The latest criticism of GAFCON’s Abuja settlement raises a fair question, though not a fatal one: how does a confessional Anglican communion distinguish between first-order doctrine and secondary disagreement?
That is a serious question. But it is not answered by declaring GAFCON incoherent. The latest assault against GAFCON comes by using the Vincentian Canon as if it were a theological vending machine: insert patristic consensus, receive ecclesial verdict.
Anglicanism has always practiced doctrinal triage. Article VI of the Thirty-Nine Articles states that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation. Article XX gives the Church authority in controversies of faith, while forbidding it to decree anything contrary to God’s written Word or to require anything beyond Scripture as necessary to salvation. That is a hierarchy of doctrine. Not every dispute has the same weight. Not every error has the same ecclesial consequence.
The Jerusalem Declaration stands within that Anglican grammar. It affirms Scripture, the creeds, the first four ecumenical councils, the Thirty-Nine Articles, the 1662 Prayer Book and Ordinal, and the biblical doctrine of marriage. It also acknowledges freedom in secondary matters. That is not institutional arithmetic. It is ordinary Anglican doctrinal triage.
The question is whether GAFCON applies that triage arbitrarily. Critics say that if historic consensus is decisive on sexuality, it must also be decisive on women’s ordination. That is the strongest version of the objection. But it does not settle the case.
The sexuality dispute is first-order for GAFCON because same-sex blessings and same-sex marriage are not merely questions of pastoral accommodation. They require the Church to bless what Scripture and the received Christian moral tradition identify as contrary to God’s will. They touch creation, sin, repentance, holiness, marriage, and biblical authority. The Jerusalem Declaration speaks directly to this when it affirms humanity as male and female and marriage between one man and one woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy. Abuja likewise locates the crisis not simply in sexual ethics, but in the abandonment of scriptural authority.
Women’s ordination is different. It is a grave ecclesial disagreement. It concerns holy orders, ministry, reception, and Anglican ecclesiology. Those are not trivial matters. But the question does not necessarily require the Church to redefine sin, bless disobedience, or alter the doctrine of creation and marriage. That is why Anglicans have long treated women’s ordination as a matter capable of impairing communion without necessarily breaking it.
This is not merely theoretical. A number of theologically conservative Anglican provinces either ordain women to the priesthood or permit women in significant ordained ministry while maintaining traditional teaching on marriage and sexuality. The Anglican Church in North America, the Anglican Church of Brazil, Mozambique & Angola, Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan, Pakistan, Congo, Central Africa, Burundi, Bangladesh, Chile, Rwanda, and Tanzania are examples of conservative provinces that ordain women to the priesthood while continuing to reject the sexual revisionism now dividing the Communion.
Kenya and South Sudan have women bishops, yet neither has followed the Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, or the Church of England into the blessing of same-sex unions or the revision of Christian marriage. The Church of Nigeria provides a different example: in 2010 Archbishop Nicholas Okoh proposed ordaining women deacons, restricting their ministry to hospital and school work, however – yet Nigeria remains among the strongest global voices for traditional Christian teaching on marriage and sexuality.
These examples do not settle the theological debate over women’s ordination. They do, however, refute the stronger causal claim that women’s ordination necessarily entails sexual revisionism. One may argue that women’s ordination creates theological tension within a conservative Anglican framework, but the actual life of the Communion shows that the move from women’s orders to sexual revisionism is not automatic, inevitable, or historically uniform. The history of the Communion shows correlation in some places, not causation everywhere.
The appeal to Vincent of Lérins must also be handled carefully. Vincent’s rule, that the Church should hold what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all, remains a vital catholic instinct. But Vincent’s method is not an automatic calculator. It works within the wider life of Scripture, councils, fathers, and ecclesial discernment. Anglicanism has received that patristic inheritance, but it has never treated the Vincentian Canon as a substitute magisterium.
Nor should the Elizabethan Settlement be dismissed as merely the disease. It was political as well as theological, as all national church settlements are. But it also gave Anglicanism a durable pattern: scriptural authority, catholic order, reformed doctrine, common prayer, and limited comprehensiveness. That inheritance can be abused. It has been abused. But abuse does not erase the legitimacy of principled comprehensiveness.
GAFCON would help itself by stating its doctrinal triage more explicitly. A defensible Anglican test would ask: Is the matter directly addressed by Scripture? Does it touch creation, sin, salvation, repentance, holiness, or the gospel? Is it constrained by the creeds, Articles, Prayer Book, or Ordinal? What is the weight of catholic consensus? Does disagreement make common discipline and mission impossible?
By that test, GAFCON can reasonably say that sexuality is first-order because it changes the Church’s public account of creation, marriage, repentance, holiness, and biblical authority. It can also say that women’s ordination, while grave and disputed, has not been treated across orthodox Anglican life as necessarily communion-breaking.
GAFCON is not saying women’s ordination is unimportant. It is saying that not every serious disagreement has the same doctrinal consequence.
The sharper distinction is this: first-order doctrines are those whose denial changes the gospel the Church proclaims, the repentance it requires, the holiness it commends, or the created order it confesses. Secondary disputes may still be painful and consequential. They may impair communion. They may require continuing theological work. But they do not necessarily place churches under rival accounts of salvation, sanctification, and obedience.
That answer will not satisfy everyone. Those with a higher sacramental account of priesthood will continue to press GAFCON on the theology of orders. They should. GAFCON should not evade the question – and in time the issue will doubtless addressed head on. But the existence of that debate does not prove hypocrisy.
The task before Global Anglicans is not to choose between institutional convenience and a rigid patristic test abstracted from the Anglican formularies. It is to apply Scripture, the creeds, the formularies, catholic tradition, and pastoral judgment with clarity and charity.
GAFCON’s critics have identified a question worth answering. They have not shown that GAFCON has no answer.