Jerusalem — The future of the Anglican Communion, the third largest Christian church in the world, has been in serious doubt since the 2003 election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay cleric, to be bishop of New Hampshire.
This week, some of that uncertainty is being resolved. The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) convened in Jerusalem on Sunday, drawing 1,200 conservative Anglicans, including 304 bishops. One of their number, Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, describes the event as “the beginning of a second reformation.”
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Immediately in advance of the gathering, conservative church leaders issued a pamphlet entitled “The Way, the Truth, and the Life.” In it, they assert that on issues of sexuality the collective decisions by primates, as the leaders of the 38 Anglican provinces are known, have been “ignored” and conservatives “derided” and “demonized” by the U.S. Episcopal Church. “There is no longer any hope, therefore, for a unified communion,” the document proclaims.
GAFCON attendees have been reticent to use the word schism — they prefer “broken.” But this seems a preference without distinction. Most of those at GAFCON are boycotting the Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade gathering on doctrinal matters — deemed “an instrument of unity” in Anglican theology — which will be held next month in Canterbury, the ancient seat of the Church of England. One of the pamphlet’s authors, the Oxford theologian Rev. Roger Beckwith, says that the move puts Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and nominal head of the global communion, “in an impossible position.”
Homosexuality, and particularly the consecration of Robinson, will likely be known to history as the cause of this Anglican crack-up, just as schoolchildren remember the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand as the “cause” of the First World War. But, likewise, such an understanding is a dramatic oversimplification.
More crucial than the substance of any single issue to understanding recent developments in Anglicanism is the dramatic rearrangement that has taken place in the communion’s demographics and leadership over the past several decades. Today, the church is overwhelmingly African, and these Africans are overwhelmingly orthodox. That is, they believe Jesus to be the sole route to salvation, and that the Bible’s proscriptions are meant to be taken literally. As Archbishop Henry Luke Orombi preached at GAFCON’s opening service, “I come from Uganda, and my God performs miracles. This Bible is black and white. It is not a historical document.” (By contrast, a leading Western thinker has tepidly called for “creativity in our theology” as a means of holding the communion together, while Bishop Robinson has defended himself by saying the Bible’s proscription of homosexual acts applies to homosexuality as it was understood two millennia ago, which he says is different from today.)
