Two small continuing Anglican churches have ended a full communion agreement that dates to 2007. They cited differences in churchmanship and the authority of the “Affirmation of St. Louis,” a 1977 text that played a central role in launching the Continuing Anglican movement.
Provocative social-media posts, and the decision of the United Episcopal Church of North America to explore fellowship with a conservative German Reformed denomination, heightened tensions with the Anglican Catholic Church.
“I believe you have staked out a position for the UECNA rooted, not in the Affirmation’s claim to form the interpretive lens for viewing and appropriating Anglican formularies, but rather in what seems to me to be Anglican muddle,” wrote Archbishop Mark Haverland of the ACC to Presiding Bishop Peter Robinson of the UECNA in an August 1 letter that appeared in the September/October issue of The Trinitarian, the magazine of the Anglican Catholic Church.
The “Affirmation” was approved by the Congress of St. Louis, a gathering of 2,000 Episcopalians of diverse churchmanship who shared a common opposition to theological liberalism, the ordination of women, and prayer-book revision. The congress authorized the creation of a new Anglican church, to be provisionally known as the Anglican Church in North America (Episcopal).
Four bishops were consecrated for the new church in January 1978, and the Anglican Catholic Church was established in October 1978. Division soon set in over the ACC’s predominant Anglo-Catholicism. One of the four original bishops, Charles D.D. Doren, eventually left the ACC’s ministry and founded the smaller UECNA, which is mostly broad and low church in ceremonial, in 1981.
In 2007, the two churches set aside their longstanding difference and signed an intercommunion agreement. “We recognize in each other the presence of the essentials of the Christian Faith, Catholic Order, Apostolic Succession, Anglican worship, and Christian morals,” Haverland said at the time.
Since then, there have been significant efforts toward greater cooperation and proposals for unification of the two churches. But the relationship began to fray in the last several years, after Robinson began exploring fellowship with the Evangelical and Reformed Synod, a tiny denomination that traces its roots to Calvinist churches established in colonial North America by German immigrants.
The largest of these German churches, the Reformed Church in the United States, experienced a high-church revival in the mid-19th century called the Mercersburg Movement, for the denomination’s seminary in Pennsylvania. The Mercersburg Movement was roughly contemporaneous with the Oxford Movement, and was influenced by similar trends. By the mid-20th century, the Evangelical and Reformed Church, as it was then known, had a predominantly liberal ethos, and counted prominent theologians Richard and Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich among its leading lights.
In 1957, most of its congregations joined with another merged church, the Congregational Christian Church, to form the United Church of Christ, but some resisted the merger or left the United Church of Christ as it became more progressive, and they formed several small conservative denominations. The Evangelical and Reformed Synod was among these, claiming the liturgical and sacramental heritage of the Mercersburg Movement and embracing an episcopal polity.
In a 2023 article for the conservative Anglican blog The North American Anglican, Robinson described the Evangelical and Reformed Synod as “our German cousins,” citing the influence of the Mercersburg Movement and Lutheran and Reformed influence on the formation of the Book of Common Prayer.
“Overall, the Evangelical and Reformed Liturgy feels very close in theology and atmosphere to the Book of Common Prayer,” Robinson wrote. “Doctrinally, both Evangelical and Reformed Orders of Holy Communion are very close, if not identical to the Book of Common Prayer.” If the Episcopal Church had not wound up with a “liberal Catholic” mindset, he suggested, a union between Anglicans and Reformed churches would seem more logical.
By then, Robinson had already been pursuing such a union for several years, receiving several Reformed pastors and their congregations into fellowship with the UECNA. That action proved to be divisive among his fellow UECNA bishops, and when Robinson’s Missionary Diocese of the East elected the Rev. Aaron Erastus Long, pastor of Paul’s Chapel Reformed Church in Lexington, North Carolina, as a suffragan bishop in 2024, the denomination’s House of Bishops refused to ratify the election.
Long’s harsh comments on social media about Anglo-Catholicism was likely a concern for some of them. “We must continue to condemn and reject the Anglo Catholics and their papist [Brethren],” Long wrote in a February 2024 Facebook post in which he also opined that the “Pentecostal/[charismatic] movement is a form of witchcraft same as papism.”
After the failed consent, Robinson shifted strategy and agreed to consecrate Long in September 2024 as “Presiding Bishop and President as the Evangelical and Reformed Synod,” which Robinson called “a hopefully temporarily separate body.” Long has described the structure of the synod, which lists 20 churches in the United States, Haiti, Kenya, and Tanzania on its website, as a “bishop in classis model,” based on Hungarian Reformed precedents.
“Unfortunately, as Anglicanism in the USA is not given to either forward thinking or rapid action, and is much too inclined to allow personalities to dominate over policy, it was not possible to create a structure within the UECNA within the time available,” Robinson wrote on Facebook after the consecration.
Robinson has also expressed frustration with the “Affirmation of St. Louis,” which he thinks overemphasizes Anglo-Catholicism. “The drafting committee was largely Anglo-Catholic, or at least sympathetic to that position, and they seem to have believed that Broad and Low Churchman, rather than Biblical Criticism, societal decay, and liberalism were the origin of the Episcopal Church’s [apostasy],” he wrote in a Facebook post, “What Went Wrong with Continuing Anglicanism,” on June 30. He wrote that the “Affirmation of St. Louis” expects a belief in seven sacraments, a distinctly Anglo-Catholic position.
All of this was alarming to the ACC, a firmly Anglo-Catholic church. Haverland wrote that at the time of the 2007 communion agreement, Presiding Bishop Stephen Reber said there were no significant theological differences between the two churches and that the UECNA agreed with the “Affirmation of St. Louis.”
Haverland said in his statement that ACC bishops gave him the authority to end their intercommunion agreement in 2023, and he finally decided this was necessary. He also wrote that another reason the ACC bishops were unhappy was their belief that “the UECNA was not careful in fulfilling its freely undertaken obligation not to ‘poach’ our clergy or parishes.”
According to Robinson, “The Affirmation of St. Louis was framed with the intent, as one senior Continuing Anglican bishop put it to me, of ensuring that ‘…Anglo-Catholics would never be the minority in the Church again.’ Not only did it succeed in that aim, but it also marginalized other churchmanships, and in combination with some of the personalities involved, helped to divide the post-1977 Continuum into several dozen small competing jurisdictions, the largest of which has approximately 5,500 communicants.”
The UECNA’s website lists 22 parishes and chapels across the United States and Canada, although some of these appear to be private oratories. The Anglican Catholic Church is more widespread, with 40 dioceses around the world, and over 150 parishes in the United States, though some of these also appear to be very small.
In an unrelated development, the ACC nearly doubled in its number of American parishes on October 15, when a smaller Continuing Anglo-Catholic denomination, the Anglican Church in America, officially merged into it. The Diocese of the Holy Cross, which was formerly independent, merged into the ACC in 2021.
Correction: an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated the size of the Anglican Catholic Church.
Greta Gaffin is a freelance writer based in Boston. She has a master of theological studies degree from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
