|
Listen to article
|
The Global Anglican Future Conference closed its four-day summit in Abuja on Friday without electing a rival to the Archbishop of Canterbury — the central act the gathering had been assembled to perform — after a late-night development that GAFCON leaders attributed to divine intervention redirected the conference toward a shared governance structure rather than a single rival figurehead.
GAFCON had gathered at St Matthias House in Abuja to elect a primus inter pares, a first among equals, in direct institutional challenge to the authority of the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury Sarah Mullally. The plans changed when, on the night of March 5, leaders experienced what was described as a “late night move of the Holy Spirit.” On the following morning, Bishop Paul Donison told delegates that the GAFCON Primates Council had been dissolved and that leadership of the newly constituted body would be shared collectively under a new name: the Global Anglican Council.
The four-day G26 conference, which began March 3, was expected to elect a rival to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Instead, it ended by renaming GAFCON as the Global Anglican Communion and electing a set of leaders to exercise what the closing communiqué called “principled disengagement” from the Archbishop of Canterbury and the historic instruments of Anglican governance in England.
Laurent Mbanda, installed on Thursday as chairman of the new rival council, read the closing statement, which said the Global Anglican Communion required that “principled disengagement” from structures associated with the Church of England.
The disengagement directive was comprehensive. “Leaders who hold office in the Global Anglican Communion must not attend future Primates’ meetings called by the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor attend the Lambeth Conference, nor attend ACC meetings or participate in Commissions of the ACC,” the statement said. It added that leaders “should not personally approve financial contributions to the ACC. It is also expected that they will not receive financial assistance from compromised sources.”
The sum of money at risk was not immediately stated. The Anglican Consultative Council, one of the four instruments of communion, receives contributions from provinces globally and coordinates the communion’s administrative and ecumenical work from its offices in London.
The conservatives gathered in Abuja insisted the Global Anglican Communion was not a breakaway communion, not an alternative one, and that they were not schismatic — but were working to return to a historic sense of the Anglican Communion as “a fellowship of autonomous provinces bound together by the Formularies of the Reformation,” the communion’s foundational documents establishing its theological and liturgical identity.
“The Church of England was reformed by Thomas Cranmer, leaving the errors of the Church of Rome behind. Like Cranmer, we are reforming the Communion from within and leaving the Canterbury instruments behind,” said the communiqué.
Read Also: Conservative Anglicans Form Rival Global Church Council
Not all Anglican bishops in Africa agreed. The Right Reverend Rose Okeno, bishop of the Diocese of Butere in Kenya, said that when GAFCON first began meeting in 2008, it was intended to be a fellowship of Anglicans who would gather to encourage one another, pray together, and support faithfulness to the gospel within the existing life and structures of the Anglican Communion.
“It was not presented as an alternative leadership body or a separate administrative structure within the Communion,” Okeno said in a statement.
Oxford church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the church at the University of Oxford, was direct when asked whether the Anglican Communion had now split. “Of course it’s a schism,” he told Reuters, but added that the rupture need not be permanent. “Schisms do eventually get healed, when both sides see that the issues that caused the schism don’t seem that important any longer,” he said. MacCulloch’s qualification was notable: he was not predicting reconciliation, only noting that church history offers precedents for it.
GAFCON spokesman Justin Murff contested that framing. “This is not a schism. It is actually a claim to continuity,” he told Reuters. He argued that GAFCON was not seeking to break away from the Anglican Communion but to reorganise and realign it to scripture, and questioned the legitimacy of a decision-making process in which what he characterised as a small number of people in the United Kingdom determined global leadership without meaningful input from the Global South.
Read Also: Sarah Mullally Is First Female Archbishop Of Canterbury
The Anglican Communion Office in London said GAFCON was ignoring years of dialogue aimed at reforming the church from within its existing structures. Archbishop Anthony of the Anglican Communion Office said: “Christ calls his Church to be one. Only by working together and not apart can we arrive at a deeper place of communion and unity.” He invited GAFCON to engage with the Nairobi-Cairo proposals — an attempt to reconcile differences across the denomination developed over recent years through official instruments of communion.
The proposals go before the Anglican Consultative Council for review this summer and would involve the Archbishop of Canterbury sharing many leadership functions with primates from other nations — a reform whose timing now sits in direct tension with Friday’s disengagement declaration.
The Church of England did not immediately comment. Mullally, who has not yet been formally enthroned, will inherit the Canterbury office at an extraordinary moment: a formal declaration of institutional disengagement from approximately half of the communion’s practicing membership, issued weeks before her enthronement, framing her authority as the proximate cause of the rupture rather than its incidental occasion. Her enthronement is scheduled for later this month.
