Standing on the Authority of God’s Word
by Charles Raven, Gafcon:
[…] In this column last month Chris Sugden and Vinay Samuel helpfully answered the question ‘Why Gafcon’. This month, as the full significance of the third Gafcon conference held in June becomes clearer, I want to offer a personal reflection on the question of where Gafcon is going.
The short answer is ‘nowhere’! The appeal in Gafcon’s ‘Letter to the Churches’ to the Archbishop of Canterbury to restore godly has been ignored and there can be no doubt now that it is through Gafcon that the faithful Anglican tradition will be continued. The powers that be seem determined that the Communion should embrace the optional orthodoxy of ‘good disagreement’.
The longer answer follows from the first. Paradoxically, what looks new is actually old and what looks old is actually new. If Gafcon remains faithful, it will eventually just be the Anglican Communion. In fact we should look for the day when the name ‘Gafcon’ becomes effectively synonymous with the Communion and therefore unnecessary.
The reason for this confidence is not just that Gafcon is growing numerically, nor that it is developing Synodical structures, nor even that nine global networks have now been formed to take forward Anglican mission and discipleship around the world. These are manifestations of something deeper. There is an inherent fruitfulness in God’s Word and it will not return to him empty (Isaiah 55:11). It is possible to get malleable bishops to conferences with lavish subsidies from the errant American Episcopal Church and leverage the hallowed history of Canterbury, but true spiritual life ebbs away when the authority of the Word of God is set aside.
The absolute necessity of what Gafcon rightly contends for is becoming a very personal experience for me. My wife, Gillian, and I have been married for 37 years and I write (with her agreement) on our last wedding anniversary. She is in the final stages of ovarian cancer with only a matter of weeks to live. It is a heart wrenching experience, and yet underneath the grief and pain is a deep sense of peace.
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