The Anglican Communion, for all of its internal disagreements, has yet to fall apart
It has been reported that the Anglican Communion had fallen apart approximately infinity times over the last twenty years. Like Schrödinger’s cat, Anglicanism is reported to be both alive and dead, depending on which press release you last read.
Rumours of Anglicanism’s death remain greatly exaggerated
The most recent supposed schism took place last week, when conservative Anglicans gathered in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, ostensibly to elect an African rival to Sarah Mullally, the first woman to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Yet the gathering turned out to be something of a damp squib, and rumours of Anglicanism’s death remain greatly exaggerated.
Why is the doom of the world’s third largest Christian denomination after Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy so often foretold? And why has it yet to come to pass? The first thing to acknowledge is world Anglicanism has been a very fractious place since the disastrous 1998 Lambeth Conference, when Global South bishops made their increasing demographic weight felt in a resolution which condemned homosexuality in uncompromising terms. The conference’s defining image was Nigerian bishop Emmanuel Chukwuma attempting to exorcise gay English priest Richard Kirker in front of an astonished international press corps.
Ever since then Anglicanism has been like the Straits of Hormuz since the fall of the Shah — a war zone, but only intermittently. Two common misconceptions about Anglicanism are worth clearing up, because doing so reveals both why it often feels like a battlefield and why it has not entirely fallen apart.
The first is that the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury isn’t really like that of the Pope. While even popes have more constrained powers than popular opinion imagines, the Archbishop of Canterbury has literally no power outside England. For those nerdy about their ecclesiology, the role of the Patriarch of Constantinople in the Eastern Orthodox world is a genuinely good parallel for that of Canterbury. While the Pope is the head of a single globe-spanning Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Communion is a loose confederation of 42 entirely self-governing “provinces”, or member Churches.
Since the 19th century, some Anglicans have proposed some or other means of worldwide Anglican authority, but its member Churches have never been willing to cede their right to rule themselves. That’s why the 1998 vote on homosexuality wasn’t binding and could never have been, and why Anglicans in the USA were free to ignore it in consecrating the gay-and-partnered Gene Robinson in 2003, which hardened the divisions first exposed in 1998 to this day.
The second misconception, shared by most Western commentators, is that conservative attitudes to homosexuality around the world broadly track conservative attitudes to women’s ministry. But this is, at most, loosely the case. In particular, while Africa can be a darkly homophobic place at times, senior women clergy are fairly common, both among mainline Protestants and in Pentecostal denominations.
For example, Oluremi Tinubu, the wife of Nigeria’s (Muslim) President, is an ordained pastor of the country’s largest Pentecostal church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God. Over the last decade a number of African Anglican Churches have started consecrating women as bishops, including conservative ones like Kenya and South Sudan.
Even in Uganda, one of Anglicanism’s trio of ultra-conservative provinces along with Rwanda and Nigeria, Primate Stephen Kaziimba was at pains to tell the local press that his objection to Mullally was due to her (lukewarm) support for same-sex relationships. In 2022, Kaziimba publicly expressed his support for women bishops to be consecrated in Uganda. In fact, women were first ordained as priests in the East African nation as early as 1983, eleven years before the Church of England.
A female archbishop is well within the range of mainstream Christian beliefs in Africa even for those who disagree; whereas the thought of two men marrying — especially if one of them is a bishop — can still reduce Nigerians or Ugandans to paroxysms of bewildered outrage.
Strangely, ultra-conservative Anglicans from the USA and Australia, opposed to both women’s ordination and same-sex couples, seem recently to have forgotten this distinction despite their long experience with African Anglicanism.
Meeting under the “Gafcon” umbrella at a business hotel in Sydney last October, a few weeks after Mullally’s appointment was made, they announced a new “Global Anglican Communion” to rival Canterbury . Unfortunately, they announced the schism without checking whether any Africans or Asians were planning to join it — of the 12 people present when the schism was called, seven were American or Australian, and all belonged to Churches that either were never part of the Anglican Communion or which haven’t engaged with its structures for twenty years. Gafcon insiders said, in the early hours, they felt the Holy Spirit guide them to announce the schism, but if that is the case then the Holy Spirit seems to have wanted to lead them into a cul-de-sac.
In January, the “Global South Fellowship of Anglicans”, a much larger and less monochrome group than Gafcon, released a statement that they were going to work with the Anglican Communion’s current proposals for reforming its top leadership, and weren’t going to join a schism. Primate Kaziimba of Uganda was one of the signatories to that statement.
Last week, Gafcon organised a conference in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, claiming that “the future has arrived” in the form of a reordered Anglicanism not centred on Canterbury. But of the 42 Anglican Communion Primates, only those of Nigeria, Rwanda, and Uganda attended. Attendees were unable to elect Laurent Mbanda, Primate of Rwanda as their leader, for reasons that have not been disclosed, and instead have ended up with a troika consisting of Mbanda plus two other bishops from churches that aren’t actually members of the Anglican Communion. This is another volte face that is claimed to have followed a “late night move of the Holy Spirit”.
Gafcon is great at grandiose press releases and statements with portentous titles — this year’s offering was “The Abuja Affirmation”. But Gafcon has been issuing bombastic press releases claiming it had seized control of Anglicanism since it was formed in 2008.
These press releases are taken at face value by the majority of journalists who are not au fait with the intricacies of Anglican ecclesiology and churchmanship, and assume, incorrectly, that Africans and Asians would never accept a woman in Canterbury. That simply isn’t the case.
That’s not to pretend that everything is hunky dory in the Anglican world — several African provinces have been semi-detached parts of the Communion for a generation, as is the wealthy and powerful Diocese of Sydney, whose influence is spreading across Australia. But the main issue is homosexuality rather than women’s ordination.
And just as Schrödinger’s Cat was neither alive nor dead until observed, so Anglicanism is still intact for as long as most of its member Churches, which are independent and self-governing, decided to turn up to meetings of its “Instruments of Communion”, even if the Southern conservatives use them to demand that Northern liberals “repent” of being too nice to the gays.
As it happens, the Christian body whose structures most resemble Anglicanism has been in an actual schism for the last eight years: Eastern Orthodoxy. Given its entanglement with Russian power politics and the war in Ukraine, one might expect it to attract more attention than Anglicanism’s spats about women and gays. Yet it rarely does.
