The influence of the Sydney delegates to the Gafcon, now known as the Global Anglican Communion, meeting in last week in Abuja, Nigeria, is highlighted in an episode of the Anglican Unscripted podcast.
George Conger and Kevin Kallsen’s post-meeting podcast explains the process, which meant the Gafcon media briefings that the conservative reform movement known as the Global Anglican Communion would appoint a figurehead, turned out to be wrong. In the Conger/Kallsen account, Sydney was at the centre of the change.
This was the news story of the Abuja conference – artificially so in the sense that the expectation that Gafcon/the Global Anglican Communion would appoint a figurehead was built up by their own briefing of the press. This led to successive BBC headlines: “Anglican divisions deepen as rebel clerics pick rival to first female leader,” and “Conservative Anglicans pull back from electing rival to Archbishop of Canterbury.” But Conger and Kallsen explain that briefings from Sydney Anglican leaders reported by Dominic Steele’s Pastors heart podcast had been been accurately predicting no rival to the archbishop of Canterbury.
But as revealed by the Anglican Unscripted crew, the tussle over whether to appoint a figurehead was not about whether to pick someone to take on the soon-to-be Archbishop of Canterbury, but about ecclesiology – the theology of the structure and functioning of the church.
“Well, now we’re going to go behind the scenes a bit more because the trajectory to get to this point reveals some of the tensions within the conservative [Anglican] world,” George Conger told the podcast audience. “The ecclesiology adopted by the global Anglican communion and the global Anglican Council is the ecclesiology of Sydney, Australia, low church.
“Bob Duncan, [the founding archbishop and primate of the Anglican Church in North America, serving from 2009 to 2014] he said this privately in sessions, and then publicly he said this to Kevin and myself, so we’re not breaking confidences. He said, Bob really said, ‘No, I don’t think this is the way to go. We need to have a Catholic ecclesiology.” One bishop, … who I won’t name because I don’t want to embarrass him, who was an ACNA bishop, said, ‘I didn’t realise I was a Presbyterian all this time.’
“So we have differences on church order, that the Low Church is very happy with the synodal approach that gives a lay voice equal weight to a clergy voice to a bishop’s voice in decision-making processes. The ACNA and the more Catholic-minded people, they’d like discussion and debate, but they want a man to be, at the end of the day, the voice.
“To sort of [go] up the theological scale of it, this is the issue of magisterium. Yes, it is. Where does authority lie? And the one wing of the conservative movement is looking to place the magisterium not in a council, but in an archbishop. And Sydney, who wrote the communique, won the day.”
Whether Conger is exactly right that the Sydney “wrote the communique,” it can be fairly observed that from the 2008 Jerusalem Declaration onwards, the drafting skills of the successive Sydney Anglican contingents have been both in high demand and influential. The impression that Sydney foisted on the conference, a view only they held about what the new structure should be, should be resisted. Synodical structures are common throughout Anglicanism and might be regarded as a characteristic of this branch of Christianity. But significantly, the Anglican Church in North America has placed great power in its bishops, rather than balancing them with a synod, which might have influenced the views of Americans in Abuja.
The Other Cheek has been unable to unearth an official list of the new Global Anglican Council, which was inaugurated at the Abuja meeting. “In a world where most organisations and individuals are concerned about keeping power and authority, the Gafcon Primates Council has made an unprecedented decision to share its stewardship of the Global Anglican Communion by creating the Global Anglican Council which includes primates, advisors, and guarantors, which will include bishops, clergy, and lay members each with full voting privileges,” a communique issued by Paul Donison the Gafcon General secretary reads.
“This expanded Council reflects the willingness of the Primates to share their authority with a wider group of global Anglican leaders, both lay and clergy. While the Chairman of the Council will be a Primate, he will not be primus inter pares (first amongst equals).
“Believing that the current Instruments of Communion no longer meet the needs of the majority of Anglicans around the world, the Global Anglican Communion is to be led by a conciliar structure. The Global Anglican Council has discerned that if we are to move past old structures, we must leave behind old titles as well.”
There was no list of members of the new Global Anglican Council with the communique, and The Other Cheek understands that information was not made public.
This statement announced three members of the new Global Anglican Council: Donison, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda as chair, and Archbishop Miguel Uchoa of Brazil as Vice Chair, with those three holding the same positions they had in the former primates council. Other primates from Chile, Alexandria, Kenya, Myanmar, REACH-SA in South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda, South Sudan, and Congo, would also carry on, perhaps joined by others.
The Other Cheek believes it is likely that the new council largely has the “advisors” and “guarantors” of the former primates council folded into the new one.
Scouring various Anglican sites reveals that former advisors Archbishop Kanishka Raffel of Sydney, Bishop Glenn Davies of the Diocese of the Southern Cross, and Bishop Jay Behan of the Church of Confessing Anglicans Aotearoa NZ are members of the new council.
The “Gafcon Guarantors who ensure continuity of vision, strategy and resource” as described on the Gafcon website were present in Sydney for the Martyrs Day statement last year. They include some of the primates, and at least two lay people; Olayinka Fisher, a Nigerian entrepreneur and a former member of the International Cricket Council, and Emmanuel Kampouris, an American businessman and philanthropist.
The wording of the communique announcing the Global Anglican Council suggests guarantors are the lay members on it.
The communique also notes that the chair, vice chair and general secretary appointments to the council will only run until the big 5-yearly Gafcon/Global Anglican Communion meeting in Athens in 2028. In an interview with the Stand Firm podcast Julian Dobbs, the acting head of the Anglican Church in North America, revealed that the standing primates, or the council, will select new members of the Global Anglican Council.
“The announcement was welcomed by many participants as an important step in the continued development of global Anglican structures capable of representing the majority of Anglicans worldwide,” Francis Capitanio of the conservative American Anglican Council reported from Abuja. “At the same time, the announcement prompted a number of questions from those present. Among the most frequently raised were the precise role of the chairman, how members of the Global Anglican Council will be selected, and how the authority of the new body differs from the former Primates Council in practice. Participants also raised questions about how the Global Anglican Communion will relate to existing Anglican structures and how it may respond to proposals currently being discussed elsewhere, including the Nairobi-Cairo proposals associated with the Anglican Consultative Council.”
The change from a council of primates to one that includes lay and clergy representation takes the Global Anglicans leadership structure toward a Synod or church parliament. Anglicans are often described as ‘synodically governed and episcopally led’, a description that applies to the Church of England but also every diocese in Australia, and most of the provinces or national churches in either the old Anglican Communion or the reset Global Anglican Communion.
It may be that the Global Anglican Council structure is given even more of a synodical aspect in 2028.
A second communique issued at the end of the Abuja meeting gives a detailed treatment of the theological stand of the emerging Global Anglican Communion, and goes into great detail to clarify who can be part of it. Any Anglican who affirms the Jerusalem Declaration, whether a layperson in Brisbane, a priest in the church of England can join with the 20m members of the Church of Nigeria in the renovated Anglican Communion.