Not even two weeks after the Church of England unveiled Sarah Mullally as the incoming Archbishop of Canterbury, a network of conservative Anglicans has exploded what fragile harmony or consensus existed.
A statement released last week from Archbishop of Rwanda Laurent Mbanda, chair of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (Gafcon), announced his group plans to take control of global Anglicanism and refound it on scriptural orthodoxy.
The Archbishop of Canterbury has for centuries served as the “first among equals” spiritual head of the Anglican Communion, a family of 42 churches worldwide that derive from the Church of England. But years of strife over same-sex relationships have culminated in last week’s statement, raising the possibility that the fraying communion may be disintegrating for good.
In the statement, Mbanda declared that “the future has arrived” and that Gafcon was making good on its promise from almost 20 years ago to save Anglicanism from theological liberalism.
The movement began in 2008 when scores of conservative churches, mostly from Africa and Asia, boycotted the once-a-decade Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops called by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Instead, they held their own gathering in Jerusalem, which evolved into the Gafcon network.
At the time, the dispute focused on moves by liberal Anglican churches in the United States and Canada to consecrate gay men and women as bishops and to create liturgies to bless same-sex couples. Then, in 2023, the mother church for the whole communion agreed to bless gay relationships. This prompted Gafcon to publicly reject the then–Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby’s traditional authority as head of the communion.
The latest statement appears to go further. Mbanda wrote that Gafcon would “reorder” the communion so its sole source of unity was the Bible. The traditional institutions that bind the autonomous Anglican provinces together—including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference of bishops—had failed to uphold traditional teaching and are rejected, the statement added.
“We cannot continue to have communion with those who advocate the revisionist agenda, which has abandoned the inerrant word of God as the final authority,” Mbanda wrote.
Gafcon statements expressed similar sentiments before, but now leaders are asking member churches to pick a side. While some Gafcon churches have for years cut all ties with the communion and even rewritten their constitutions to strip out mention of the Church of England or the Archbishop of Canterbury, others have continued in both camps: going to Gafcon events and taking part in the traditional institutions of the Anglican Communion.
This has to end, Mbanda’s statement said, and churches that belong to what Gafcon now calls the Global Anglican Communion cannot go to meetings called by the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor give or receive money from the official Anglican Communion. And for the first time, the Gafcon archbishops will elect one of their own to act as “first among equals,” a direct rival to the authority of Canterbury.
Nobody expected Gafcon to approve of the choice of Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury. The former senior nurse turned bishop previously led the project to introduce gay blessings and also represents the first woman to ascend to the throne of Saint Augustine in Canterbury Cathedral, an issue for certain Gafcon provinces that do not ordain women as priests or bishops.
But few predicted such a bold move and so soon. Some have interpreted the statement as a schism, with Gafcon establishing a rival Global Anglican Communion set against the official Anglican Communion.
The Church of Ireland, Anglican Church of Canada, and Episcopal Church reaffirmed their loyalty to the Canterbury-aligned communion.
“We grieve that some GAFCON primates have chosen to remove themselves from the Anglican Communion,” said Sean Rowe, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church. “We pray for their participation in God’s mission in their contexts.”
But Mbanda and other Gafcon figures insist they are not leaving but instead wresting back control of the communion from its traditional sources of authority, what they see as liberal and discredited.
In a podcast interview after the statement, Mbanda said the Global Anglican Communion was closer to a rebrand than a new organization and that it was the revisionist Anglicans in the UK and North America who were the true schismatics.
“Why would they accuse me of being schismatic when they are the ones who departed?” he said. “We have always been there. We stay there. We continue there.”
The announcement changes little for churches such as his in Rwanda, let alone breakaway Anglican movements such as the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), which are sponsored by Gafcon and have never been in communion with Canterbury.
These conservative churches do not take part in communion affairs or institutions and have already jettisoned their links with the church in England. The statement will pose greater challenges for more moderate Gafcon members, such as Anglican churches in Kenya, Uganda, or Chile. Felix Orji, a Nigerian bishop who leads an ACNA diocese in Texas, said some provinces which have had a foot in both camps will have “an intense battle over this issue.”
“There’s going to be some conflict in the internal running of certain Gafcon provinces, and this may push some of them to decide, ‘You know what? We’re going to stay with [the] mother church. We’re not going to go with Gafcon,’” he said. “So it’s a risky venture, but it was necessary.”
But do not expect the entire Anglican project worldwide to divide into two camps just yet. Susie Leafe, the director of the British pro-Gafcon group Anglican Futures, said nobody expected the conservative minorities languishing within liberal provinces to abandon their buildings and salaries to start afresh as breakaway churches.
“I don’t think they’re going to suddenly say that everybody in the Church of England or the Anglican Church of Australia—that’s very mixed—they’ve all got to leave for new church plants.” The messy reality of Anglicanism, with liberals and conservatives and everything in between bound up in loose affiliation, will continue for now.
Indeed, the official response from the communion’s secretary general, Anthony Poggo, has been a plea for provinces not to abandon an official, if plodding, process currently consulting on more tepid reforms to how Anglican churches with different beliefs can relate to each other.
“I share the hope of the commission that all Anglicans, and the whole Church of God, may still seek and find agreement in the Faith,” Poggo wrote. Theological uniformity cannot be demanded—it requires “patience and love” and the “hard work of discernment.”
Gafcon leaders have denied their move was solely prompted by Mullally’s accession, but Orji doubted the statement would have arrived if, by some miracle, a more conservative figure had emerged as the next Archbishop of Canterbury.
“We’ve been pleading for repentance, for rapprochement, and now you have a woman, and this woman is in favor of everything we’re against,” the ACNA bishop said. “And so there is no hope. If the Church of England had chosen a male who is evangelical, I don’t think that this decision would have been made.”
Lee McMunn, a former Church of England vicar now a bishop in the Gafcon-aligned Anglican Mission in England, said Mbanda’s surprise statement prompted both joy and encouragement for small breakaway movements like his own.
“So much of Anglicanism is often characterised by nuanced statements to prevent anybody from feeling they’re left out,” he said. “So to have a really bold declaration centred on God’s Word, that’s the key for me.”
Refusing communion funds would be costly but worth it for other provinces previously still linked to Canterbury, McMunn said. “If we’re going to stand together on the Word of God, there will be sacrifices to be made. But it is worth it because there is now a clarity in terms of our communion.”
Beneath the disagreement over Mullally’s gender and her LGBTQ-affirming theology is a deeper argument over the definition of Anglicanism. Is it a relational movement, united around historic colonial ties to England and sustained by friendship and shared liturgies? Or is Anglicanism, going all the way back to the first break with Rome led by Henry VIII in 16th-century England, about fidelity to the Bible over transnational institutions and relationships?
Orji said he retained a lot of fondness for England, dating back to the British schoolteachers who led him to Christ when Orji was a teenager in Nigeria. But he welcomed Gafcon’s apparent decision to f abandon these ties.
“It is important that the primacy of England should not take precedence over the primacy of Scripture,” he said. “We cannot allow our affection for England to trump affection for Christ and his Word.”
