he Abuja Affirmation marks the end of an era. The third largest Christian communion, Anglicanism (behind only Catholicism and Orthodoxy), has splintered. While its demise has been a drawn-out affair, the church has reached an inflection point. A crisis of authority has existed for over fifty years, a crisis that conservative Anglicans had long sought to resolve by returning Anglicanism to its scriptural roots. At a meeting in Abuja, Nigeria, this March, bishops from around the communion declared that the crisis had been resolved; the authority of the Scriptures had been restored. Their announcement was triumphant. But it contradicted reality.

Bishops of the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) gathered in Abuja from March 3–6 ostensibly to  replace the hegemonic and symbolic power of the archbishop of Canterbury by electing a new primus inter pares (first among equals) for the (newly branded) Global Anglican Communion. However, instead of reorganizing the traditional authority structure within Anglicanism, they overthrew it, setting up their own institution with a corporate evangelical polity based in Protestant confessionalism. While GAFCON denies that it has split the Anglican Communion, for all intents and purposes there are now two communions: one institutional, centered around the See of Canterbury; the other confessional, centered around the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008. 

The ecclesial conflicts within the historic Anglican Communion are well known; but what about the new Global Anglican Communion? Its Abuja Affirmation stridently forms a new communion nested within the old while rejecting the ecclesial authority of apostate provinces or dioceses. And yet, the true cost of this new communion is not so much the schism it portends as the contradiction at its root. 

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