Update (April 21): Conservative primates collected in Kigali today withdrew their acknowledgment of Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, as the “first among equals.”
The chair of St Augustine is now empty, as far as leaders representing an approximated 85 percent of the Anglican Communion are worried.
The primates collected at the 4th Gafcon conference specified:
We have no self-confidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the other Instruments of Communion led by him (the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates’ Meetings) have the ability to offer a godly method forward that will be appropriate to those who are devoted to the truthfulness, clearness, sufficiency, and authority of Scripture. The Instruments of Communion have actually stopped working to preserve real communion based upon the Word of God and shared faith in Christ…
Successive Archbishops of Canterbury have actually stopped working to safeguard the faith by welcoming bishops to Lambeth who have actually accepted or promoted practices contrary to Scripture. This failure of church discipline has actually been intensified by the present Archbishop of Canterbury who has himself invited the arrangement of liturgical resources to bless these practices contrary to Scripture. This renders his management function in the Anglican Communion totally indefensible.
Their Kigali Commitment requires repentance by progressives within the Anglican Communion. “Despite 25 years of persistent warnings by most Anglican Primates, repeated departures from the authority of God’s Word have torn the fabric of the Communion,” specified the primates. “These warnings were blatantly and deliberately disregarded and now without repentance this tear cannot be mended.”
Gafcon will offer assistance for evangelicals in and out of the Church of England.
“In view of the current crisis, we reiterate our support for those who are unable to remain in the Church of England because of the failure of its leadership. We rejoice in the growth of the ANiE [Anglican Network in Europe] and other Gafcon-aligned networks,” specified the primates. “We also continue to stand with and pray for those faithful Anglicans who remain within the Church of England. We support their efforts to uphold biblical orthodoxy and to resist breaches of [Lambeth 1998] Resolution I.10.”
The primates echoed the arrangements of the 1998 resolution, keeping in mind that LGBT individuals must be treated with self-respect.
“We affirm that every person is loved by God and we are determined to love as God loves. As Resolution I.10 affirms, we oppose the vilification or demeaning of any person including those who do not follow God’s ways, since all human beings are created in God’s image,” specified the primates. “We are thankful to God for all those who seek to live a life of faithfulness to God’s Word in the face of all forms of sexual temptation.”
The declaration backs the ongoing presence of 2 conservative motions in Anglicanism, however acknowledges a requirement to have a single conservative point of identity—in essence, a reordered communion.
“The leadership of both groups affirmed and celebrated their complementary roles in the Anglican Communion…,” specified the primates. “The objective is that orthodox Anglicans worldwide will have a clear identity, an international ‘spiritual home’ of which they can be happy, and a strong management structure that provides stability and instructions as Global Anglicans.
“We therefore commit to pray that God will guide this process of resetting, and that Gafcon and GSFA will keep in step with the Spirit.”
Editor’s note: Lambeth Palace, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s London seat, released the list below action:
We note that the GAFCON IV communiqué makes much of the very same points that have actually formerly been made about the structures of the Anglican Communion. As the Archbishop of Canterbury has actually formerly said, those structures are constantly able to alter with the times — and have actually done so in the past. The Archbishop said at the recent Anglican Consultative Council conference in Ghana (ACC-18) that no modifications to the official structures of the Anglican Communion can be made unless they are concurred upon by the Instruments of Communion.
“At the ACC-18 conference — which was gone to by Primates, bishops, clergy, and laypeople from 39 of the 42 Anglican provinces — there was extensive assistance for interacting patiently and constructively to evaluate the Instruments of Communion, so that our distinctions and disputes can be held together in unity and fellowship. Archbishop Justin Welby has actually invited this choice — simply as he likewise invited in 2015’s choice by the Church of England’s General Synod to provide the Anglican Communion a higher voice on the body that chooses future Archbishops of Canterbury.
“The Archbishop continues to be in regular contact with his fellow Primates and looks forward to discussing this and many other matters with them over the coming period. Meanwhile the Archbishop continues to pray especially for Anglicans who face poverty, conflict, famine, discrimination, and persecution around the world, and Anglican churches who live and minister in these contexts. Continuing to walk together as Anglicans is not just the best way to share Christ’s love with a world in great need: it is also how the world will know that Jesus Christ is sent from the Father who calls us to love one another, even as we disagree.”
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Initial report (April 19), entitled “To Whom Shall We Go: Conservative Anglicans Discuss Divorce from Church of England”:
A “revived, renewed, and reordered” Anglican Communion will be the core message provided tomorrow to 1,300 conservative Anglicans from 53 nations satisfying today in Kigali, Rwanda to go over “to whom shall we go?”
The last declaration of the 4th Global Anglican Futures Conference (Gafcon) will detail an exceptionally important action by the conservative bulk of the Anglican Communion to the recent relocations by Church of England bishops to adopt prayers to bless same-sex marital relationships.
Gafcon is the network that invited the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) into the Anglican family, if not the authorities Anglican Communion, in 2008.
“We owe our existence to Gafcon,” said ACNA archbishop Foley Beach. “The first Gafcon called for the formation of a new province in North America.”
Chair of the Gafcon primates council, Beach required the liberal provinces of the Anglican Communion to repent. He included, “Unless the Archbishop of Canterbury repents, we cannot regard him as the first among equals.”
Then explaining that “sexual sins are not the only sins in the Bible,” Beach required Gafcon churches to be repenting churches likewise.
Archbishop Stephen Samuel Kaziimba Mugalu, leader of the eight-million-strong Church of Uganda, likewise called archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby to repent.
“I am disappointed because, in Uganda, the message of the gospel came from the Church of England in 1877,” he informedThe Pastor’s Heart, a livestream podcast produced by Sydney Anglicans. “The first missions came, and we had polygamy as a normal way of marriage, and every man had three, four, five women. And they ceased having [that number of] wives because of the gospel. And now, we hear a message that a man can have another man’s wife or same-sex marriage is also marriage.
“We get disappointed that those who brought the gospel to us are turning away from what they brought to us,” said Kaziimba. “So we call upon Archbishop Justin to repent, and they should reverse their decision, which is destroying the Anglican Communion.”
Bishop Keith Sinclair from England completed his early morning plenary speech in tears. He detailed the Church of England’s practice of making inconsistent declarations.
“Rather than face this fundamental disagreement and the implications for fellowship, mission, discipline, and so on,” he said, “the differences are simply described as if both are possible in some hope that we can keep together in an institution that has got some shared history but no common mind.”
This was a speech from a man hanging on to the hope that evangelicals might preserve a location in the Church of England. Nevertheless, Sinclair revealed unhappiness that “the church which God used to bring the gospel to so many parts of the world because of her faith in that scriptural revelation now seems to have succumbed to the very cultural captivity it appealed to so many to renounce.”
He did express the caution that the main procedure in England is still continuous. “Formally it remains to be seen how the [English] bishops will respond to what has been said globally and in England.”
In 2000, as the American evangelical breakaway from The Episcopal Church (TEC) started, archbishops from the nationwide churches of Rwanda and Southeast Asia sprang into action, using to be momentary bishops for American and Canadian dissidents. Today, the provinces include in the 2 significant wings of the conservative motion in the Anglican Communion.
Rwanda is hosting today’s Gafcon. Many Gafcon members have a history of boycotting Anglican Communion conferences in Kigali, and the group has actually taken a militant position versus the liberal motion in the communion.
Attending the Gafcon event is retired Singapore bishop Rennis Ponniah, basic secretary of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA). Until now, the GSFA has actually kept relationships with liberal provinces such as the United States and Canada, serving along with them on communion bodies.
But in Kigali, there are signals this will alter. Some experts state the GSFA, rocked by the Church of England’s moving position, is now much less likely to walk along with the liberal provinces.
There is already considerable overlap in between the 2 groups.
“The Bible stands at the heart of the faith that all Anglican Churches have inherited from the Church of England,” said Benjamin Kwashi, basic secretary of Gafcon. “That the Church of England has actually now chosen to leave from the Bible’s mentor is bothering for lots of Anglicans.
“Some have accused Gafcon of creating division in the Anglican Church, but I must disagree. There have been deep disagreements over the authority of the Bible among members of the Anglican Communion for quite some time,” said Kwashi, a Church of Nigeria archbishop based in Jos. “We do not seek division, but rather we want to move with the mission of God in the world. The gospel of our Lord Jesus calls us to guard the unchanging, transforming Gospel of Jesus Christ and to proclaim Him to the world.”
The latest breakaway motion in the Gafcon motion, Australia’s Diocese of the Southern Cross, received a brand-new churchgoers as delegates took a trip to Kigali.
Faith Church on the Sunshine Coast is pastored by Hedley Fihaki, who led the Assembly of Confessing Congregations, an evangelical motion in the Uniting Church in Australia that will stop operations this weekend. His is just the very first ex–Uniting Church churchgoers anticipated to end up being Anglican.
“It was eight months ago that we decided we could no longer follow the archbishop and the decisions of the Diocese [of Southern Queensland] for the blessing of same-sex marriage,” said Peter Palmer, the very first minister to sign up with the self-described “Anglican lifeboat.” Even as he established the very first church of the brand-new diocese, he hoped his would be the only one—simply put, that his diocese would repent and he might rejoin it. However, his area now has 4 Southern Cross churches.
The delegates from the UK are the most varied, varying from church planters who have actually left the Church of England to those who think that its procedure has actually only simply started which strong resistance might make a space for evangelicals to stay. In lots of methods, the procedure that took place in the United States is being duplicated in the UK.
Gafcon has actually offered the starts of an “Anglican lifeboat” in the recently established Anglican Network in Europe (ANiE), led by Andy Lines, a missionary bishop to Europe from ACNA. Also in presence at Gafcon is the brand-new bishop of Ebbsfleet, Rob Munro, a “flying bishop” in the Church of England serving complementarian churches. They have varying viewpoints about the strength of the pushback versus the British bishops’ proposed prayers for same-sex true blessings.
But the message of the Kigali event will be to state even louder than prior to that the Church of England is not at the center of the Anglican Communion.
A 2nd main style of the conference is the desire for the 2 conservative motions to combine or walk more carefully together. In a remarkable minute throughout a session looking for input into the ultimate conference declaration, a delegate from Uganda recommended that Gafcon and GSFA must “speak one language.”
The room, filled with clergy and lay delegates, appeared in loud applause and cheers.
After a break, a recommended summary list was on the cinemas around the Kigali Conference Center. But, sadly, the Gafcon-GSFA concern was not on it.
But then the chair, Tasmania’s Bishop Richard Condie, guaranteed delegates that he would carry out the message to the primates and guarantee it would be heard.
In impact, there are parallel conferences in the mix at Kigali. There are public events of Bible research study, praise, and preparing a conference declaration, and a myriad of smaller sized ones. This consists of GSFA and Gafcon primates satisfying together.
“As most of you know, some of—actually most of—the Global South primates are also Gafcon primates, but we did have a meeting with the leaders of both groups…,” Beach informed an interview. “So we’ll be gathering together later this week. And we’ll just see where that goes.”
Due to the Church of England advancements, the GSFA and Gafcon have actually accumulated in tone. The GSFA has actually focused on building up the ecclesial links in between provinces as a residue within the Anglican Communion, while Gafcon has actually been more likely to boycott communion structures and look for to change them. The range in between these methods has actually diminished as GSFA wants to distance itself more decisively from liberal provinces like TEC, Canada, and now the Church of England.
To choose a single leader for the combined conservative forces in the Anglican communion–one possible relocation–implies settling distinctions, such as the chair of GSFA turning each year and Gafcon choosing a chair for a five-year term. Having a brand-new “first among equals” would indicate the Archbishop of Canterbury would have a competitor. And the anticipated strong language in the last conference declaration would indicate that a person of these leaders will be appreciated and the other will be overlooked in the larger Anglican world.
A unique function of both motions is the unity in between bulk world evangelicals and the Anglosphere. Confessing motions in denominations that have actually seen progressive-conservative divides might gain from the Anglican example. For example, unlike the United Methodists, it is clear that African and Asian churches are leaders in the conservative motion. And unlike the Presbyterians, the bulk world remains in the bulk.
“Gafcon and Global South are two institutions that overlap in what they do,” GSFA chair Justin Badi Arama, archbishop of South Sudan, informedThe Pastor’s Heart. “In the future, it is my hope and prayer that the two might become one.”
