From a Long Perspective: The Foundational Documents, Ecumenical Covenants, and Other Significant Agreements of the Anglican Church of Canada.

A.J. Pell is editor of the Canadian Evangelical Review and an instructor
of Liturgy, Anglican Studies Program, Regent College, Vancouver.

Foundational documents are taken very seriously in society—think of the importance attached to and the strong debates about the repatriation of the British North America Act in the early 1980s—and by Christian churches when they consider such documents as the Bible, the historic creeds, and denominational confessions. With this book, Kimberly David Murray has undertaken to call Canadian Anglicans to recognize their foundational documents and to become familiar with them. A total of 17 documents are brought together in this book, grouped into three sections: “Foundational Documents,” “Ecumenical Covenants,” and “Other Important Documents.” Each document is printed in full, with a short explanation and/or commentary provided by the author.

Some documents are those that would be expected by all Canadian Anglicans: the three historic creeds, the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, the prefaces to the Book of Common Prayer, and the Solemn Declaration of 1893. Others would be complete surprises to the majority of Anglicans, particularly lay people: the Lambeth Quadrilateral, the Bonn Agreement of 1931, and the Anglican Church of Canada’s Mission Statement in the Handbook of General Synod. A few would raise eyebrows, if not hackles, in parts of the Anglican church: the introduction to the Book of Alternative Services, and the Primate’s Apology to Aboriginal Anglicans, along with the Covenant and Acceptance. Murray’s selection will certainly provoke thought.

            Yet such is the state of contemporary Canadian Anglicanism that what would be expected to be an irenic instructional book veers into partisan Anglicanism on more than one occasion. Two quick examples. On page 53 the English evangelical group Reform is referred to as “ultra-Protestant,” a pejorative church politics term, rather than “Puritan,” its theological stance. Later, on page 142, Murray dismisses the recommendations of the Windsor Report “and its curia-building proponents,” a pugnacious stance in these troubled times. Such partisanship may well condemn this book to a relatively short shelf life.