CANA
The Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) is an Anglican missionary effort in the US sponsored by the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion).
CANA’s members comprise a broad range of races and ethnicies and represent a balance of
the catholic, evangelical, and charismatic streams of Anglican Christianity. CANA included 61 congregations and 188 clergy in 20 states at the end of 2007 and continues to grow rapidly.
CANA believes:
- Jesus Christ is the only means of redeeming humanity from sin,
- the Bible is God’s authoritative Word for our lives, and
- orthodox Anglican Christianity has a unique role to play in the world today.
According to the Web site:
Another way to summarize CANA’s statement of faith is by these three phrases: Radical Inclusion, Profound Transformation, and Inspired Service.
Radical Inclusion: God loves the world (John 3:16). CANA is leading and building communities of faith where the radical message of Galatians 3:28 is lived out: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” CANA is a place where people of diverse backgrounds show the world that true unity is possible when we are connected by “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph 4:5). CANA is committed to the Dromantine Communiqué (February 2005): “we continue unreservedly to be committed to the pastoral support and care of homosexual people. The victimization or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us.”
Profound Transformation: God loves you so much that he wants to heal all of your brokenness and enable you to live the God-bearing life to the full in this fallen world. If we are to embrace Jesus’ call to conversion as a full-bodied, life-long process of spiritual maturity, the church must recapture the theology of regeneration. We are “being transformed into [God’s] likeness” within a spiritually vibrant community (2 Cor 3:18; 1 Pet 2:4). We should no longer be “infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching . . . instead, speaking the truth in love, we . . . grow up into him who is the Head, that is Christ” (Eph 4:4–15).
Inspired Service: Our passion is to reach and serve the least, the last, the lost, and the left-out. We are blessed by the Holy Spirit to be a blessing. It is in the simple acts of inspired service to those in need that we often see Christ at work most powerfully. Mother Teresa devoted her life to serving the poorest of the poor and sometimes described them as “Christ in his most distressing disguise”. She reminds us of the promise, “Truly I say to you as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me” (Mat 25:40). On the national and international scene, CANA is beginning to impact the battle against pandemics in Africa by developing a partnership with the Council of Anglican Provinces of Africa’s HIV/AIDS officer. CANA congregations are also engaged in Five Talents International, a micro-enterprise initiative that has impacted tens of thousands of lives around the Anglican Communion. We also partner with the Barnabas Fund, Anglican Relief and Development, and malaria projects.
CANA Bishops
