News & Analysis
The October 16 launch of a Global Anglican Communion by the conservative renewal movement GAFCON has captured headlines around the world. Yet many are puzzled about how the decision was made, who will join in, and what the development will mean for the future of the Canterbury-based Instruments of Communion.
GAFCON’s General Secretary, Bishop Paul Donison of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), provided a few answers in an interview released Friday on the Stand Firm podcast, which is hosted by three ACNA priests. The Living Church has learned more from conversations with Global South primates and an additional participant, who attended both the three-day consultation at the Lakeside Hotel and Conference Center in Sydney that birthed the concept and the short online meeting of the GAFCON primates’ council that approved it, in the participant’s words, “unanimously and enthusiastically.”
Seven of the 12 men who drafted the communique were part of the Diocese of Sydney or the Anglican Church in North America. All 12 belong to dioceses and churches that have either never been part of the Anglican Communion or have been largely disengaged from it for the last two decades.
While the announcement came as a surprise to many, Donison described it as a summary of GAFCON’s consistent message since its founding conference in Jerusalem in 2008. In discussions at the consultation, he said the participants recognized “that GAFCON has said a lot of things very clearly over the years, but maybe it’s time to say those things in one document, with even more clarity, and a bit of application.
“There’s nothing new in GAFCON. We’ve said it all in multiple statements. But this was a way to say, ‘Wow, we’ve actually said a lot about what our relationship with the Instruments of Communion should be,” he said. “We’ve said a lot about the [Archbishop of Canterbury]. We’ve said a lot about where Scripture stands.’”
The Consultation
Donison said that Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda, GAFCON’s chairman, had called for a consultation two months ago to discuss the movement’s future.
“He was sensing, in that as there’s further erosion within the Anglican Communion structures—a complete lack of the repentance that we have been calling for since 2008 … Mbanda said, ‘It’s time for us to have a consultation about where are we going. What’s the future of GAFCON?’”
While admitting that the selection of Bishop Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury was “a factor” in the consultation’s decision, Donison denied that the launch of a Global Anglican Communion was a direct response, mentioning that the meeting had been planned long before the October 3 announcement about Mullally.
The gathering was held in Sydney, Donison said, to ease the participation of 82-year-old Peter Jensen, a former Archbishop of Sydney, who served as GAFCON’s first general secretary from 2008 to 2019. Retired archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, its first chairman, also agreed to attend.
Mbanda spoke about the consultation in an October 17 interview with the Rev. Dominic Steele, a priest of the Diocese of Sydney, on his podcast, The Pastor’s Heart. He described it as a time to be with “the founding fathers; to be inspired by their hearts, their commitments; to sit down with them, and think together, and look back together in the context of everything that is going on.”
The steps taken at the consultation, Mbanda also said, “had been on my heart for a long time,” telling Steele that he wondered: “We have talked a lot. Is it time to walk the talk?”
In addition to Donison, Mbanda, Jensen, and Akinola, the meeting included three other members of the GAFCON Primates’ Council: Archbishop Henry Ndukuba of Nigeria and the leaders of two churches largely formed and authenticated by GAFCON, Archbishop Miguel Ochoa Cavalcanti of the Anglican Church of Brazil, and Archbishop Steve Wood of the Anglican Church in North America.
Several other members of GAFCON’s leadership team were present: the Rev. Canon Jodie McNeill, a priest of the Diocese of Sydney who serves as GAFCON’s global operations manager; and trustee and guarantor Olayinka Fisher, a former Nigerian diplomat and tech entrepreneur. Another trustee, Emmanuel Kampouris, an ACNA layman from New Jersey who was formerly chair of the American Standard Companies and a board member of Amway Inc., participated via Zoom.
Also attending were former Sydney archbishop Glenn Davies, who now leads the GAFCON-founded Diocese of the Southern Cross, and Bishop Julian Dobbs of the ACNA’s Diocese of the Living Word, GAFCON’s regional secretary for North America.
Donison said the consultation’s first focus was listening to Jensen and Akinola retell the story of the GAFCON movement, and that the communiqué emerged “really organically, and I would say under the power of the Holy Spirit guiding us.”
He remembered: “It felt like when we finally read what became the final communiqué, there was a most profound sense of God’s presence—the Holy Spirit in that room. There were alleluias and there was singing. There was a just a sense that we were getting just a little touch of that Shekinah glory.”
The Primates’ Council Meeting
The consultation members then decided, Donison said, to call an online meeting of the Primates’ Council. This was held at 11 p.m. Sydney time on the gathering’s final day, October 16, TLC was told by a participant.
“All the primates of GAFCON were notified, were called to an extraordinary emergency meeting where we were able to look at the statement, talk it through, explain it. And for those who were on the call—which was the overwhelming majority—unanimous consent. Everyone signed on,” Donison said.
Another participant specified that seven of GAFCON’s 12 primates attended, and an eighth primate confirmed his support the next day. The secretariat has not heard from the four other primates. One member of the Primates’ Council told TLC he was not invited to the meeting.
“We had such a unified, great moment,” Donison said. “It was electric. It felt right. It didn’t feel rushed. It didn’t feel like we were pushing. It felt like we were receiving something from the Lord as a gift to say, ‘Here’s some clarity for the future.’”
The meeting may not have felt rushed to Donison, but it was very short, for a gathering to confirm something as momentous as the creation of a Global Anglican Communion. The email from GAFCON’s communications department, with the communiqué’s full text under the heading “The Future Has Arrived,” was sent out at 11:55 p.m. Sydney time on October 16, 55 minutes after the Primates’ Council meeting began.
What Comes Next?
Donison told the Stand Firm hosts that the GAFCON secretariat was assembling a list of signatories for the communiqué and that plans were coming together for a March 3-6 bishops’ conference in Abuja that would “confer [on] and celebrate” the Global Anglican Communion.
He said that all primates who will sign GAFCON’s 2008 Jerusalem Declaration are invited to be part of the Global Anglican Communion’s Council of Primates, which will gather for the first time at the Abuja conference to elect the communion’s first leader. This Council of Primates will be distinct from GAFCON’s current Primates’ Council, Donison said.
He also said that many primates who are not deeply involved in the movement have come to GAFCON conferences, and participants in the communion’s Council of Primates could potentially be very large.
Donison said the selection of a leader for the Global Anglican Communion would help ACNA clergy, including him, answer questions that newcomers pose about their relationship to wider Anglicanism,
“When people say, ‘Isn’t the Archbishop of Canterbury the head [of the Anglican Communion]?’ you can say, ‘No—historically, yes, there has been a role, but things have changed. And, in fact, now, for global Anglicanism, for the Global Anglican Communion, the chairman of the Primates’ Council, of those who sign the Jerusalem Declaration, is the primus inter pares … It just makes it clear,” he said.
This suggests that a major impetus for the creation of the communion may be a longstanding desire for legitimation among churches—like the ACNA—that were created under GAFCON’s auspices, but were never in communion with Canterbury, a dynamic also in play in ultimately unsuccessful attempts to encourage a merger between GAFCON and the GSFA in 2023.
Challenges
Though the Global Anglican Communion announcement has been widely covered by church and secular news outlets, very few GAFCON-affiliated churches have spoken publicly about whether they plan to affiliate with the body. Only the primates of Rwanda, Nigeria, and the ACNA, all of whom helped to draft it, have made statements. Donison said in the Stand Firm interview that another five GAFCON-affiliated primates have privately signaled their support.
TLC attempted to contact the leader of every Anglican Communion member church that has been associated with GAFCON and received only two replies. Both archbishops acknowledged they had serious reservations about the project but requested anonymity.
This may not have been unexpected by GAFCON’s leaders. In the Stand Firm interview, Donison acknowledged that “these movements are never without detractors. We pray that there would be incredible unity, but we’d be foolish to think that everybody’s going to sign on.”
He added: “There are going to be some that are going to not like this, and they are going to say, ‘I’m not going to go with you in this next step.’ … There are also going to be people who we are surprised to see show up, and we’re going to say, ‘Wow, brother, I didn’t know you would be willing to put your neck on the block like this.’”
Donison acknowledged that some provinces will be reluctant to join because “there are certain parts of the world where that British connection literally gives you more safety and security.”
“But I still have to believe you are never in danger of leaning into gospel fidelity,” he said. “You’re never really in danger of doing a hard thing for Jesus. What are we afraid of? What are we really afraid of? If we are afraid, we’re afraid of the wrong things.”
Donison also said the communiqué’s requirement that members of the Global Anglican Communion cannot “receive any monetary contribution from the [Anglican Consultative Council] or its networks” would be difficult for some churches.” He also seems to interpret the requirement as a demand that churches cut all ties with Communion-affiliated donors, even those who affirm traditional teaching on marriage and human sexuality.
While Donison said that the ACNA’s Anglican Relief and Development Fund could provide some help with economic sustainability, the underlying issue for him was “a poverty mindset.” Global South churches wary about giving up their partnerships with churches in communion with Canterbury, he added, should be “willing to say, ‘We actually need to move to a view of abundance that says, We actually can be sufficient without getting dirty money.’”
He held up the Anglican Church of Rwanda as an example, saying, “Long ago, they took a stand and said, ‘We’re just not going to receive money, period.’ It’s not that they had a plan that said, ‘We’re not going to miss a beat.’ No, it’s going to be a sacrifice. But for a question of principled fellowship, we’re going to choose not to take money out of the hands of those who are going to try to manipulate us through that money to try to compromise the gospel.”
What Donison did not mention was that conservative American Anglicans lavishly funded the Rwandan church in the 2000s, when the Anglican Mission in America was operating under its auspices. A 2011 letter from Rwandan bishop Alexis Bilindabagabo alleges that American donors gave $1.9 million (US) to central church authorities between 2006 and 2011.
Nigerian primate Henry Ndukuba, whose church serves Africa’s fourth-richest country by GDP, registered his firm agreement with Donison in an October 20 video posted by Advent Christian News, his church’s media ministry.
“We are not going to associate or receive anything from them. They may have the money. They may have the property. They may have the power. But you can take all these things, but give us the undiluted Word of God and Jesus,” he said.
Ndukuba also warned of the consequences for not cutting financial ties with Canterbury-linked Western churches: “We are saying to our bishops, especially in Nigeria, if we see you eating with the devil—even if it is with the longest spoon—we will cut you off. Like the Hebrew young men, even if God chooses not to save us, we will not bow to the image of Nebuchadnezzar.”
The Anglican Church of Kenya is likely a crucial bellwether for the project’s success. The Global South’s third-largest church and the host of important institutions like the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa, Kenya has long been an active participant both in GAFCON and the Instruments of Communion.
The church’s primate, Archbishop Jackson Ole Sapit, did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the Global Anglican Communion announcement (one of his staffers told our reporter that getting a response would be “a Hail Mary pass”).
But the Bishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya’s Diocese of Garissa, Francis Omondi, said to TLC that breaking ties with Canterbury would be a major cultural shift for his church, which retains deep respect for its historical ties to the church that brought it the gospel and has a robust culture of internal consultation.
“Kenya will need a fundamental reworking to break with Canterbury. No archbishop can take Kenya away without changing the church’s law. This will be hard to achieve. Breaking with Canterbury may result in breaking the church locally, creating two provinces,” Omondi said.
“The position I take and which I advance is that we cannot and should not server links with Canterbury. We are so culturally intertwined that these breakaway talks cannot work. I think the challenge is desire for power and control. In Kenya, we represent reasoning from both sides but have chosen to reconcile them in a united church.”
It may be impossible for the Diocese of Sydney, which has always played a central role in GAFCON, to participate fully in the Global Anglican Communion. The communiqué states that “a province or diocese” must assent to the Jerusalem Declaration to join the communion, but it also states that “provinces are encouraged to amend their constitution to remove any reference to being in communion with the See of Canterbury and the Church of England.”
The Diocese of Sydney endorsed the Jerusalem Declaration shortly after it was issued in 2008, and its archbishop, Kanishka Raffel, is listed among GAFCON’s “primate advisors,” an adjunct body to its Primates’ Council.
But as GAFCON Australia’s previous chair, Bishop Richard Condie of Tasmania, acknowledged in an October 21 pastoral letter to his diocese, “The Anglican Church of Australia remains ‘in Communion’ with the See of Canterbury by virtue of our Constitution. That can only be changed by the General Synod and then agreement by all the Dioceses. That is unlikely to occur.”
The Anglican Church of Australia’s constitutional commitment to communion with the Church of England is not unqualified, and can be broken if such communion is deemed to be in violation of the Australian church’s “fundamental declarations.” Some conservatives suggest that a change to the Church of England’s doctrine of marriage could trigger such a path.
Conservative evangelical dioceses in other Communion-loyal provinces, like the Church of Ireland’s Diocese of Down and Dromore, whose bishops have often participated in GAFCON gatherings, would face a similar challenge.
A GAFCON-produced meme widely circulated since the communique was released features a quote from Down and Dromore’s bishop, David McClay, saying “GAFCON is not leaving the Anglican Communion, GAFCON is the Anglican Communion.” The Church of Ireland’s archbishops, however, issued a statement October 20 reaffirming their commitment to the Anglican Communion and noting that their church’s formularies commit it to communion with the Church of England.
GAFCON and the GSFA
TLC also spoke to leaders of the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans about the GAFCON communiqué. The GSFA shares with GAFCON a commitment to orthodox teaching on human sexuality and there is significant overlap among their leaders. None of the GSFA leaders were willing to go on the record, out of respect for “their brothers in GAFCON.”
Ten GSFA primates announced their rejection of the leadership of Archbishop Justin Welby in 2023 after he endorsed same-sex blessings in the Church of England, and only one of the primates on its Steering Committee attended the Primates’ Meeting he convened in 2024. The GSFA leader’s response to Sarah Mullally’s selection earlier this month said it would be unable to recognize her as the Anglican Communion’s “first among equals leader” because of her leadership of Living in Love and Faith discussions.
At the same time, the GSFA has never claimed that its Covenantal Structure is a replacement for the Anglican Communion. Many of its church leaders participate actively in Anglican Communion networks and send representatives to meetings of the Instruments of Communion. Some have significant financial partnerships with Communion-affiliated churches in the Global North.
One GSFA leader expressed concern to TLC about how quickly GAFCON had developed its plans for the Global Anglican Communion. “They are a movement; we are an ecclesial body,” he said. He also confirmed that the GSFA had not been consulted in the development of plans for the new communion, though the idea had been floated by GAFCON before. The GSFA had no immediate plans to issue a statement about the communiqué’s proposal, he added, because this would require consultation with several different bodies within its Covenantal Structure.
Asked if he plans to attend the Abuja conference, the leader said he doubted it, if its purpose was to endorse the Global Anglican Communion.
Thanks to Daniel Sitole and Jesse Masai, who assisted in the preparation of this story. All analysis is by Mark Michael.
The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.
John Sandeman attends his local church in the Diocese of Sydney. After an almost three-decade career serving the Fairfax media empire (that’s the Australian newspapers not owned by Rupert Murdoch), he founded Eternity, a national paper/website for Australian Christians, and now runs Theothercheek.com as an independent Christian journalist.
