BEACHHEAD ESTABLISHED IN EUROPE BY ORTHODOX ANGLICANS
Author: Woody Norman
Author: Woody Norman
EDINBURGH,
Scotland, U.K., June, 2017 – Within sight of the mouth of the Firth of Forth,
an archbishop of the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon) introduced
the conference's to-be-consecrated missionary bishop to Europe.
The Most
Reverend Doctor Foley Beach, Archbishop and Primate of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) made the announcement on June 8, 2017 following a vote by
the Scottish Episcopal Church changing its canons allowing for same-sex “marriage.”
Canon Andy
Lines will be Gafcon’s missionary bishop to Europe. The office - a new "North See" - provides
Scottish Episcopalians who faithfully uphold traditional and biblical marriage
episcopal oversight.
Just days
earlier the globe-trotting archbishop attended the convocation of the FreeChurch of England (FCE), an ecclesial body associated neither with the Church of England nor with the Anglican Communion. Beach's close proximity to Scotland at that time was not coincidental.
THE ARCHBISHOP
The young
North American archbishop has been, since his election by fellow ACNA bishops,
working diligently to shore-up orthodoxy around the world and not just within Anglicanism.
Foley Beach
has developed a relationship with the Russian Orthodox Church, especially a
good relationship with the Metropolitan Hilarion of the Department of External Church Relations. Beach has also entered into
talks with American ecclesiastical organizations such as the LutheranChurch-Missouri Synod. ACNA is in communion with the North American LutheranChurch (NALC).
Since its
founding in 2008 by Gafcon, the Anglican Church in North America has been
planting churches across the United States and Canada. Indeed, there are many “store-front”
churches within ACNA. One can argue that ACNA exercises The Benedict Option.
CANONICAL RESIDENCE
What might
have gone unnoticed in the announcement by Archbishop Beach of bishop-elect
Andy Lines is that Lines’s canonical residence has already been moved from a diocese
in a South American Anglican province to ACNA’s Anglican Diocese of the South,
Foley Beach’s diocese.
To be sure
Archbishop Foley Beach does not act independently of his Gafcon brother Primates,
however, he appears to have been charged by them with pulling together any and all
remnants of orthodox Christianity throughout the world. Beach is a person with strong, biblical convictions and has continually demonstrated his highly developed organizational skill as "captain of the ship."
Placing Canon
Lines within Beach’s own Anglican Diocese of the South promises, to a degree, an
implementation of orthodox Anglicanism - under Beach's oversight - throughout a dying Europe.
Canon Andy Lines will be consecrated a bishop on June 30, 2017 at the ACNA’s triennial assembly at Wheaton College in Illinois.
Worth Earlwood "Woody" Norman, Jr. is a biographer , historian, poet, and publisher. A community chaplain, Norman is a deacon in ACNA's Special Jurisdiction of the Armed Forces and Chaplaincy and is an assisting clergy at the Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd in Pelham, Alabama.