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Common Cause Partners

Common Cause Partners, founded in June 2004, represents an unprecedented alliance of several churches and ministries in the Anglican tradition. The groups represent or provide pastoral oversight for more than 200,000 Christians in the Anglican tradition.

These are the ministries and churches that have banded together to form Common Cause Partners:

  • American Anglican Council
  • Anglican Coalition in Canada
  • Anglican Communion Network
  • Anglican Essentials Canada
  • Anglican Mission in America
  • Anglican Network in Canada
  • Anglican Province of America
  • Convocation of Anglicans in North America
  • Forward in Faith North America
  • Reformed Episcopal Church

Covenant Declaration of the Common Cause Partners

We intend by God’s grace:

  • to partner together in a renewed missionary effort in North America and beyond, driven by our passion for Jesus and His Gospel.

  • to ensure an orthodox Anglican Province in North America that remains connected to a faithful global Communion.

  • to create a unity in the essentials of our Anglican faith that respects our varied styles and expressions.

  • to build trusting relationships marked by effective coordination, collaboration, and communication.

Theological Statement of the Common Cause Partners

We believe and confess Jesus Christ to be the Way, the Truth, and the Life: no one comes to the Father but by Him. Therefore, the Common Cause Partnership identifies the following seven elements as characteristic of the Anglican Way, and essential for membership:

  1. We confess the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments to be the inspired Word of God, containing all things necessary for salvation, and to be the final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life.

  2. We confess Baptism and the Supper of the Lord to be Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself in the Gospel, and thus to be ministered with unfailing use of His words of institution and of the elements ordained by Him.

  3. We confess the godly historic Episcopate as an inherent part of the apostolic faith and practice, and therefore as integral to the fullness and unity of the Body of Christ.

  4. We confess as proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture the historic faith of the undivided church as declared in the three Catholic Creeds: the Apostles’, the Nicene, and the Athanasian.

  5. Concerning the seven Councils of the undivided Church, we affirm the teaching of the first four Councils and the Christological clarifications of the fifth, sixth and seventh Councils, in so far as they are agreeable to the Holy Scriptures.

  6. We receive The Book of Common Prayer as set forth by the Church of England in 1662, together with the Ordinal attached to the same, as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline, and, with the Books which preceded it, as the standard for the Anglican tradition of worship.

  7. We receive the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion of 1562, taken in their literal and grammatical sense, as expressing the Anglican response to certain doctrinal issues controverted at that time, and as expressing the fundamental principles of authentic Anglican belief.

In all these things, the Common Cause Partnership is determined by the help of God to hold and maintain as the Anglican Way has received them the doctrine, discipline and worship of Christ.

“The Anglican Communion,” Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher wrote, “has no peculiar thought, practice, creed or confession of its own. It has only the Catholic Faith of the ancient Catholic Church, as preserved in the Catholic Creeds and maintained in the Catholic and Apostolic constitution of Christ’s Church from the beginning.” It may licitly teach as necessary for salvation nothing but what is read in the Holy Scriptures as God’s Word written or may be proved thereby. It therefore embraces and affirms such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the Scriptures, and thus to be counted apostolic. The Church has no authority to innovate: it is obliged continually, and particularly in times of renewal or reformation, to return to “the faith once delivered to the saints.”

To be an Anglican, then, is not to embrace a distinct version of Christianity, but a distinct way of being a “Mere Christian,” at the same time evangelical, apostolic, catholic, reformed, and Spirit-filled.

Proposed August 18, 2006. PDF version.


 
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