Steering Committee of the Network

Prepared for Father Dick Kim's mailing list:

You asked me to comment on the formation of the Steering Committee by the Network. It is good to see that there is within the ECUSA a significant remnant which is willing to be courageous and take a stand for what it believes is the Gospel and (to use its own press release words) "the tradition and worship of Anglican Orthodoxy". Here is an extract from that press release

"The Steering Committee also began a funding and budgeting process and approved formation of an Anglican Communion Network Missionary Society. This Missionary Society’s primary purpose will be to bring into fellowship groups of people who have left ECUSA and those who are seeking to explore the tradition and worship of Anglican orthodoxy."

What I want to say through your good offices to this committee and the Network is that they need to continue to explore the Anglican Way and its tradition and to seek to put this movement on a sure foundation that is decidedly Anglican and biblically orthodox. Right now the Network is based on an unsure and unstable foundation, with its chief formulary being the 1979 Prayer Book of the ECUSA. This Prayer Book though it has an hallowed title (Book of Common Prayer) is not truly the Book of Common Prayer in the sense that the `1662, 1789, 1892 and 1928 editions are. It is, as we all know, a book of varied services and mixed doctrines. It is thus an unstable and shifting formulary to based a reform movement upon.

I do urge members of the Committee to take the time to read my latest booklet AN ACT OF PIRACY. THE TRUTH BEHIND THE EPISCOPAL LITURGY OF 1979 available from 1-800-727-1928 or from debbie@bee.net. Here I show - I think beyond all reasonable doubt - that the true Formulary of the Anglican Way is the historic, classic Book of Common Prayer - along with the Ordinal in that book and the Articles of Religion therein also. By all means use the 1979 book for what it is - a book that fits alongside but also underneath the classic BCP, just like the "Book of Alternative Services" of the Anglican Church in Canada, but do not use it for what it is not and can never be.

This point is so obvious and clear to anyone who compares the 1979 book with the 1662 or 1928 editions of the classic BCP and knows the history of the work of the Standing Liturgical Commission in the 1960s and 1970s.

I do not want to stop the Network worshipping in modern language if that is what they desire. But I do sincerely wish and pray that it will dig again the wells of Abraham and sup the clear fresh water of those wells, by discovering its true roots, foundations and stability in the Formularies of the historic Anglican Way, for these are themselves so clearly fixed within the sacred Scriptures - within the One Canon with its Two Testaments.

Thank you for your patience.

The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon M.A., D.Phil. (Oxon.),
Christ Church, Biddulph Moor & St Anne's, Brown Edge