The Fall of Canterbury
by Matthew Kennedy and Anne Kennedy, First Things:
This might be the most important gathering of Anglicans in 400 years,” declared Bishop Lee McMunn last month at the fourth Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON). GAFCON, held this year in Kigali, Rwanda, is a conference of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GFCA). Representing 85 percent of the world’s Anglicans, the GFCA was formed in 2008 as a conservative response to the Church of England’s theological drift into progressivism. It includes convocations like the Anglican Mission in England, to which McMunn belongs.
After McMunn spoke, Archbishop Henry Ndukuba, primate of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, took the stage to read the Kigali Commitment, the statement produced at the conference. “We cannot ‘walk together’ in good disagreement with those who have deliberately chosen to walk away from the ‘faith once delivered to the saints,’” he read.
Successive Archbishops of Canterbury have failed to guard the faith by inviting bishops to Lambeth who have embraced or promoted practices contrary to Scripture. . . . This failure of church discipline has been compounded by the current Archbishop of Canterbury who has himself welcomed the provision of liturgical resources to bless these practices contrary to Scripture. This renders his leadership role in the Anglican Communion entirely indefensible.
All week the writing committee had sought words to describe the disastrous failure of Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury (ABC). Anglicans don’t have anything like a pope, as they will be quick to tell you. The Anglican Communion was officially established in 1867 when the British Empire was nearing the peak of its expansion. The twentieth-century withdrawal of Britain from her colonies, while messy and painful, also left a residue of ecclesiastical affection. Anglicans around the world, though they may have never been lulled by the beauty of Evensong, or wandered through Canterbury Cathedral, have nevertheless always considered the Church of England the Mother Church.
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