Archbishop Wood’s Address to ACNA Provincial Council: What’s Missing

Opportunity missed. Credibility harmed. And reason for alarm.

The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) had its Provincial Council last week. As part of that, Archbishop Steve Wood delivered an address. This Council was less transparent than past ones. So his address was not posted until Monday afternoon, and that only in video format on YouTube so far. (So my quotes from his address might contain minor errors.)

I could nitpick this or that in his address — you know I could. But what is missing, one thing in particular that is missing, stands out and harms the credibility of his address and even of ACNA. As he addressed church planting efforts, he said this (and, again, these quotes may be inexact):

I've spent a good deal of time over the past year, even more so the past few months, actively discerning with the College of Bishops, with the executive committee, with our new team and with many of you as well to seek clarity around two very specific questions, and those two questions are these: what is the role of the province and . . . what does it actually look like and then secondly what is the Lord specifically wanting to do with us for the sake of his church in this moment.

And then he spent some time discussing church planting using agricultural analogies. He then continued (Emphasis mine):

In the church we use agricultural terms often. We plant churches. We cultivate leaders. We bear fruit in our discipleship programs. But this is all work that, as our Canons and our [unintelligible] constantly remind us, is best done at a local level. Article 4 of our constitution clearly states in the ACNA, the fundamental agency of the mission is the local congregation. Our dioceses, our organizations are organized as collections of congregations. The province is a collection of these dioceses, and so, in this inverted or what I would claim truly biblical hierarchy where the first will be last and the last first, the province is not the director or the boss of anything or even the final authority. Rather as Gregory the Great first said many centuries ago and what our founding Archbishop Robert Duncan has often echoed in our Anglican structure, leaders are the servants of the servants of God. . . .

Our dioceses require the flexibility to tend and to adapt to the needs of their local context. There is no one-size-fits-all. And as even you can see from the wide variety of plants that we have . . . situated around the building there is … no one best plant and no superior garden. Each is unique. Each is important. Each is beautiful in its own right. And each is needed to have a healthy biosphere. And while this offers a distinctive and powerful source of great agility and strength for the life of our church, it is received in the local context and adaptable to its changing needs.

So what is missing? The alert among my readers who remember Wood’s intervention against Calvin Robinson and his parish . . .

. . . Those who remember may see what is missing and needful in Archbishop Wood’s address. For his words stating that local congregations and dioceses take priority over the provincial level of ACNA and that “there is no one-size-fits-all” and so on — for these words to have any credibility, Wood needed to apologize for his intervention against Robinson and repudiate it. For that intervention and his address contradict.

Further, the context of Wood’s address gave him an excellent opportunity to make an apology. It would have been a much more credible and impactful address if he would have inserted something like the following:

I know that, as Archbishop, I must strive not to ask you to do one thing and then for me to do practically the opposite. So I must make a confession before I proceed further.

I foolishly played the boss back in May when I interfered in a public and inappropriate way in REC Presiding Bishop Ray Sutton’s decision to provide temporary oversight to Father Calvin Robinson and his parish, St. Paul’s Anglican Grand Rapids. I went beyond my proper role as Archbishop. I did not give Presiding Bishop Sutton the trust and respect he has well earned in his years of excellent service to ACNA. In so doing, I also disrespected the Reformed Episcopal Church. I certainly disrespected Calvin Robinson and his parish as well. In so doing, I foolishly tried to impose something of a “one-size-fits-all” to an unusual situation. Again, that is not and should not be my role as Archbishop. I apologize to Bishop Ray, to Father Calvin, and to St. Paul’s Anglican, as well as to those in ACNA and the REC who were rightly offended by my interference.

Instead, an apology is utterly missing. So when Wood says local parishes and dioceses and their contexts take priority over the province, when he says he and the province are not to be “the boss”, when he says a variety of plants are necessary in a healthy church, what I hear is “do as I say, not as I do.”

Not only that, but the tenor of much of Wood’s address is for the provincial level to take on more power and influence over ACNA. His address is therefore all the more self-contradictory.

Perhaps part of what is going on is that ACNA and Wood’s leadership is two tier. Based and traditional gets one sort of treatment; woke and woke adjacent and women-ordaining gets another. And ACNA’s provincial initiatives, such as Matthew 25 and Next Generation Leadership already tended to feed the latter before Wood became Archbishop. That problem will likely get worse if ACNA follows Wood’s lead and gives the province more influence.

So Calvin Robinson and his parish is blackballed. But the Diocese of C4SO and the like is fine, just fine. Or to use Wood’s planting analogies, the former is quickly and yanked and cast out like weeds as soon as women priests and male feminists shriek; the latter is cherished as beautiful variety “needed to have a healthy biosphere.”

Which begs the question of why us trad Anglicans should be content in such a hothouse-longhouse compound.

In any case, “do as I say, not as I do” won’t do.