The Anglican Centre in Rome has put GAFCON’s Abuja declaration on the table.

On 11 June 2026 the Centre will host a seminar entitled “‘The Future Has Arrived’: A Decolonial Reading of the Global Anglican Future Conference’s G26 Abuja Affirmation,” with Dr Ishaya Anthony giving the principal paper and Dr Christopher Wells, the Anglican Communion’s Director of Unity, Faith and Order, responding. The event will be held at the Centre’s rooms in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilj in Rome and online at 6:00 pm Central European Time (

That the subject is being taken up in Rome is worth noting. The Anglican Centre is not GAFCON territory. It is an ecumenical and Communion-facing institution, one accustomed to the patient language of dialogue and process. GAFCON’s Abuja Affirmation, by contrast, was not written in committee-room prose. It was written as a line in the sand.

Meeting in Abuja from 3 to 6 March, GAFCON reported that 347 bishops and 121 clergy and lay leaders from 27 provinces had gathered under the hospitality of the Church of Nigeria. The resulting Abuja Affirmation declared that “The Future has Arrived,” rejected the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Conference, Anglican Consultative Council, and Primates’ Meeting as failed “so-called Instruments of Communion,” and announced the inauguration of a reordered Global Anglican Communion.

Abuja did not ask Canterbury to try harder. It did not plead for another listening process, another Windsor-style report, or another indaba with better refreshments. It declared the old system had failed because it could no longer discipline false teaching, especially over Scripture, sexuality, and the formularies of the Anglican Reformation.

Nor was Abuja merely a protest against the Church of England. GAFCON’s statement argued that communion is confessional before it is institutional, and that fellowship now rests on assent to the Jerusalem Declaration rather than historic deference to Canterbury. “There are not two Communions,” the statement said, “but two incompatible definitions of communion,” one confessional and one institutional.

That sentence turns the usual question upside down. The issue is no longer whether GAFCON has left the Anglican Communion. GAFCON’s claim is that the Canterbury system has ceased to be a reliable guardian of Anglican communion, and that the real Communion is being recovered elsewhere.

The Rome seminar appears designed to probe that claim rather than simply denounce it. Dr Anthony, Canon Theologian of the Diocese of Kwoi in Nigeria and a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Johannesburg, will examine the Abuja text through a decolonial lens. That framing matters, because GAFCON has long rejected the charge that it is a Western conservative franchise dressed up in African vestments. Its leaders contend that the moral and theological center of Anglicanism has shifted southward, and that Canterbury has been too slow, too compromised, or too polite to notice.

Dr Wells’ response will bring the discussion back to the Communion’s official reform proposals. The Anglican Centre says he will address Anglican identity and leadership structures through the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals, which will be discussed at the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Belfast from 27 June to 5 July.

Those proposals are the official Communion’s answer to the same disease Abuja claims to diagnose. Developed by IASCUFO, they would revise the way the Anglican Communion describes itself and broaden leadership among the Communion’s representative bodies. They would also de-emphasize the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury as the singular “focus of unity,” while leaving Canterbury with a continuing representative role in many ecumenical settings.

A common vision of what it means to be an Anglican in communion is no longer possible. Nairobi-Cairo says the Communion can be adjusted. Abuja says it must be reordered. Nairobi-Cairo seeks the highest degree of communion possible amid division. Abuja says that formula is precisely the problem.

The June seminar will therefore serve as a small but revealing preview of the larger Belfast debate. If the ACC embraces Nairobi-Cairo, it will be saying that the Communion can survive by loosening Canterbury’s grip without abandoning the institutional family. If GAFCON’s Abuja reading prevails among the Global South churches, then Canterbury’s problem is not merely that it has too much symbolic power, but that its symbolic power no longer commands obedience.

The Anglican Centre’s announcement notes that the Abuja Affirmation has drawn both “commendation and criticism” within and beyond the Anglican family. A neutral observation. Another way that Abuja has forced the Communion to say what it means by communion, and to say it before the people who have stopped waiting for an answer.

Registration for the seminar is by email at info@anglicancentre.it, with attendance available both in person and online.