OACI Anglican

 

The Old Anglo-CatholicMovement 1515 through  

The Latin-American Anglican Church 1975

 

THE ORTHODOX ANGLICAN COMMUNION

The Anglican Orthodox Communion was established in 1964, (the Orthodox Anglican Communion was later formed to oversea the churches abroad). The Anglican Orthodox Communion was one of the first such communions to be formed outside of the See of Canterbury and therefore is not part of the Anglican Communion. The Anglican Orthodox Communion adheres to the doctrine, discipline, and worship contained in the classic Anglican formularies, especially in the 1662 English, 1928 American, 1929 Scottish, and 1962 Canadian Books of Common Prayer. The presiding bishop of the American branch of the communion, known in the United States as the Anglican Orthodox Church, serves as the metropolitan of the global communion. The communion has over one million members worldwide, with branches in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. The first regional conference of bishops was convened by the communion's primate at the Imperial Hotel in Kisumu, Kenya on August 24, 2009.

 

History: The church was founded by Episcopalians who withdrew from the Episcopal Church in 1963. The new jurisdiction was incorporated in the state of North Carolina in March 1964. Its founders intended to establish a conservative and low-church alternative to the Episcopal Church. Episcopal polity with apostolic succession was maintained with the consecration of its first bishop on Passion Sunday in 1964 by bishops of Eastern Orthodox and Old Catholic lineages. In 1999, Bishop Robert Godfrey and a majority of the church's clergy met in committee and determined to align the church more closely with the Continuing Anglican churches in worship style. A name change was also made. In opposition, lay leaders and standing committee close to the founding bishop and a small minority of the clergy subsequently started a new church and incorporated anew as the Anglican Orthodox Church International (AOCI).

 

On April 30, 2000, Godfrey retired as Presiding Bishop in favor of his suffragan bishop, Scott Earle McLaughlin. In 2005, the jurisdiction changed its name from the Episcopal Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of America to the Orthodox Anglican Church. Godfrey and McLaughlin were signatories to the Bartonville Agreement in 1999. In 2007, McLaughlin signed a Covenant of Intercommunion between the OAC and the Old Catholic Church in Slovakia, represented by the Most Revd Augustin Bacinsky. The Old Catholic Church of Slovakia seceded from the Utrecht Union in 2004 because of the Union's approval of women's ordination and same-sex blessings. On Ash Wednesday 2012, McLaughlin announced his retirement and the nomination of Creighton Jones of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to be his successor. That nomination was confirmed by the General Convention on June 9, 2012. Jones was consecrated as a bishop and enthroned as the presiding bishop and Metropolitan archbishop on July 21, 2012, at the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

 

In 2014, the church celebrated 50 years as a jurisdiction of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church and also marked the 50th anniversary of its incorporation in the state of North Carolina (March 6, 2014). On November 16, 2014, Archbishop Jones announced his retirement and nominated his suffragan, Thomas Gordon, to be his successor. On April 18, 2015, a special general convention of the church was held and delegates from the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico unanimously approved of the nomination. Thomas E. Gordon was enthroned the same day as the sixth Presiding Bishop of the Orthodox Anglican Church and the Metropolitan of the Orthodox Anglican Communion. The Apostolic succession is the method whereby the ministry of the Christian Church is held to be derived from the apostles by a continuous succession, which has usually been associated with a claim that the succession is through a series of bishops. Christians of the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Old Catholic, Moravian, Hussite, Anglican, Church of the East, and Scandinavian Lutheran traditions maintain that "a bishop cannot have regular or valid orders unless he has been consecrated in this apostolic succession". Each of these groups does not necessarily consider the consecration of the other groups as valid.

 

This series was seen originally as that of the bishops of a particular see founded by one or more of the apostles. According to historian Justo L. González, apostolic succession is understood today as meaning a series of bishops, regardless of see, each consecrated by other bishops, themselves consecrated similarly in a succession going back to the apostles. According to the Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, "Apostolic Succession" means more than mere transmission of powers. It is the succession in a church that witnesses to the apostolic faith, in communion with the other churches, witnesses of the same apostolic faith. The "see (cathedra) plays a significant role in inserting the bishop into the heart of ecclesial apostolicity", but once ordained, the bishop becomes in his church the guarantor of apostolicity and becomes a successor of the apostles.

 

Those who hold for the importance of apostolic succession via episcopal laying on of hands appeal to the New Testament, which, they say, implies a personal apostolic succession (from Paul to Timothy and Titus, for example). They appeal as well to other documents of the early Church, especially the Epistle of Clement. In this context, Clement explicitly states that the apostles appointed bishops as successors and directed that these bishops should in turn appoint their own successors; given this, such leaders of the Church were not to be removed without cause and not in this way. Further, proponents of the necessity of the personal apostolic succession of bishops within the Church point to the universal practice of the undivided early Church (up to AD 431), before it was divided into the Church of the East, Oriental Orthodoxy, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and the Roman Catholic Church. Some Protestants deny the need for this type of continuity, and the historical claims involved have been severely questioned by them, Anglican academic Eric G. Jay comments that the account is given of the emergence of the episcopate in Chapter III of the dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium (1964) "is very incomplete, and many ambiguities in the early history of the Christian ministry are passed over".