ACC and TAC are more “traditional” in comparison to ACNA, they both still exclusively use the 28 and they have now ordained women as priests or bishops. Also, after following liturgical Anglican pages and seeing posts from all over the country, it is an observant pattern that many, if not most, ACNA Churches have no understanding of the Anglican liturgical history. They all make it up as they go. (Please don’t even get me started on that liturgy they made up as their own also.) Case in point, you will find many ACNA ministers celebrating in their clerical street clothes with a stole. Some not even that much. Anybody ever heard of “Ritual Notes”!? I mean you have better chances of finding higher liturgy in the Episcopal Church.
I said this even before becoming Catholic, but allowing female clergy in ACNA already made themselves obsolete. They can claim that they take biblical stances that the Epiacopal Church doesn’t, but that just means you are just 10 years behind them now. The same arguments used to push ECUSA “forward” can be used in ACNAIf you take their Affirmation of St. Louis as their statement protesting what they protested of the ECUSA, it’s better than anything I’ve seen on ACNA’s website.
So if we are going to use the word “traditional” it has to have some of these elements at least. Just because they claim to care more about the bible than some, that just means you care more about the bible. That doesn’t mean you’re traditional. Once again, im talking about what I thought of ACNA even as an Anglican. I have more nuanced opinions about all of this now, but at least my views on ACNA are still the same.
ACNA comprises what might generally be called l the +Iker portion, and the ++Duncan school. Both are on the AC side of the spectrum, Duncan if only marginally. For each stream, what constitutes traditional, varies and has historically in Anglicanism. Liturgically, and in some cases, doctrinally.
Other components of ACNA also are spread along the Anglican spectrum. It is, in a sense, an attempt to recreate, for the 21st century, an analog of the Elizabethan compromise.
The St. Louis Statement was the founding document of what became the Continuum. And it reflects the essentially Anglo-Catholic views of the first out the door from TEC , 45+ years ago; those who (one or two steps later), became the ACC, the APCK, the ACA… If any constituents of the ACNA came from the Continuum (and they might have), they would look back to St. Louis. If not, they wouldn’t.
The issue of female ordination is the current main sticking point for what the ACNA will become. And it is a point that ACNA has decided to stop and ponder and discern about. I am curious as to what it will bring forth. There are some traditional traditionalists on each side of the main division, who oppose the idea, and some not so traditional traditionalists, ditto, who support it. ACNA, no more than anything else Anglican, can be understood in a reductionist, monolithic manner. Motley is the “M” word…
But that little problem is one reason that, for all I wish the ACNA (generally) well, and for all my admiration for +Iker, I am not looking for a local ACNA parish. I got a parish.
The ACNA is a work in progress. Unfledged, needing being licked into shape. It’s got a strong reformed wing, the Anglo-Catholics are in the minority (because most of that flavor,and doctrinally orthodox, left TEC to form Continuum Churches, years ago) and it has folk in it with …creative ideas. I watch with interest.
You will, of course, want to change the typo “now” to “not”, with respect to ACC and TAC, and other folk in the Continuum) and may, in fact, already have done so.
) I don’t want to rehash. However, I think it should be noted that for us [R]Cs, the word “traditional” is generally pretty high praise; so codefro’s comment doesn’t completely surprise me.