Telling delegates the break with the Episcopal Church is now complete, Bishop Robert Duncan opened the Inaugural Assembly of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) June 22 at St. Vincent’s Cathedral in Bedford, Texas.
 
The ACNA’s archbishop-designate stressed the themes of martyrdom and mission in his opening address to the assembly. He said St. Alban’s Day, the feast of the first British martyr, had been specifically chosen for the start of the assembly session. He also urged delegates to take up the battle cry of “muscular Christianity”: “No cross, no crown.”
 
Bishop Duncan recounted the birth pangs of the new province, concluding that the break with the Episcopal Church was absolute.
 
“How is it that a once great tradition has lost its moorings?,” he asked. “We compromised, we were silent, we looked away. No more!
 
“There is no one here who will go back.”
 
Asserting that “what is ahead of us is what really counts,” Bishop Duncan said “we are proud to be part of the great reformation of the Christian church” now taking place.
 
“There is an ever-growing stream of North American Protestantism that has embraced” a foundational view of scripture, he said, while “at the same time Pentecostals and Evangelicals are moving towards tradition.”
 
While internally divided over the issue of women’s ordination, Bishop Duncan told delegates it is a “miracle” that those who believe the ordination of women was a “grave error” can “work together toward mission” with those who see it as a being justified by scripture.