- In creating man “male and female” (Genesis 1:27), our Lord has appointed men and women to fulfill different roles in His will of redemption.
- These different roles reflect His self-disclosure, seen through the written testimony of the apostles and prophets, wherein we read that God reveals Himself as Father (John 14:9), Christ became incarnate as a man (Matthew 1:25), and the Church is imaged as His bride (Ephesians 5:25).
- Consequently, for the instruction, protection, and good ordering of His people, our Lord has further revealed His will that only qualified men be ordained as ministers in Christ’s Church (1 Timothy 3:2).
- Nor has our Lord spoken so only in Scripture, but also in the created order itself, which, by natural reason and the mystery of holy matrimony, declares to all men those truths that He has plainly set forth in His most Holy Word.
- With this revelation our historic Anglican formularies agree, as do our Anglican divines who authored them and those later divines who exposited them.
- In confessing this doctrine, Anglicans receive the Church’s catholic tradition and the teaching of her doctors, who from antiquity have confessed the same as part of that faith once delivered unto the saints (Jude 3).
- It is incumbent upon Anglican provinces to conform their doctrine to this three-fold witness of Scripture, nature, tradition, as articulated in our formularies.
- Orthodox Anglicans likewise affirm what the ACNA college of bishops has affirmed in the Vancouver Statement regarding the ordination of women: “We also acknowledge that this practice is a recent innovation to Apostolic Tradition and Catholic Order.”
- Moreover, the Jerusalem Declaration’s statement that “The Bible is to be translated, read, preached, taught, and obeyed in its plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading” (Article II) compels the ACNA to pursue the aforestated doctrines.
- Therefore, that the ACNA might dutifully administer word and sacrament; that it might flourish according to God’s design; and that it might experience the profound joys known only in the full and uninhibited communion of the saints; we, the Anglicans for Church Reform, call upon the ACNA to embrace historic orthodoxy and restore male-only ordination in the province.
