Description: Archbishop Laurent Mbanda
By Mark Michael
BOLDLY announcing that “the future has arrived,” GAFCON, the Global South-based conservative renewal movement also known as the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, declared the creation of a “Global Anglican Communion” in an Oct. 16 communiqué by its chairman, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda.
Archbishop Mbanda outlined a set of eight resolutions agreed to by its primates the same day “to reorder the Anglican Communion.” These include establishing the Bible as the “only one foundation of communion,” rejecting and refusing to participate in meetings of the four Instruments of Communion “which have failed to uphold the doctrine and discipline of the Anglican Communion,” and breaking communion “with those who advocate the revisionist agenda.”
The Global Anglican Communion, Mbanda said, is “restoring [the Anglican Communion’s] original structure as a fellowship of autonomous provinces bound together by the Formularies of the Reformation.”
The communion’s future provinces must remove references in their constitutional documents to being in communion with the See of Canterbury and the Church of England, and assent to the 2008 Jerusalem Declaration, GAFCON’s foundational text, which it declares to be “the contemporary standard for Anglican identity.”
The communiqué also says that the Global Anglican Communion’s member provinces will form a council of primates who will elect one of their members as a chairman, serving as primus inter pares (“first among equals”), a title traditionally associated with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“Today, GAFCON is leading the Global Anglican Communion,” the communiqué asserts. “As has been the case from the very beginning, we have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion.”
The churches of Rwanda, Nigeria and Uganda, key leaders in GAFCON from the beginning, have largely refused to participate in meetings of the Instruments of Communion since the 2016 Primates’ Meeting. Three of the nine other churches represented on GAFCON’s Primates’ Council are not recognized by the Anglican Communion Office and have largely been formed under GAFCON’s auspices (the Anglican Church of Brazil, the Reformed Evangelical Anglican Church of South Africa, and the Anglican Church in North America).
But such a total severing of connections with Canterbury and the Instruments of Communion would be a new development for the six other provinces represented on the council (Alexandria, Chile, Congo, Kenya, Myanmar, and South Sudan).
The communiqué’s confident tone echoes familiar patterns in GAFCON’s rhetoric, and its vision of an Anglicanism founded on biblical inerrancy, simplistic understandings of ecclesial communion, and Protestant confessionalism is not new. But Mbanda’s terse statement seems to pose as many questions as it answers, and in some ways, it seems remarkably ill-timed.
The communiqué makes no direct allusion to contemporary issues, but it does reference Mbanda’s October 3 statement, which reacted harshly to news of the selection of Bishop Sarah Mullally as the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
In that statement, Mbanda said that Mullally’s sex makes it “impossible for the Archbishop of Canterbury to serve as a focus of unity within the Communion” (on the basis that a majority of Anglicans reject women bishops, which is very difficult to prove).
The October 3 statement also describes Mullally as having “voted in favor of introducing blessings of same-sex marriage into the Church of England.” Mullally did play a central role in securing permission for the church’s clergy to bless same-sex unions within regular church services, and called this step “a breath of fresh-air.”
That step certainly sparked distrust and division across the Communion as well as among many supporters of same-sex marriage in the Church of England, but there’s no evidence that Sarah Mullally is among them. The unsubstantiated claim that Mullally is a supporter of same-sex marriage was also reiterated by several other GAFCON primates, including the Archbishops of Nigeria, Uganda, and South Sudan.
The GAFCON statement seems unaware of the previous day’s announcement that the Church of England’s bishops have effectively paused the Living in Love and Faith process, which [in part] provoked the crisis to which it is responding.
The English bishops’ decision dials back plans pushed by former Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby to allow for stand-alone services of same-sex blessing and giving clergy permission to enter same-sex civil marriages, insisting on a deliberate synodical process, informed by legal and theological guidance. These new plans are earning plaudits from conservatives within the Church of England, and they likely reflect Mullally’s more cautious approach to issues of church unity and human sexuality.
It’s also not clear if those drafting the communiqué have seriously considered the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals (though they were drafted in and bear the names of the see cities of two GAFCON primates, Archbishops Samy Fawzy Shehata of Alexandria and Jackson Ole Sapit of Kenya). Shehata was also on the commission that drafted them.
The proposals, issued in 2024 and due to be considered for approval by the Anglican Consultative Council next summer, decentre the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role in the Communion and would give a significant degree of representative authority to a primate from a different region of the Communion. They do not go as far as GAFCON’s plans, but the proposals respond to the same challenges with fairly similar moves.
Perhaps most seriously, it’s unclear how GAFCON’s announcement of a Global Anglican Communion relates to the Covenantal Structure launched by the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans (GSFA) at its meeting in Egypt in the summer of 2024. Seven of the 12 members of GAFCON’s Primates’ Council lead churches that have already become full members of the Covenantal Structure (ACNA, Alexandria, Chile, Congo, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Uganda), committing to deeper mutual accountability based on biblical orthodoxy for the sake of repairing Anglicanism’s “ecclesial deficit.”
While GAFCON and GSFA share theological commitments, and the GSFA has clearly distanced itself from the Church of England and the Instruments of Communion since its 2023 Ash Wednesday Statement, the two organizations do not fully overlap. Many of GAFCON’s senior leaders have been from the churches of Nigeria and Rwanda, which have not participated in GSFA gatherings for many years; the GSFA is headquartered in Singapore, the seat of the Church of South East Asia, which has not engaged with GAFCON.
At GAFCON’s last major gathering, at Kigali, Rwanda, in the spring of 2023, many prominent GAFCON leaders called for a merger of the two groups. Yet this was politely but firmly resisted by GSFA leaders at their 2024 gathering in Egypt. A resolution affirming a special affinity between the two groups was only passed at the very last minute, after most delegates had left for the airport.
By launching an ecclesial body on the basis of an agreed theological foundation, GAFCON, the renewal movement, is distinctly treading into the territory that has belonged until now to GSFA, which has largely been concerned with doctrine and church structure.
It’s not clear from Mbanda’s statement if the primates who are firmly affiliated with both GAFCON and GSFA all supported the creation of the Global Anglican Communion, or if they considered it identical to GSFA’s Covenantal Structure, complementary to it, or an end-run around it. The lack of a coordinated response by the GSFA to the GAFCON announcement is telling.
GAFCON’s proposals are also vague in other ways. Point 7, which states that “to be a member of the Global Anglican Communion, a province or a diocese must assent to the Jerusalem Declaration,” suggests that individual dioceses could become part of the Communion (while their provinces remained unaffiliated), yet the body is envisioned to be governed only by a council of primates, in which an individual diocese would seemingly not be represented.
It’s also not clear if the Global Anglican Communion’s “Council of Primates” would be the same body as GAFCON’s “Primates Council,” and if the chairman of one body would also be chairman of the other.
If GAFCON is right that with this announcement “the future has arrived” for Anglicans, the future may indeed be just as confusing as the present. TAP
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism. This article is reprinted with the author’s permission.
South East Asia Primate and GSFA Leader Questions GAFCON Communiqué
Archbishop Titus Chung, honorary secretary of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), has become the first major conservative Anglican leader to express concerns about the implications of the launch of a Global Anglican Communion since it was announced in a GAFCON communiqué on Oct. 16.
An Oct. 28 statement with Chung’s signature, issued by the bishops of the Province of the Anglican Church of South East Asia that he leads as primate, acknowledged that the GAFCON announcement marks “an important moment in the ongoing life of the worldwide Anglican family,” but the bishops suggest that a lengthy process of discernment will be necessary to evaluate the idea. They also signal a desire to engage further with the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals for restructuring the Anglican Communion that are not due to be acted upon until next summer.
For full story see: livingchurch.org/news/news-anglican-communion/gsfa-leader-questions-gafcon-communique.
Archbishop Georges Titre Ande, primate of the Anglican Church of Congo, has become the first member of the GAFCON Primates’ Council to affirm his church’s intention to remain part of the Anglican Communion.
The statement, released October 30, states: “The Anglican Church of Congo has no intention to leave the Anglican Communion, rather to keep working with brothers and sisters of the GSFA [Global South Fellowship of Anglicans] to accomplish our common goal: to reform, heal and revitalize the Anglican Communion without leaving it. We remain committed to our fellowship in Christ with all orthodox/evangelical brothers and sisters in the Anglican Communion. They are our partners in mission.”
For full story see: https://livingchurch.org/news/news-anglican-communion/congo-staying-in-the-communion/
TAP readers may also be interested in “The Inside Story of GAFCON’s Communiqué”: livingchurch.org/news/news-anglican-communion/the-inside-story-on-gafcons-communique. TAP
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BOLDLY announcing that “the future has arrived,” GAFCON, the Global South-based conservative renewal movement also known as the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, declared the creation of a “Global Anglican Communion” in an Oct. 16 communiqué by its chairman, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda.
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