The Jerusalem Declaration & Statement: Apples of Gold in a Setting of Silver
A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver.
Proverbs 25:11
In their statement that “The Future Has Arrived,” the Primates of the Gafcon movement have declared:
Our Gafcon Primates gathered this hour to fulfil our mandate to reform the Anglican Communion, as expressed in the Jerusalem Statement of 2008.
To be a member of the Global Anglican Communion, a province or a diocese must assent to the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008, the contemporary standard for Anglican identity.
In this article, I explain how the Jerusalem Statement establishes the framework for the reordering of the communion and how the Jerusalem Declaration fits within that framework as a discrete unit.
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Think of the biblical image of a silver bowl containing golden apples. The Jerusalem Statement is the silver dish that provides the context in which the “fellowship of confessing Anglicans” was birthed; the clauses of the Jerusalem Declaration are the contents—the golden apples—of that confession. For a proper understanding of the emergence of the Global Anglican Communion, context and content belong together.
For this article, I shall focus on the silver bowl, examining it section by section. I aim to show that, unlike many communiqués, the Jerusalem Statement is not a list of to-do items but a coherent theological treatise from beginning to end (see the Jerusalem Statement and Declaration here.)
Note: this is the second essay in a series on the Global Anglican Communion and the Jerusalem Declaration. The first essay offered a historical overview of the journey from Canterbury to Jerusalem. There, I argued that the 2008 Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem ushered in a kairos moment in which the Anglican Communion’s glory shifted from Canterbury to the Global South.
The Introduction: Jerusalem My Happy Home
The global church has no apostolic or historic See city, so the choice of Jerusalem for the first Global Anglican Future Conference was a fortunate one. The Holy City has always presented a double-edged persona: a place of judgment, such that Jesus mourned over its impending destruction, and a heavenly vision, when he comes again in glory. The Jerusalem Statement opens with praise from Psalm 147—“The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel.” This verse marries visions from the Old and New Testaments: the nations going up to Zion for instruction and the gospel going out from Jerusalem to the ends of the earth. Hence, the name of the conference—despite its odd acronym GAFCON—focuses not so much on past grievances as on a bright future for the global church.
When participants arrived in Jerusalem, they were issued slips of paper with two questions: “Do you want this conference to do something?” and “Do you wish to leave the Anglican Communion?” The overwhelming answer to the first question was ‘Yes!” and to the second “No!” The statement, which says on the one hand—“We cherish our Anglican heritage and the Anglican Communion and have no intention of departing from it”—and on the other hand: “GAFCON is not just a moment in time, but a movement in the Spirit.”
Seventeen years later, that consensus remains. In “The Future Has Arrived,” the Primates reiterate:
As has been the case from the very beginning, we have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion.
To be sure, many of those present in 2008 held out hope that this reforming movement in the Spirit might lead its historic head to a change of heart. That hope has been proved vain. Since 2008, successive Archbishops of Canterbury have studiously avoided recognizing the Gafcon movement, and there is little reason to think the newest archbishop will change that mindset.
The Global Anglican Context: An Indictment
The next section of the Jerusalem Statement is an extended prophetic indictment of contemporary culture—“this present darkness”—and of the Western Church’s failure to put on the whole armor of God and stand firm for the Gospel (Eph. 6:11-12). This failure is twofold: many churches and their leaders bowed the knee to the “militant secularism and pluralism” of modernity and postmodernity, leaving a spiritual vacuum “readily filled by other faiths and cults.” Since 2008, the hollowing out of Western “Christendom” has continued apace, with increasing hostility toward Christian believers while embracing Islam, anti-Semitism, and neo-paganism.
The indictment now turns to Anglicans in particular, noting that, despite its advantages as a worldwide body, the communion is “divided and distracted.” The statement identifies three undeniable facts underlying this disunity.
The first fact is the acceptance and promotion within the provinces of the Anglican Communion of a different “gospel” (cf. Galatians 1:6-8) which is contrary to the apostolic gospel.
The first fact recalls St. Paul’s rebuke to his converts in Galatia: “I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting him who called you in the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel.” He immediately adds, “not that there is another one, but there are some who trouble you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.” These perverters are wolves in sheep’s clothing and enemies of the gospel.
The statement describes the embrace of this false gospel in terms of religious pluralism (the teaching that all ways lead to God) and pansexualism, which goes today under the ever-expanding LGBTQIA+ banner. These two causes of division are the prototypical sins of idolatry and sexual immorality condemned by Moses (Exod. 32:6), St. Paul (Rom. 1:18-31), and the first Jerusalem Council (Acts 15:28-29). The simple apostolic counsel is to “flee” these works of darkness (Gal. 5:19-20; 1 Cor. 6:18; 10:14) and to have nothing to do with those who promote them (1 Cor. 6:9-11; Eph. 5:3-5).
The specific charge to bishops and their clergy at ordination is “to banish and drive away all strange doctrines contrary to God’s Word.” So, if the first fact of the indictment is true, the second and third follow from it as a matter of ecclesiastical discipline. The second fact is the declaration by provincial bodies in the Global South that they are out of communion with bishops and churches that promote this false gospel. The third fact is the manifest failure of the Communion Instruments to exercise discipline in the face of overt heterodoxy.
A Failure of Discipline After 2003
Since 2003, many provinces in the Global South have declared themselves in a state of “impaired communion” with the Episcopal Church USA and the Anglican Church of Canada. When Rowan Williams, contrary to the express will of the Primates, invited the Episcopal Presiding Bishop to their meeting in 2007, Global South Primates refused to receive Holy Communion. When Williams again reneged on his promise to disinvite the Americans from Lambeth 2008, several hundred bishops instead came to Jerusalem and stayed away from Lambeth.
Yet many in the Gafcon movement continued to hope that Canterbury under Justin Welby would hear their plea. Ten years later, in its “Letter to the Churches,” the third conference, again in Jerusalem, “respectfully urged” the new archbishop to invite Gafcon bishops from North America and Brazil to the upcoming Lambeth Conference. Archbishop Welby did not even deign to acknowledge this request. From that time on, as I see it, “impaired communion” had de facto become “broken communion,” as foreseen in 2008: “Sadly, this crisis has torn the fabric of the Communion in such a way that it cannot simply be patched back together.”
I want to pause on the word “sadly.” Gafcon’s critics often say, “Why are you so angry and vindictive?” The vast number of Anglicans I have met in this movement, West and East, North and South, love the Anglican way and would choose no other. We cherish our heritage from the Church of England: its cathedrals and hymnody, its scholars, missionaries, and martyrs, and, of course, its Prayer Book and Articles, the bequest from Thomas Cranmer. We are grieved at its lapse into revisionism and cultural conformity and are sympathetic with the dilemmas many “Remainers” face. And we have not lost hope that the day will come when a true Anglican orthodoxy will arise in force in that blessed isle.
St. Paul, reflecting on God’s hardening of the Jewish people, could see a providential end in their situation: “For if their rejection means the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance mean but life from the dead?” (Rom. 11:15). May it be so in God’s providence for our Mother Church!
In my address to GAFCON IV in Kigali, I challenged the delegates:
Here is the question for us, my friends. Was this indictment true? Did Gafcon truthfully identify a false Gospel? If it is not true, we need to repent and turn back to the Canterbury Communion. But if it is true, then we have no choice but to separate from it and its promoters and enablers.
The same challenge underlies the most recent Primates’ communiqué.
A Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans
It is a quirk of branding that “Gafcon,” with all its odd associations (e.g., “gaffe-prone”), is stuck. In the years following the first conference, the movement took the name “The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans,” later adding “global” to the official name—“The Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans.” In the next section of the Jerusalem Statement, the participants define their purpose:
We are a fellowship of people united in the communion (koinonia) of the one Spirit and committed to work and pray together in the common mission of Christ. It is a confessing fellowship in that its members confess the faith of Christ crucified, stand firm for the gospel in the global and Anglican context, and affirm a contemporary rule, the Jerusalem Declaration, to guide the movement for the future. We are a fellowship of Anglicans, including provinces, dioceses, churches, missionary jurisdictions, para-church organisations, and individual Anglican Christians whose goal is to reform, heal, and revitalise the Anglican Communion and expand its mission to the world.
Two characteristics stand out from this definition. One is fellowship. The word “fellowship” taken in contemporary context can mean a variety of things, from happy hour at the pub with hail fellows well met, to membership in a country club or in an Oxbridge university. But Christian koinonia is distinctive. We have communion with the Father and Son through the Holy Spirit as members of the Body of Christ (2 Cor 13:14; Eph 4:4; 1 John 1:3-7). It is for this reason, I think, the Primates have retained the title Global Anglican Communion, which aspires to the same global and spiritual vision as the historic communion. This idea is expressed in our hymnody, such as this verse from “The day thou gavest, Lord is ended”:
We thank you that your Church, unsleeping
while earth rolls onward into light,
through all the world her watch is keeping
and never rests by day or night.
Anglican Orthodoxy
The confessional basis of the Gafcon fellowship is orthodoxy, the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3). The Jerusalem Declaration defines its clauses as “the tenets of orthodoxy,” as opposed to overt heterodoxy, as found in the third “fact.” Gerald Bray usefully notes: “Heresy, schism, and apostasy differ from one another, but all three ultimately derive their meaning from the concept of ‘orthodoxy.’” In defining Anglican orthodoxy, the statement simply quotes from the foundational canon of the Church of England:
The doctrine of the Church is grounded in the Holy Scriptures and in such teachings of the ancient Fathers and Councils of the Church as are agreeable to the said Scriptures. In particular, such doctrine is to be found in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, the Book of Common Prayer and the Ordinal.
The term “Anglican orthodoxy” may sound strange to a newcomer’s ears. It has become commonplace over the past quarter-century as Anglicans from a variety of traditions have sought to identify what unites them from those who have departed the Anglican way.
Before GAFCON 2008, I was part of a multi-cultural “GAFCON Theological Resource Team” that produced a booklet titled The Way, the Truth, and the Life. In the section titled “Anglican Orthodoxy,” we identified authentic streams of Anglican faith and practice: evangelical, catholic, and charismatic (note the lower-case indicates that these are tendencies, not parties).
We even included as typical the Anglican “spirit of liberality,” the openness to reason and imagination, and often associated with the Anglican “middle way.” Orthodoxy has accommodated figures as diverse as Richard Hooker and Richard Baxter, George Whitfield and the Wesleys, Charles Simeon and John Keble, Bishop Griffith-Thomas and Archbishop Ramsey, C.S. Lewis and Packer and Stott, and Bishops Neill, Newbigin, and Nazir-Ali.
But while acknowledging this breadth, we noted that orthodox discipline is essential to orthodox doctrine. Discipline is a mark of discipleship and a biblical fundamental, as our Lord himself said: “If you love me, keep my commandments.”
St. John puts it this way: Whoever says “I know him” but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him (John 14:15; cf. Matt. 7:21-23; James 2:14-26; 1 John 2:4; Rev. 20:12).
This section of the Jerusalem Statement prepares for the next and concludes: “Building on the above doctrinal foundation of Anglican identity, we hereby publish the Jerusalem Declaration as the basis of our fellowship.”
Having set the table, we shall move on to the golden apples of the Jerusalem Declaration in the essays to come.
References
- The Way the Truth and the Life: Theological Resources to a Global Anglican Future (London: Latimer Trust, 2008).
- Gerald Bray, Heresy, Schism, and Apostasy (London: Latimer Trust, 2008).
- Stephen Noll, “Foundational Texts: A Plenary Address to the GAFCON IV Assembly, 18 April 2023” at https://stephenswitness.org/2023/04/22/gafcon-foundational-texts/.
Image: Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. Photo by BargotiPhotography from Getty Images, via Canva. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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