Conservative Archbishop’s snub: Why I won’t be attending Justin Welby’s Anglican summit

Sep 6, 2017 by Jill

by Harry Farley, Christian Today:

The influential Archbishop of Nigeria is rejecting an invitation to the forthcoming summit of Anglican leaders hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury in October.

Nicholas Okoh rebuked Justin Welby in a letter explaining his refusal to attend, saying he had overseen a ‘repeated failure to preserve’ conservative teaching on sexuality.

Okoh is head of the traditionalist network GAFCON which claims to represent the majority of Anglicans globally. Different factions of the Anglican Communion were brought by Welby to Canterbury for their second meeting in two years this October in an attempt to resolve deep differences around sexuality.

But Okoh’s snub comes as a challenge to Justin Welby’s authority as the head of 85 million Anglicans around the world and could fuel a de facto separation between conservative Churches in Africa and the global south and more liberal leaning ones in the US and the West.

‘Everything else is the same or worse,’ Okoh wrote comparing Welby’s tenure to that of his predecessor Rowan Williams. ‘There is endless debate, the will of the orthodox Primates is frustrated and misrepresented, false teaching is not being corrected, and nothing is being done to halt orthodox Anglicans in North America (and maybe soon elsewhere) being stripped of the churches that have helped form their spiritual lives.

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