News Analysis
The 176 delegates, observers, and invited guests who gathered for the First Assembly of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) on June 11 in the Egyptian desert surely brought a variety of hopes with them.
Some had been working on what is now called the GSFA’s Covenantal Structure for nearly a decade, and were excited to see the body finally convene and elect its leaders. For them, these are crucial steps in building the kind of institution the Anglican Communion hasn’t been in a long time, a body that acts like a global church, standing firm against false teaching and binding its members in mutual submission and common order.
Some, especially those from about 15 provinces that have been associated with the GSFA for the last 30 years but who haven’t yet applied for membership under the Covenantal Structure’s terms, were testing the waters. How would the GSFA position itself in relation to the See of Canterbury and the Instruments of Communion? Would its rhetoric be shrill or conciliatory? Would it derive its leadership and strength from the Global South, Anglicanism’s growing edge, or would it be a pawn in the culture wars of Global North Anglicanism?
Some clearly wondered if the time had come for the GSFA to merge with GAFCON (recently renamed the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans), a mission movement that has been historically led by those provinces most at odds with the See of Canterbury and that has set up rival churches to work within the boundaries of nine existing Anglican provinces.
At its March 2023 gathering in Kigali, GAFCON leaders warmly received the GSFA’s Ash Wednesday Statement, which claimed that the Archbishop of Canterbury had forfeited his role as the Anglican Communion’s leader because of his complicity in the Church of England’s decision to allow blessings of same-sex unions. The time had come for a reset, led by a faithful remnant of orthodox believers, the GSFA Primates said.
On the floor of the GAFCON gathering, a lay leader’s plea that the two bodies merge was greeted by loud applause, and Archbishop Foley Beach, primate of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), expressed hopes in the gathering’s closing press conference that a new Global Primates’ Council could be formed (presumably after the two groups had merged), with a leader who could serve as a rival to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Such a move would clearly be welcomed by many conservative Anglican leaders, who remain a fairly small and interconnected group. Many primates serve in the leadership of both organizations, and lots of people at Khatatba picked up conversations they had been having the last time they met 14 months earlier in Kigali.
GAFCON clearly knows how to put on a dynamic conference, and has a wide network of mission partners and an established organizational structure. GSFA has a plan for ecclesial fellowship, grounded in a founding document with a nuanced vision of Anglican ecclesiology. Practically, a merger would be logical.
Such a move would be especially important to the ACNA and similar churches in Brazil, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, which have all been founded under GAFCON’s auspices but lack the wider ecclesiological standing that could come with a full alliance after merging the two bodies. GAFCON’s new general secretary, Bishop Paul Donison, who attended the GSFA Assembly as an invited guest, also leads one of the ACNA’s largest churches, Christ Church Cathedral in Plano, Texas.
As often happens at such global gatherings, the big topic was mentioned only at the very end. In the final minutes of the assembly’s gathering, the GSFA’s chairman, Archbishop Justin Badi Arama, asked that Assembly delegates pass several previously drafted resolutions, summarizing the gathering’s plenary addresses.
In one resolution, the GSFA expressed its readiness to “collaborate with other orthodox groups” within global Anglicanism to advance its reset of the Communion’s life. Bishop Bill Atwood, the ACNA’s dean for international affairs and the ambassador for the GAFCON’s Primates Council for over a decade, moved an amendment, asking that the resolution single out GAFCON as a trusted partner.
“It would be a great encouragement and a statement of confidence to the members of both groups,” Atwood said. The Rev. Phil Ashey, an ACNA priest who helped draft the Covenantal Structure, added that it would be especially valued by those “bodies who GAFCON has authenticated and recognized.”
The amendment was ruled out of order by the chair twice, but after a large portion of the 80 assembly members left for a bus to the airport, the amendment came back to the floor and was approved 24-12. It seemed an important symbolic victory in the moment.
But GAFCON is mentioned only once in the GSFA’s final communiqué, as one among many “orthodox bodies” that play “important and often complimentary roles … in contending for the truth and advancing God’s kingdom.”
One key question the GSFA is still working out is how strong an influence the ACNA will have in shaping its priorities. The ACNA is one of ten Anglican provinces that are ordinary members of GSFA, and when the assembly meets, each province has eight votes. But its influence is much deeper. I estimate that 28 of the 172 participants in the Assembly are (or were until recently) ACNA clergy or lay people (16%). About half of the GSFA’s 14 mission partner organizations are led by ACNA members.
The relational connections are also deep, and that means a great deal in the Global South. Many of the bishops from the Global South have studied at what is now Trinity Anglican Seminary, and many more have attended the ACNA-led New Wineskins Conference. Bishop Robert Duncan, the first ACNA primate, announced during the GSFA gathering that the ACNA would be distributing its new catechism for free in the Global South. Referring to the GSFA’s role in providing temporary oversight for the Anglican Diocese of South Carolina (2014-17), he said, “You were there for us when we really needed you, and now we want to give something back.”
The ACNA, it must be said, has earned its respect in the Global South fair and square. Bill Atwood has visited 41 of the 42 Anglican provinces during his tenure as ACNA’s dean for international affairs. Foley Beach has served with distinction as a senior primate for both GAFCON and the GSFA. ACNA dioceses and parishes give generously to evangelistic mission in the Global South (which matters more to many bishops than the disaster relief that comes from Episcopal Relief and Development). They invite Anglican church leaders from the Global South to their diocesan and provincial synods. When the GSFA invites groups to apply for affiliation as mission partners, ACNA leaders fill out the applications, buy their plane tickets to Cairo, and then network as hard as they can.
Maybe it was a little too much. If you throw in the English and Australian evangelicals, the GSFA gathering was more than a quarter English-speaking white people from declining churches, which is an odd look for a body that pins its identity on the Global South. If you add to the ACNA contingent the delegates from Brazil, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, about a quarter of those present were from churches formally outside the Anglican Communion, an oddity for a group that claims to be resetting the Communion on a new foundation.
The chairman of GAFCON’s Primates’ Council, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda, did not attend the GSFA gathering (nor did anyone from his province). GAFCON’s largest province, the Church of Nigeria, was also entirely absent, though it sent hundreds of clergy and lay leaders to Kigali in April 2023. One delegate suggested to me that Nigerians are more excited about mission than structure, and that GSFA just wasn’t their kind of gathering. They wouldn’t be the first evangelical Anglicans to be tepid on synods, but their absence shows that coordinating such a merger (in which nearly all leaders would need to surrender some control) was clearly not as important to GAFCON’s African leadership as it was to the ACNA.
GSFA chairman Justin Badi spoke at least twice during the gathering of the various orthodox bodies as boats working alongside each other in a common battle. It’s a metaphor that may derive more from British imperial expansion than the New Testament, but his meaning is clear enough. GSFA and GAFCON are engaged in a common struggle for faithful teaching and renewal in mission across global Anglicanism. They need open communication and warm fellowship. But they have different strengths and purposes, and they won’t be merging anytime soon.
Despite Badi’s rhetoric since the Lambeth Conference, which often seems harsh to Western ears, the GSFA seems as solidly under the control of its most moderate wing as ever. The two major leaders shaping its life in the last 20 years were Archbishops Mouneer Anis of Egypt and Rennis Ponniah of South East Asia, neither of whom were ever fully aligned with GAFCON. Nearly all the GSFA gatherings have been in Singapore or Egypt, and hosting brings influence.
The new Primates’ Steering Committee has its successors, Archbishops Samy Shehata and Titus Chung, as two of its four elected leaders. Highly skilled theologians, both serve on IASCUFO, the Anglican Communion’s faith and order commission, and both have been involved in important work that aims to restructure the Communion in ways that minimize the Church of England’s central role. Both attended the Lambeth Conference and Chung was at the Primates’ Meeting last spring. They are clearly committed to historic orthodoxy and they are in full communion with the GAFCON-formed churches. But they are not separatists. They believe in reforming from within.
Some ACNA leaders flew home last week disappointed. The GSFA Assembly was Bill Atwood’s swan song. He retires this month. Foley Beach will soon step down, after his successor is elected in late June. Because of the Assembly’s timing, the new ACNA primate will not be eligible to serve on the GSFA’s senior bodies for some time, and the ACNA may not choose a new archbishop with the same kind of experience with and passion for global Anglicanism. This was the ACNA’s big chance to align these two movements, and it may not come again soon.
The deciding factor in GSFA’s future may lie with the actions of provinces that are more like South East Asia and less like ACNA. If provinces like Central Africa, West Africa, Melanesia, and Tanzania that are committed both to orthodoxy and to communion with the See of Canterbury apply to become members of GSFA, the momentum of the organization could still shift. If more organizations from within the Global South and from the Anglo-Catholic tradition apply for GSFA mission partnership status, it could expand this body’s reach and deepen its comprehensiveness.
The Covenantal Structure’s treatment of ecclesiastical jurisdiction — its open endorsement of boundary-crossing — is deeply concerning to many of these Catholic-minded provinces, because it constitutes a clear departure from traditional Anglican ecclesiology. But, in time, there may be ways to adjust this language while still preserving a valued place for the GAFCON-authorized provinces that have become integral to the GSFA’s life.
There is surely also time for the GSFA to get behind the new restructuring plan being worked out by the Anglican Communion Office, especially since several of its key leaders have had a hand in shaping it. If that new plan provides some way of recognizing the GAFCON-authorized churches, it could dampen the separatist impulse and open a wider and potentially fruitful conversation about Anglican identity. The Church of England’s ability to develop a plan to provide acceptable pastoral oversight to its conservative parishes will probably go a long way in calming troubled waters.
As we have seen so often over the last several decades, Anglican leaders will use strong words to defend historic orthodoxy and they will call out other leaders who surrender to those who would teach a false gospel. But the impulse to communion, the desire “to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” is etched deeply into our life. We may talk like evangelicals, but we usually end up acting like Catholics.
The GSFA calls itself a faithful remnant, and remnants don’t run away. They testify from within, suffering for the truth God has committed to them. Remnants wait and pray, trusting that God has not finally forsaken his troubled Church. So far, at least, the GSFA is using this self-descriptor with care and accuracy, which is a very good thing for all of us.
