CANADA ANGLICANS AND LUTHERANS PREPARING FOR ãFULL COMMUNIONä

CANADA ANGLICANS AND LUTHERANS APPROVE "FULL COMMUNION"

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November 2, 1999 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - Anglicans and Lutherans in Canada have approved plans to achieve "full communion" in the year 2001. The Anglican Church of Canada approved the plan in 1998, and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, in July 1999. The plan is called the "Waterloo Declaration."

"Full Communion" is not a merger of the two denominations, but means they will recognize each other’s ministries as interchangeable. "A Lutheran pastor can serve as the priest of an Anglican parish, and an Anglican priest can serve as pastor of a Lutheran congregation" and "lay people transferring from one church to another would not have to be confirmed to be received" (Ecumenical News International, Oct. 12, 1999).

Future plans are not clear but might include joint hymnbooks and service books, joint coordination of missions, and the establishment of Lutheran-Anglican congregations.

Richard Stetson, a member of the Lutheran Working Group, said: "We don’t know what the next step is after full communion. It could be something much bigger, and that includes more than Lutherans and Anglicans as far as the call of Christ to THE REUNION OF THE CHURCH."

The Lord Jesus Christ did not call for the union of biblical churches with unbiblical ones. The modernistic, largely unregenerate mixed multitude that Stetson is calling "the church" is more akin to the harlot of Revelation 17 than the churches established by the Lord’s Apostles.

"Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints" (Jude 3).