The Global Anglican Communion: From Canterbury to Jerusalem
In October 2025, the Primates of the Gafcon movement announced that “The Future Has Arrived”:
The first Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) gathered in 2008 in Jerusalem to prayerfully respond to the abandonment of the Scriptures by some of the most senior leaders of the Anglican Communion, and to seek their repentance.
In the absence of such repentance, we have been prayerfully advancing towards a future for faithful Anglicans, where the Bible is restored to the heart of the Communion.
Today, that future has arrived… Today Gafcon is leading the Global Anglican Communion.
As someone with a long history in the Gafcon movement and the author of a book titled The Global Anglican Communion, I hope to explain, in a series of short essays, the significance of the title “Global Anglican Communion” and the meaning of the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration.
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Someone may ask: “Hasn’t the Anglican Communion been around for a long, long time?” This depends on what you consider a long time and how you define the Anglican Communion. Let me suggest a thumbnail sketch of Anglican church history, which brings us up to the present moment.
The Mother Church
Christianity in the British Isles had existed for centuries before the Roman emissary Augustine of Canterbury arrived on English soil in 597 AD and founded the Provinces of Canterbury and York. These provinces remained Roman Catholic until 1534, when Parliament established the Church of England under the monarch, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as “Primate of All England.” Thomas Cranmer, the first Archbishop of the Church of England, was a Protestant Reformer who laid the doctrinal and liturgical foundations of the Church of England (the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the Book of Common Prayer), which, after a brief interlude under Queen Mary, remain to this day.
The Colonial Communion (1867–1998)
As the British Empire expanded and missionaries planted churches throughout the world, these colonial churches looked to the Archbishop of Canterbury as “first among equals,” and their bishops met for the first time in 1867 at the Archbishop’s Lambeth Palace in London to constitute what would become the Anglican Communion.
Because the Church of England was established under Parliamentary law, the maturing colonial churches adopted their own “autonomous” constitutions, based on English formularies and canon law. The question of Communion authority, however, remained problematic. One attempt to define the “communion” of Anglicans was the “Lambeth Quadrilateral,” four basic principles of doctrine and church order. The 1930 Lambeth Conference defined the Anglican Communion in terms of churches in communion with the See of Canterbury as “they uphold the Catholic and Apostolic faith and order as they are set forth in the Book of Common Prayer.”
During the 20th century, the Communion adopted four governing “instruments of unity” —the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Lambeth Conference of bishops. The “Instruments” give the appearance of representative democracy, but the real source of power has remained a Western preserve, with a bureaucracy in London and major financing from New York.
Crisis at Canterbury (1998)
Although most colonial churches had become independent by the mid-20th century, their voice was muffled until 1998, when they encountered a perfect storm: Enlightenment skepticism toward the Bible and the expressive individualism of the Sexual Revolution, which had seeped into the culture of the churches in the West.
These forces came to a head at the Lambeth Conference held in Canterbury in 1998. In the eyes of the Western media, the presenting issue at Lambeth 1998 was sex, in particular the ordination of practicing homosexuals and the blessing of same-sex couples in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. In the eyes of churches in the Global South, however, the issue was the Bible and its clear teaching on marriage.
Six months before the Lambeth Conference, a meeting of Global South leaders in Kuala Lumpur had sent a warning shot, stating:
…we reaffirm that the only sexual expression, as taught by Scripture, which honours God and upholds human dignity is that between a man and a woman within the sacred ordinance of marriage.
At Lambeth, in the debate leading to the passage of Resolution I. 10, a Nigerian bishop put it this way:
When the [missionaries] came, they came holding the Bible, telling us that what they believe is what has come from the word of God. And, so our forefathers meticulously accepted the Christian faith and religion that was tied to the word of God and the Scriptures. Therefore, we accept the Scripture as the most authentic we should follow, rather than our intelligence or the way we [are] naturalistic.
So the issue that divided the Communion in the eyes of the Global South bishops was not about sex but about a fundamental departure from the apostolic faith and order, that
the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as ‘containing all things necessary to salvation,’ [are] the rule and ultimate standard of faith.
1888 Lambeth Quadrilateral
The Global South view was approved by a vast majority of bishops in Resolution I.10 on Human Sexuality, which begins:
This Conference, in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds faithfulness in marriage between a man and a woman in lifelong union, and believes that abstinence is right for those who are not called to marriage.
And here, too little noticed, is the way the Resolution ends by
[noting] the significance of the Kuala Lumpur Statement on Human Sexuality and the concerns expressed in resolutions IV.26, V.1, V.10, V.23 and V.35 on the authority of Scripture in matters of marriage and sexuality and asks the Primates and the ACC to include them in their monitoring process.
The Road to Jerusalem (1998-2008)
The leadership of the Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church of Canada soon made clear that they rejected the Lambeth resolution, the former sealing its opposition in 2003 by consecrating V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as bishop. The Resolution’s disciplinary responsibility now fell to the “Instruments of Unity,” headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primates, and the Anglican Consultative Council.
Although George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, voted in favor of Resolution I.10, he and his successor, Rowan Williams, failed to discipline the North American provinces. The Global South churches protested repeatedly to the Archbishop of Canterbury through their Primates. These protests came to a head at the meeting in 2007 at Dar es Salaam, where Rowan Williams agreed to use his “gathering” role to refuse an invitation to the North American bishops to the 2008 Lambeth Conference unless they conformed to Communion teaching. He proceeded to renege on his commitment, disinviting only Gene Robinson but welcoming Robinson’s consecrators.
As I was living in Uganda at the time, Abp. Peter Akinola of Nigeria asked me to join a team writing a statement titled “The Road to Lambeth,” warning Archbishop Rowan Williams that the churches of the Global South would not attend the upcoming Lambeth Conference in 2008 unless he excluded the disobedient churches. The Road to Lambeth statement concluded:
At the outset of our Lord’s ministry, he began preaching: “The time (kairos) is fulfilled; the Kingdom of God is near” (Mark 1:15). A kairos moment is a special time when God rotates the hinge of history in a new direction. It may also be called a “crisis” time (krisis), exposing the difference of light and darkness (John 3:19). We believe that such a kairos moment and krisis time have come to the Anglican Communion.
The Road to Lambeth
Rowan Williams ignored the warning, and the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) met in Jerusalem in June 2008, three months before the Lambeth Conference.
The die was cast, the Rubicon crossed. The authority to speak for orthodox Anglicanism had shifted from Canterbury to Jerusalem (cf. Isaiah 2:1-3).
The Jerusalem Conference (2008)
The Global Anglican Future Conference was an amazing event. It was organized in six months. The first days of the Conference took place in Jordan to accommodate participants from Muslim countries that refused visas to Israel. As it turned out, participants had hardly arrived when we were expelled from Jordan, and conference organizers amazingly found “room in the inn” for us in Jerusalem.
The Conference was a colorful assembly of races, nationalities, men and women, bishops, clergy, and laypeople. There were plenary sessions of praise-filled worship and breakout sessions led by scholars, bishops, evangelists, and other leaders. I was secretary of the Statement group, which included the Primates of Kenya and Rwanda, two diocesan bishops from Nigeria and Sydney, a bishop’s wife from Nigeria (with a Ph.D.), two academics, and a vicar from England. Each evening, our group would report on our progress to the seven Primates present.
On the penultimate day of the conference, I read the draft to the assembled participants, and we solicited comments, which were so voluminous that our group stayed home to make amendments and missed the trip to Galilee the next day. When Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda read the final approved draft to the entire Assembly, wild alleluias of rejoicing rang out. Each of the seven Primates then solemnly went forward and signed the Jerusalem Statement. Gafcon was launched!
Toward the Global Anglican Communion (2025)
I believe GAFCON 2008 was a kairos moment in the history of the Anglican Communion, as Archbishop Mbanda announced, “The future has arrived.”
It is hard—let’s admit it—for those of us who have looked to England as our Anglican compass to fathom the claim that this movement, which came forth from and was nurtured by the Church of England, is now taking off from the nest and flying on its own into the future.
The First Jerusalem Council
There are, I think, historical precedents from Scripture and history for such an understanding. The first Jerusalem Council convened because St. Paul’s mission preaching had broken the original bonds of Jewish belief and practice. Having listened to the testimony of Paul and Peter and consulted together, the assembled leaders wrote a letter to the wider church, saying:
For it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us to lay on you no greater burden than these requirements: that you abstain from what has been sacrificed to idols, and from blood, and from what has been strangled, and from sexual immorality. If you keep yourselves from these, you will do well. Farewell.
Acts 15:28-29
The Council of Nicaea
A second precedent, whose 1700th anniversary we celebrate this year, is the Council of Nicaea (325), which produced the Nicene Creed, the orthodox standard of the Holy Trinity. The significance of the Council of Nicaea is a matter of historical hindsight. Its teaching continued to be disputed for a half century, until a second council at Constantinople in 381 confirmed and supplemented the Nicene Creed in the form we now use in our liturgy.
The First Continental Congress
Thirdly, as an American looking ahead to another anniversary, I find it difficult not to see the Jerusalem Statement as analogous to the Declaration of Independence issued by the Continental Congress in 1776. Just as the American colonists’ appeals for recognition by Parliament and the King went unaddressed, former churches of the British Empire convened the Global Anglican Future Conference after repeated appeals to Canterbury regarding a matter of biblical authority came to nothing.
Much lay ahead for the colonies before they established a “more perfect union.” And perhaps I may add in hope, just as the war that followed was divisive and bloody, it has been replaced by Anglo-American ties of affection and unity, which came together in the Grand Alliance that defeated the neo-paganism of Nazism.
Image: Along the Via Delorosa in Jerusalem’s Old City, alexsl from Getty Images Signature, courtesy of Canva. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
Prayers for the Global Anglican Communion of Churches
As Anglican churches prepare this World Mission Sunday, I would like to propose that our prayers include a petition for the global Anglican communion of churches.
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