The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) was founded in the hope that orthodox Anglican faith and practice might take root again on this continent. It was the hope that a divided and weary people might be gathered into one body under Christ, and that the ancient order of bishops, priests, and deacons might serve a renewed and missionary church.
That hope remains. Yet fifteen years in, we find ourselves living with repeated crises—of trust, of leadership, of legitimacy, of belonging. Some focus on failures of character; others on failures of doctrine or discipline. Those matter, but they don’t reach the heart of the problem. The deeper issue is mimetic rivalry. We are caught in ordinary human patterns of imitation and competition, and our structures often make them worse instead of better.
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