelical problem. Everyone is looking for somewhere to be comfortable, somewhere that aligns with their vision of what the world and the church should be like. That is certainly an interesting story, even more so if dig into the actual beliefs that ordinary people embrace.

And this is what makes this part two of yesterday. At the moment when individual human people most need to hear about the saving love of Jesus, when they have lost the ability to read the Bible or know it is a book that holds the words of Life, the ACNA is arguing about “sexual minorities” and “white supremacy.” Or rather, some corners of it are. And Christianity Today is giving them cover, instead of holding their theological feet over the flame to see if the light and the heat might show whether what they are saying is true, or whether they are lying to themselves and the world.

Now is a good time to be a Christian. Now is a good moment to open the Bible and read it. Now is a perfect and precious hour to see that God made you and has the power to take care of you, whoever you are, and that demonizing anyone based on their orthodox and therefore increasingly reviled theological convictions only means you get eaten by the wild beasts in the Colosseum a little bit after everyone else has.

And now I must go and lift heavy weights and read more books and splain my children. Have a nice day!