GAFCON has called on the CofE to repent over same-sex marriage – here’s what it means for the Church

May 1, 2023 by Jill

by Gerald Bray, Premier Christianity:

Many Anglicans around the world say CofE proposals to bless gay relationships are at odds with the views of the global majority. As the rift in the Anglican Communion deepens, Gerald Bray explains what it’s all about.

The Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON) recently met for the fourth time in Kigali, Rwanda. Out of the meeting came an agreement that this global group of Anglicans had no confidence in the leadership and central institutions of the Anglican Communion (AC) because they had departed from orthodox biblical faith by failing to discipline those Anglican provinces that bless (or even celebrate) same-sex marriages.

[…] There is no doubt that the revisionist Churches of the AC are a minority, and that they are in decline. The American Episcopal Church (TEC), for example, has lost approximately 40 per cent of its members in the past 20 years. Much the same can be said for the other Churches that have followed the revisionist agenda – the Anglican Church of Canada, New Zealand, the Church of Scotland, the Church of Wales and the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil.

It is also true that these declining churches have continued to play an outsized role in the AC, despite repeated protests from both GAFCON and GSFA, whose Churches are often expanding at breathtaking speed. Statistics are unreliable, but their claim to represent about 85 per cent of the world’s practising Anglicans is probably not far off the mark. Fairness would suggest that their views ought to prevail in the AC as a whole, but that has not been the case. Sooner or later, something is bound to give, and it may be that GAFCON-IV will be the watershed moment that will finally give the GFSA the recognition it believes it deserves.

Matters have now come to a head because of the fear that the Church of England, which in many respects is the lynchpin of the Anglican Communion, seems set to follow the path of the revisionist Churches and ignore the wishes of the worldwide majority. In particular, the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury as one of the AC’s instruments of unity has been called into question, because Most Rev Justin Welby has not supported the views of the majority, or distanced himself from those Churches which have dissented from them.

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