Anglican Schism

Global South church leaders – representing about 75% of Anglicans who frequent pews – have decided that it's time to start cutting ties between the "Canterbury Communion" and the rest of the Anglican Communion.

Anglicanism's First World churches have a disproportionately high number of active bishops and large trust funds built on generations of wealth. Global South Anglican flocks are rich in converts, children and, with many battle zones, martyrs. While clashes over LGBTQ issues have made headlines, Anglicans have increasingly become divided by colonial history, economics, culture, demographics and radically different approaches to doctrine.

From Anglican Unplugged

“What this means is that we are now going to have two Communions of Anglicans going forward, the Global South Anglicans who are keeping to the teachings of the Scripture and the Global North Anglicans who are preaching and practicing a watered-down gospel.”

This is how the Rev. Tom Otieno, the vicar of Saint Barnabas Anglican Church of Kenya in Nairobi explained the latest schism in the church, which looked unresolvable after the meeting of the Global Anglican Future Conference in Kigali, Rwanda in late April.

“We no longer recognize the leadership of the Right Rev. Justin Welby as the head of the Anglican Church, and I believe we are soon going to announce the new headquarters of the Global South church,” Otieno added.

At the end of the week-long meeting, some 1,000 delegates issued the Kigali Commitment, whose main thrust was that:

We have no confidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the other Instruments of Communion led by him (the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meetings) are able to provide a godly way forward that will be acceptable to those who are committed to the truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency and authority of Scripture. The Instruments of Communion have failed to maintain true communion based on the Word of God and shared faith in Christ.

All four Instruments propose that the way ahead for the Anglican Communion is to learn to walk together in ‘good disagreement.’ However we reject the claim that two contradictory positions can both be valid in matters affecting salvation. We cannot ‘walk together’ in good disagreement with those who have deliberately chosen to walk away from the ‘faith once for all delivered to the saints’ (Jude 3). The people of God ‘walk in his ways’, ‘walk in the truth’, and ‘walk in the light’, all of which require that we do not walk in Christian fellowship with those in darkness (Deuteronomy 8:6; 2 John 4; 1 John 1:7).

According to the commitment, successive archbishops of Canterbury had failed to guard the faith by inviting bishops to Lambeth who have embraced or promoted practices contrary to Scripture.

“This failure of church discipline has been compounded by the current Archbishop of Canterbury who has himself welcomed the provision of liturgical resources to bless these practices contrary to Scripture. This renders his leadership role in the Anglican Communion entirely indefensible,” it stated.

The Church of England, the mother church, early this year agreed to bless same-sex relationships, although stating that such weddings were still not on the cards. To many conservatives, the difference is the same, and the issue has continued to raise hackles in the global stage.

The Future Conference is a communion of conservative Anglican churches formed in 2008 in response to ongoing theological disputes in the worldwide Anglican Communion. The majority of its membership is in the Global South, which although lacking in resources compared to its brethren in the developed world, has the numbers and the growth that are critical for the church’s future.

The inaugural conference took place in Jerusalem in 2008, the second was held in Nairobi in 2013, the third took place in Jerusalem in 2018, and a subsequent conference gathered in Dubai for G19 in February 2019.

The current meeting is underway in Kigali, where the chairman, Archbishop Foley Beach of the Anglican Church in North America said, “Sadly, with broken hearts, we must say that unless the Archbishop of Canterbury repents, we can no longer recognize him as the ‘first among equals’ and the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion.”

The archbishop used his address to reference the decision of the Church of England to approve proposals to bless same-sex unions in a vote earlier this year of the General Synod.

Archbishop Beach described the Kigali meeting of over 1,300 people from across 53 nations as potentially “one of the most important church gatherings in our time.”

He also called on the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Church in Wales, the Episcopal Church of Brazil, the Anglican Church of New Zealand, the Church of Australia, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the Episcopal Church of the USA to also repent and “return to the teachings of Holy Scripture.”

“It is time for the whole Anglican establishment to be reformed,” he said. “Why does the secular government of only one of the nations represented in the Anglican Communion still get to pick the spiritual leader of the Anglican Communion? This makes no sense in today’s post-colonial world.”

Gavin Ashenden isn't so sure the bureaucracy will allow change and full separation will ne necessary.

In a secular organisation this might alarm shareholders, investors and members and shake the confidence in the appointed leadership to such an extent that the chairman would for reasons of honour or realpolitik be forced to resign.

But not in the C of E. Welby knows very well that for as long as the dissidents don’t declare UDI and form an alternative communion, he is untouchable.

And there are two other factors which will allow him an undisturbed sleep at night.

The first is that one reason why the UDI or schism option has not, and probably will not happen, is that English canon lawyers wrote most of the constitutions governing the African provinces. To make legal changes these constitutions would have to be revoked and re-written.

This process has, perhaps intentionally, been designed to take a very long time. Some provinces have to wait for two separated meetings of governing bodies that only gather once every few years. So this is not going to happen quickly and will take a sustained effort if it is to happen at all.

The other reason is that a number of the albeit very few English bishops and allied conservative agencies like the Church Society have an investment in the organisation of the Church of England continuing uninterrupted. And they made long and heartfelt pleas insisting that not all was lost; that the progressives were not as determined on excluding them as they pretended to be; that the conservatives might yet mount an institutional take over through the Synodal and senior appointments process.

It is hard to know whether they actually believe these claims, so unimaginably far-fetched are they as a realistic prospect, but that have said them with tears in their eyes, and conviction in their voices. And this has added to the sense of constitutional and theological confusion in Kigali.

The outcome of all this is that the status quo remains the same. There is and will be no formal schism within the Anglican Communion. Instead the strategy of boycotting meetings, writings letters of protests, expressing votes of no confidence will continue. The disparity between the numbers of Anglicans which rather oddly diminish rapidly in the Province of Canterbury and York but grow readily throughout Africa will also continue.