Scholars ponder denomination’s future after GAFCON pledge to ‘reorder’ Anglican Communion

By Sean Frankling

ANGLICAN JOURNAL

October 31, 2025

In the wake of the declaration by a coalition of conservative Anglican provinces of its intention to reorder the Anglican Communion around itself rather than Canterbury, two Canadian scholars with years of experience in the global South take different views on how much the apparent schism will divide the denomination in theory and in practice. 

What both agree on is that it is not yet clear how many of the provinces within the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON) will go through with GAFCON chairman and Primate of Rwanda Laurent Mbanda’s call to sever all ties with the Church of England and its communion. GAFCON’s split comes after the election of Bishop Sarah Mullally, whom it considers too theologically liberal, as the first female Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Anglican Communion Office announced Oct. 3 that King Charles III had approved the nomination of Mullally—who has served as bishop of London since 2018 and previously served as bishop of Crediton in the diocese of Exeter—as the next Archbishop of Canterbury. She is the first woman to be elected to the office, and served as leader of the Living in Love and Faith consultation—the Church of England’s consultative process on human sexuality that approved prayers and blessings for same-sex couples, though it did not approve same-sex marriage—from 2020 to 2023. Mullally will be installed as the Church of England’s senior bishop in March 2026 in a service at Canterbury Cathedral.

GAFCON was formed in 2008 in protest of the growing acceptance of same-sex relationships, blessings and marriages among some member provinces of the Anglican Communion, which GAFCON leaders consider unbiblical. Many bishops in GAFCON have boycotted the Lambeth Conferences and other communion meetings for years. Some had already stripped references to communion with Canterbury or the Church of England from their constitutions. In 2023, the organization announced it no longer recognized then-Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, over his support of a Church of England vote in favour of same-sex blessings. 

Mbanda released a statement Oct. 3 accusing the Church of England of abandoning “global Anglicans” by announcing Mullally as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. GAFCON provinces could not accept her because most of them supported a male-only episcopacy and strongly disagreed with her endorsement of blessing same-sex couples, he said. 

On Oct. 16, Mbanda declared GAFCON the new centre of the Anglican Communion. GAFCON had resolved to “reorder the Anglican Communion,” reject the instruments of communion, end all participation in meetings called by the Archbishop of Canterbury and encourage its members to remove any remaining references to communion with Canterbury or the Church of England, he said. It would also form a council of primates, he wrote, which would elect a chairman to be considered “first amongst equals,” the traditional role of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Mbanda’s communique does not call this move a schism. Rather, it says, “As has been the case from the very beginning, we have not left the Anglican Communion [emphasis his]; we are the Anglican Communion.”

Announcement makes it ‘that much harder to come back’: Radner

The Rev. Ephraim Radner is a retired professor of theology at the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College and a former missionary with experience in Burundi and Haiti. He says the new declaration changes little when it comes to the regular practice of GAFCON’s member bishops and provinces. For decades now, its member churches, including those of Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda have already boycotted meetings of the communion. It’s not yet clear what, if anything, the new statement changes about that practise, says Radner.

But he says Mbanda’s message does make an important change by effectively formalizing a separate set of leadership structures. Formalizing that difference adds new barriers to any future effort to reconcile the split in the global Anglican community, he says. It makes it more difficult for Anglicans who have been participants in GAFCON but have maintained some ties to the original Communion to keep their lines of engagement open, he says. 

GAFCON did not organize itself in a vacuum, Radner says, and it is not the only party involved in widening the gulf between conservative and progressive Anglican provinces, says Radner. The provinces of the progressive Western church have also scaled back their efforts to reach out to GAFCON in practice over time, he says. They have also done a poor job of addressing the concerns of conservative provinces even as leaders at recent communion meetings have championed the call to boost the voices of the historically colonized people who often raise those concerns, he says. Western churches have made a priority off dealing with social change in their own home countries, Radner says, and this goes some way to explaining why many GAFCON provinces feel alienated from others in the communion. He sympathizes with some of GAFCON’s concerns about the theological issues in progressive provinces’ approach to sexuality—but not what he calls the attitude of self-righteousness shown in breaking communion over them. 

The creation of official alternative structures to the instruments of communion makes GAFCON’s move an official schism, in Radner’s opinion.

“To set up a separate church structure with the claim, ‘we are the real Anglicans,’” he says, “makes it that much harder to come back. We have 2000 years of track record of formal church divisions and none of them get resolved or reconciled quickly. They take hundreds of years … You would have thought people would learn from this, and they don’t seem to have. Ultimately, division weakens the church. It always has. It has never strengthened it.”

Structures don’t provide a basis for reconciliation, he adds—only human charity, prayer, listening and arguing can do that.

Radner questions Mbanda’s willingness to meet with Mullally to discuss their differences before declaring he and his organization could not recognize her. “Have they ever sat down and tried to think about it together: What are we going to do? How can we move forward given that we disagree so deeply about these matters?” he asks. “This does not strike me as a mature way of responding to this kind of crisis of leadership as it’s felt and perceived by folks in GAFCON.”

GAFCON synods and individuals may feel—and vote—differently from bishops: Zink

The Rev. Jesse Zink is the principal of Montreal Diocesan Theological College and has travelled, worshiped and liaised widely among provinces of the Anglican Communion including Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan, South Africa and England. Zink says this experience has shown him there is a difference between what bishops and primates proclaim and what ordinary Anglicans believe when it comes to communion abroad. The Anglican Communion is a wide and deep network of relationships among Christians, he says, not just a set of documents or leadership structures. It is more than the typical voices that get reported, which tend to be male, English-speaking bishops, he adds.

“Of course the Anglican Church is an episcopal-led tradition, but in none of our churches can bishops just sit around and decide whether or not they want to be in the Anglican Communion,” he says. They can offer guidance, but in GAFCON provinces just as in Canada, both synods and individuals may feel and vote differently. His own school has just admitted several students from Rwanda, he says, which illustrates that at least some people remain willing to form ties across the divide.

The question, he says is not only what Anglicans’ opinions are on same-sex blessings, but whether the ties of Anglican community must depend on agreement on issues like it.

“What the Archbishop of Rwanda seems to suggest is that your opinion about who you should be in relationship with turns on whether or not you agree on a relatively narrow set of issues,” Zink says. “[But] it has often been my experience that there are people who say, ‘look, we might disagree on topic X, but that’s not going to stand in the way of us having some form of Christian relationship.’”

The leaders of the Anglican Communion have often described their intentions as “walking together … despite our deep disagreement” on issues of human sexuality, such as in 2022’s Lambeth Call on Human Dignity. Zink says he’s observed that some in more conservative provinces tend to see “even the act of being in relationship with someone who holds such ‘wrongheaded’ beliefs as itself sinful.” Sometimes, that comes down to the question of who it is and isn’t appropriate to take communion with. This attitude showed itself at the 2022 Lambeth Conference when members of GAFCON announced they would refuse the sacrament of the Eucharist at worship services that included gay and lesbian bishops. In I Corinthians, Zink says, St. Paul writes that Christians should examine themselves before taking communion, but with the goal being not to take it if something is wrong in themselves—not as a way to show judgement on others.

That approach is symptomatic of a broader climate of political and social media discourse today in which people frequently deal with disagreement by cutting others off entirely, says Zink.

The other piece of important context Zink says he learned in his time visiting African provinces—which make up a significant part of both GAFCON’s membership and of the global population of Anglicans—is how competitive churches there are to attract members. “African Christians are concerned that if for whatever reason their church is perceived as inferior, imperfect, less than orthodox, other churches will point that out,” he says, and draw members away from Anglican ones. 

It can be difficult to convey this to people living in Canada who are used to churches being ignored in the public sphere, he adds, but the competition is real. In many ways membership in the Anglican Communion is an attractive feature in that “marketplace,” he adds, noting the Nigerian branch is officially called the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) as a point of proud association. It shows the church is connected to a group with international credentials. “But then when the Anglican Communion does things like apparently allowing gay people to get married, it’s like, ‘Wait a second, maybe that’s not so great.’” He says. “So there’s a way in which the leaders of the church need to express rather publicly and vociferously their opposition because of the context in which they’re ministering.”

Both Zink and Radner say much depends on how many provinces, bishops and individuals choose to go along with this new vision for GAFCON.

“There are individual bishops all over the place in these provinces related to GAFCON that have varying degrees of desire to be formally separate,” says Radner. “I’ve met them.” This is one thing that may cause tension in GAFCON in years to come, he says. Often branches of the church that split once continue to split again.

“It’s the Protestant dynamic of vociferousness. When you’re always protesting, it’s in your blood,” he says. “It’s hard to stop it.”

In response to Mbanda’s declaration, Archbishop Shane Parker, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, released a statement reaffirming the Canadian church’s communion with the Church of England and its commitment to the four Instruments of Communion: the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), the Primates’ Meeting and the Archbishop of Canterbury. 

Bishop Anthony Poggo, secretary general of the Anglican Consultative Council, released a statement of his own, acknowledging the divisions within the Anglican Communion. The church is ever-reforming through an ongoing process of dialogue, he wrote, expressing hope that the church could find some hope of greater unity in the Nairobi-Cairo Proposals. 

Drafted in 2024 by the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity, Faith and Order, the proposals call for the church to de-emphasize the centrality of the Archbishop of Canterbury, distributing instead some of that role’s importance among other primates of the communion. Specifically, the proposals recommend the Archbishop of Canterbury’s role as the president of the ACC be shifted to a member of the Primates’ Meeting elected from each of the five regions of the communion on a rotating basis, and the Primate’s Standing Committee, a group of five primates who are part of the communion’s executive leadership, to play a greater role in calling the Primate’s Meetings and Lambeth Conferences. 

Poggo encouraged all Anglicans, including GAFCON members, to participate in the process of refining the instruments of communion into a version they could endorse at 2026’s ACC meeting.

“Those who are present are the ones who shape the outcomes and resolutions of meetings,” he wrote.

—with files from Matthew Puddister