ACC REFUSES TO GIVE UP ECCLESIASTICAL POWER

Nairobi-Cairo proposals kicked into the long grass as Canterbury establishment clings to control

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I July 6, 2026

Why are we not surprised?

The 19th Anglican Consultative Council, meeting in Belfast, Northern Ireland, voted 72–8 on July 4 to leave the Archbishop of Canterbury's role as the spiritual and ecclesiastical figurehead of the Anglican Communion untouched. Delegates declined to adopt the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals — the most serious attempt in a generation to reckon with post-colonial reality — and called instead for three more years of “discernment and conversation.”

Three more years! When the ecclesiastical establishment wants to kill something, it does not shoot it; it studies it to death. The Windsor Report, the Anglican Covenant, the “listening process,” Indaba — the graveyard of Anglican reform is littered with commissions, consultations and continuing conversations, and now the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals join them in the long grass. The ACC will not even take the matter up again until its next meeting in 2029, hosted by the Church of North India. By then the question may well have answered itself.

Consider who was not in the room. Nigeria, Uganda and Rwanda — provinces representing tens of millions of practicing Anglicans — again refused to attend, as they have for years. Sudan and Congo also sent no delegations. The 72–8 landslide was achieved because the opposition had already left the building. It is easy to win a vote on Canterbury's supremacy when the churches that reject Canterbury's supremacy are not present to cast one. The Episcopal Church's three delegates, needless to say, voted yes.

WHAT WAS ACTUALLY REJECTED

The Nairobi-Cairo Proposals were no revolutionary manifesto. Drafted by the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order (IASCUFO), chaired by the Church of England's own Bishop Graham Tomlin, they would have redefined membership in the Communion so that provinces needed only a “historical connection” to the See of Canterbury rather than being “in communion with” it — an honest acknowledgment that full communion no longer exists. A supplement issued in March went further, proposing that Canterbury's ministry be shared among five regional primates, and that the archbishop no longer serve as president of the ACC.

Modest. Overdue. A recognition that a global church of some 85 million people, roughly 80 percent of whom now live in the Global South, should no longer be presided over by the state church of a post-Christian island. Even that was too much for Belfast.

Instead, the ACC affirmed the status quo, adopting an amended resolution declaring “widespread agreement” that communion with the See of Canterbury remains vital to Anglican identity. When members challenged the accuracy of the word “widespread” — and how could they not, with five provinces absent and a dozen more in impaired communion — the effort to strike it was defeated by more than two to one. The establishment does not merely hold power; it insists you affirm the fiction while it does so.

A SLAP IN THE FACE

Make no mistake: this was a power grab dressed up as patience. The vast majority of the Anglican Communion is orthodox in faith and morals, while the West has capitulated to the world and the flesh, specifically in the arena of human sexuality. The Church of England has been blessing same-sex couples since 2023 in open defiance of Lambeth Resolution 1:10 and the plain teaching of Scripture. The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) responded with its Ash Wednesday Statement declaring it could no longer recognize the Archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals. The embrace of pansexuality marked the end of the Communion as we knew it. The Windsor Report changed nothing then; three more years of “discernment” will change nothing now.

Leaving the Archbishop of Canterbury's role untouched is the height of hubris and a slap in the face of Global South archbishops and bishops, many of whom face persecution on a daily basis, whose people face starvation, displacement and death for the name of Christ. They asked for a seat at the head of the table they now overwhelmingly fill. They were told to wait — again.

There were voices in Belfast who saw it clearly. The Rev. Berthier Lainirina of the Province of the Indian Ocean warned the council that without structural change, his province and other orthodox churches might conclude they no longer have any place in the Communion at all, lamenting that delegates preferred to pretend all was well when it manifestly is not.

A Kenyan lay delegate, Ambrose Otieno Weda, pleaded with members to reason together rather than walk away and leave empty chairs. Noble sentiments. But the chairs are already empty, and Belfast just guaranteed more will follow.

THE COMMUNION HAS LEFT US

To say that much of the Global South is now in a state of “impaired communion” is an understatement. GAFCON leaders concluded long ago that they are done with Canterbury. Last October, in Abuja, they launched the Global Anglican Communion under the chairmanship of Rwandan Archbishop Laurent Mbanda, requiring member provinces to strike references to Canterbury from their constitutions and to assent to the Jerusalem Declaration as the contemporary standard for Anglican identity. Their communiqué put it plainly: “we have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion.”

They are right.

In reality, the Communion is no more. It is de facto dead, if not yet de jure.

The GSFA primates under Archbishop Justin Badi of South Sudan have taken the more patient road, agreeing to engage with the Nairobi-Cairo process “for the time being” and sending delegates to Belfast — many of whom, tellingly, cannot in conscience receive Holy Communion alongside their Western counterparts. One must ask how long “for the time being” can last. Belfast gave them their answer: the establishment has no intention of reforming itself. The GSFA extended a hand; the ACC studied it and formed a committee.

A COMMUNION OF TOURISTS' CATHEDRALS

This week's vote cements the establishment's hold on the machinery of the Communion, but it is a hold on a corpse. The Western branches are withering before our eyes. By 2040 the Anglican Church of Canada will be gone, if not before. The Episcopal Church will be a shadow of its former self. The Church in Wales, the Scottish Episcopal Church and the Church of England itself will barely be recognizable to demographers, their cathedrals and parish churches repurposed as tourist destinations, concert venues and housing units — the new mantra of mission.

Archbishop Sarah Mullally, presiding over her first ACC since taking office in January — and finding herself in the singular position of chairing a debate about the future of her own authority — told delegates the answers to the Communion's divisions may not be structural but “spiritual and relational.” She promised more process: a meeting with the Primates' Standing Committee in September, a Primates' Meeting in early 2027, early planning for another Lambeth Conference. More meetings. More minutes. More management. The machinery grinds on while the body dies.

Her own words, invoked in the resolution itself, that “lasting unity is built by trust,” ring hollow. Unity is dead and trust vanished long ago — it bled out over two decades of torn fabric, broken promises and shredded resolutions. She is living in the twilight zone of a communion in tatters, and that she cannot see this indicates a level of spiritual blindness the Apostle Paul would have shredded in a single epistle.

The present state of the Communion is held together by bureaucrats, management wonks and theologically vacuous functionaries who long ago abandoned the Gospel and the authority of Scripture. History will record a communion once orthodox, which carried the Gospel from West to East and South, then abandoned that Gospel — and the very peoples who received it now believe it, live it, die for it, and stand ready to bring it back to a West that no longer wants it.

Hope springs eternal. But for now, that hope has been quashed by men and women who have lost sight of the very Person — Jesus — whom they claim to follow, and whom they have in truth abandoned.

END