Primates Pronounce on Global Issues but Fail to See Their Own Provinces in Decline

By David W. Virtue, DD

www.virtueonline.org

August 19, 2026

Seven primates of the Anglican Communion met recently in São Paulo, Brazil, and pledged to labor together on the great global questions of the age. They issued a statement. They affirmed dignity. They deplored colonialism, secularism, polarization, migration, corruption, and climate change. What they did not do — what they dared not do — was look out the window at their own emptying pews.

They were the Most Rev. Alba Sally Sue Hernández García of the Anglican Church of Mexico; the Most Rev. Marinez Rosa dos Santos Bassotto of the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil; the Most Rev. Brian Williams of the Anglican Church of South America; the Most Rev. Shane Parker of the Anglican Church of Canada; the Most Rev. Juan David Alvarado Melgar of the Anglican Church in Central America; Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe; and the Most Rev. Philip Wright of the Church in the Province of the West Indies. They were joined by Bishop Anthony Poggo, secretary general of the Anglican Communion. It was the first time the primates and provincial secretaries of the Americas had gathered as one. Rowe brought with him the Rev. Charles Robertson, his senior adviser, and the Rev. David Ulloa Chavez, the church's lead for Global Episcopal Partnerships.

A Photograph, Not a Gospel

It is tempting to file all seven under the banner of the progressive left. The truth is more revealing. Three of these provinces — The Episcopal Church, the Anglican Church of Canada, and the host province of Brazil — have formally abandoned the Communion's teaching on marriage. The others have not. Brian Williams's Anglican Church of South America is a Global South and GAFCON-aligned province, orthodox on sexuality. The Church in the Province of the West Indies, newly led by Archbishop Philip Wright, is among the more theologically traditional provinces present. Mexico styles itself a “Global Center.” What united this gathering, then, was not a shared gospel but a shared photograph — and the quiet willingness of orthodox provinces to lend their presence to a table set by the Communion's revisionist wing.

They kept faith, too, with Canterbury. The gathering registered no dissent from the leadership of Archbishop Sarah Mullally, installed as the first woman to hold the office after herself carrying the motion to bless same-sex couples through the Church of England's General Synod. GAFCON, which claims to speak for some 85 percent of the world's practicing Anglicans, has declared her unable to lead. In its 2023 Kigali Commitment it renounced Canterbury as an Instrument of Communion; in Abuja this March it constituted a Global Anglican Communion under its own council. Whether the true figure is the 85 percent GAFCON asserts or the 45 to 50 percent its critics allow, the direction of travel is not in dispute: the Communion's center of gravity has already left the room in which these primates were sitting.

The public-relations machine turned up the usual cant about “reconciliation” and being a “prophetic presence,” and settled on the conviction that the great issue before them was Brazil's Indigenous peoples, “stewards of the Amazon and faithful voices in the struggle for climate justice.” Thousands of dollars in airfare were spent to announce what could have been sent by email — that dignity is good and diversity is rich. They voted to revitalize a Committee on Migration in the Americas. They noted the dignity of all people. This is not breaking new ground. It is virtue signaling, and governments do not, by and large, consult religious bodies on what they think about anything at all.

And What of the Seven Provinces?

Consider the numbers these shepherds did not carry to Brazil.

The Episcopal Church, Sean Rowe's own province, counted 1.96 million members in 2010. By 2023 that had fallen to 1.55 million, and in 2024 the church quietly declined to publish a membership figure at all. Average Sunday attendance — the truest measure of a living church — stood at 724,845 in 2009, fell to 547,107 by 2019, and reached 413,034 in person in 2024. The median Episcopal congregation now gathers 38 people on a Sunday morning. The average Episcopalian is sixty years old. The denomination's own analysts have projected, on present trends, a church with no Sunday attendance within a generation. When The Episcopal Church consecrated the openly partnered Gene Robinson in 2003, whole congregations walked out; from that exodus came the Anglican Church in North America, which in 2024 reported 130,111 members and 96,148 in worship — growing in every category it tracks, for the third-year running, even as the church it left behind contracts.

The Anglican Church of Canada, Shane Parker's province, tells a starker story still. From roughly 1.3 million members in 1961 it had fallen to 357,123 by 2017, with Sunday attendance of 97,421. Attendance has dropped some 40 percent since 2001, and a further 26 percent between 2019 and 2022 — what the church's own statistician called a “radical discontinuity.” Five separate methodologies converge on a single grim date: on present trends there will be no members, no attenders, and no givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by about 2040. Here too the orthodox left and founded the Anglican Network in Canada, now a diocese of the growing ACNA.

And Brazil — the host. The Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil claims 120,000 members, though independent counts put the active figure nearer 103,000, and honest observers nearer still to a rounding error in a nation of 210 million. In 2018 its synod redefined marriage without reference to sex and consecrated Marinez Bassotto, who now presides over the province. It was not the first rupture. In 2005 the Diocese of Recife, under the late Robinson Cavalcanti, left over Brazil's rejection of Lambeth Resolution I.10 and aligned with the Global South. The pattern is by now monotonous: the province innovates, the orthodox depart, the rolls thin.

The remaining provinces are smaller than a single healthy megachurch. The Anglican Church of Mexico claims 100,000 baptized members; the Church of England Yearbook and a 2016 Cambridge study put the active number closer to 21,000. The Anglican Church in Central America, credited with 126,000 in 2010, today counts something over 35,000. The Anglican Church of South America — Brian Williams's evangelical, GAFCON-aligned province — numbers perhaps 35,000 to 41,600, the great majority of them in Argentina. Only the Church in the Province of the West Indies, with some 770,000 nominal members across eight Caribbean dioceses, brings real numbers to the table — and it is among the more orthodox provinces present.

The Immigrants Who Filled Other Pews

The migrant question the primates raised is trickier than their statement allows. There are lawful immigrants and unlawful ones, and the primates did not trouble to say which they mean to speak for. But the deeper point is the one they cannot afford to make. Immigrants have poured into the United States and Canada for a generation, and they have not filled Episcopal or Anglican pews. They have filled Catholic and Pentecostal ones. The newcomers are hungry for precisely the gospel these provinces have spent two decades explaining away.

Meanwhile the primates found room in their communiqué for the Amazon and its stewards, and no room at all for the 380 million Christians whom Open Doors counts as persecuted for their faith — one in seven believers on earth. Nigeria alone accounted for some 3,100 of the 4,476 Christians killed for their faith in a single year. Has the Nigerian government been moved by an Anglican statement? Have any of them? Governments do not consult the resolutions of dying provinces.

What Future? What Gospel?

Presiding Bishop Rowe called the meeting a chance to “discern the future of our ministry together,” and spoke of a new chapter. Secretary General Poggo prayed that God would build His Church across the Americas. The Rev. Charles Robertson found it remarkable that primates of such diverse backgrounds could come together in fellowship. Some stayed on in São Paulo to launch a relief initiative called “A Place at the Table,” founded on the conviction that the world's troubles are less a matter of scarce resources than of distorted power — who is heard, who decides, who benefits, who is excluded.

Perhaps it is a new chapter. But a new chapter is not the same as a new life, and there is no evidence here of the one thing that reverses the numbers set down above: the gospel preached without apology and believed without embarrassment.

The primates say they look forward to working together again, supporting one another in their Gospel work. But what gospel? The word means good news. For provinces counting down to zero, the only news on offer is the assurance, exchanged among themselves at considerable expense, that they still have a future.

Will the Indigenous peoples rise up and call them blessed? One wonders whether these primates believe a statement amounts to anything more than words on a page.

The pews will render the verdict. They are already rendering it.

David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org You can subscribe to receive my biweekly VIEWPOINTS. You can also view my Substack on the Middle East here: davidvirtue2.substack.com