SPECIAL VIEWPOINTS EDITION

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

www.virtueonline.org

September 19, 2025

For nearly forty years, the Anglican communion has roiled over issues of human sexuality. It has been a remarkable period in the life of some 100 million Anglicans, most of whom were not interested in the topic, preferring to get on with the mission of the church, saving souls and discipling the nations.

Homosexuality came out of the West, and in all probability, it will die in the West, as the Global South faces more pressing issues of evangelism, persecution, and in some cases its very own survival.

While the Global South has yet to feel the full onslaught of modernity, there is every reason to believe that it will survive Western post-modernism as it focuses on the gospel above all else.

The number of Anglican Christians is growing by more than a million people every year, according to the respected scholar David Goodhew, visiting fellow of St John’s College, Durham University.

The online World Christian Database gives the best data on the current size of the Communion. Numbers last recorded in 2020 show that global Anglicanism has doubled in the past 50 years,” Goodhew reported in The Church Times. Anglican churches are those derived from the Church of England (C of E) through inherited doctrine and practises.

“As it continues to increase by about one million a year, there are about 100 million Anglicans, as of 2025. This is the result of massive growth in the global South, while Anglicanism in the global North has mostly shrunk. Talk of Anglicanism’s demise is the opposite of the truth.”

And that is why this “summoning” of GAFCON bishops next year to Nigeria is so important. The leaders could well ring down the changes on the state of the Anglican Communion, declare themselves fully out of communion with a shrinking Western church and the Church of England - the Mother Church – announce it fully apostate, and form a more perfect union with Anglican dioceses like the ACNA, AMiE and more.

It would be the final break which many believe has been coming on for a long time, and has now reached its apogee.  There will be no more talk of inclusion, diversity, indaba, Windsor Reports, Covenants and compromise. That day is done.

It would not come as a surprise that the election of a lesbian archbishop to the Church in Wales was the final straw for orthodox Anglicans who see this act as a departure from Scripture, tradition and history.

GAFCON chairman Dr. Laurent Mbanda’s “summons” cannot be taken lightly; it indicates a depth of concern and has an ominous ring to it that cannot be ignored. We shall see.

I am posting this special report with just two stories on this  remarkable call to arms.

David W. Virtue DD,

President

VIRTUEONLINE

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GAFCON Chairman Summons Orthodox Bishops to Nigeria Next Year

Communion is entering a “crucial period” in its history, he says

Sept 15, 2025

Dear Brothers and Sisters of Gafcon,

Greetings to you in the name of Jesus, our rock and our redeemer!

The next six months are crucial for our global Anglican church.

This is why the Gafcon Primates have summoned the world’s orthodox Anglican bishops to gather in Abuja, Nigeria, from 3 to 6 March, 2026.

This may be the most important assembly of authentic Anglicans since Gafcon reset the Communion at Jerusalem in 2008.

Revisionists deliberately divide the Communion with schismatic actions that celebrate sin, as they appoint false shepherds to lead their flock away from God’s good word.

But Jesus is building his church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail!

This is why we must gather godly overseers to prayerfully submit to the Holy Spirit as we seek God’s will at this historic assembly.

Bishops, please be in touch today with your Provincial Offices to inform them of your interest in attending G26, and encourage them to send a current list of orthodox bishops to secretariat@gafcon.org.

If you are in a province not represented by a Gafcon Primate or Advisor, please contact your Branch Chair or Regional Secretary.

For the rest of our fellowship, please bend your knees in prayer for this landmark event, seeking the mercy of God for our beloved Communion.

Pray that the Lord will ignite a generosity that will see us cover the expenses of international travel that is essential for this gathering.

The gospel is exploding in the Global South, and it is critical that every orthodox Anglican bishop is able to attend this assembly in person.

I'd like to help support orthodox Bishops to attend G26

Pray that we raise adequate funds for travel expenses so that every faithful bishop can contribute to this assembly as we unite before God.

Please consider giving to get every global bishop assembled for this momentous occasion by visiting www.gafcon.org/G26Bursary

Further details will soon be emailed to invited delegates as our General Secretary prepares invitations for our global bishops.

Join us in praying that the Lord will meet us in Abuja as the world's orthodox overseers gather... for such a time as this.

 Yours in Christ,

The Most Rev’d Dr Laurent Mbanda

Chairman, Gafcon Primates Council

Saturday, 13th September 2025

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IS THE FINAL CHAPTER ABOUT TO BE WRITTEN IN THE COMING SCHISM?

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD

IT was an ominous call to arms.

GAFCON chairman and Rwanda Archbishop Dr. Laurent Mbanda summoned Gafcon bishops to meet with him next march in Abuja, Nigeria, the largest and fastest growing province in the Anglican communion.

What he said was piercing, troubling and illuminating all at once. The very language of “summoning” has an almost legal tone to it. Certainly, a theological and ecclesiastical urgency is implied. He called it an “historic assembly”, a “crucial” period in the life of the Anglican Communion.

Then he took the gloves off and said this; “Revisionists deliberately divide the Communion with schismatic actions that celebrate sin, as they appoint false shepherds to lead their flock away from God’s good word.”

He could not have been clearer. Was he thinking of what the Church in Wales did electing an avowed lesbian to the episcopacy…the continuation of a process begun with Gene Robinson in 2003, even earlier with the Diocese of New Westminster approving rites for same-sex blessings.

Could the chairman’s push for a gathering of the orthodox be a prelude of what’s to come?

One wonders if this is the moment for the announcement of the Great Schism. The Methodist Church schism which involved primarily the United Methodist Church (UMC) splitting over issues related to LGBTQ+ rights led to the formation of a new denomination - the Global Methodist Church. What doth hinder the Anglican Communion? We have had, in fact, a de facto schism now it would be de jure.

Of course, it has been coming for some time now, so should we really be surprised? Global South archbishops and bishops have been endlessly patient with their apostate friends in the Global North and West. At least three Lambeth Conferences have wrestled with the issue.

From the 1998 Lambeth Conference resolution 1:10 rejecting homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture, to the Gene Robinson consecration in 2003, through the Windsor Report, a study in sin management, and on to a Covenant for the Anglican communion that never came to fruition; the communion has roiled from one crisis to the next, leading to the sudden departure of the Archbishop of Canterbury over a failed safeguarding issue.

The brilliant but Hegelian driven Rowan Willams became the eminence grise of sexual compromise. The master of language, he designed the Covenant to obfuscate and bully the Global South into acquiescing before the moloch god of sodomy.

This from the Covenant itself; “In living out this inheritance of faith together in varying contexts, each Church, reliant on the Holy Spirit, commits itself….” INTERPRETATION: Ya’ll do your own thing and charge it to the Holy Spirit. No reference to Holy Scripture. Not surprisingly the Covenant sank without trace.

But Global South leaders were not fooled for a moment. They patiently went along with it all convinced they could persuade their northern brethren that homosexuality had no support or approval from scripture or God, and that the West was capitulating to the culture, departing from ‘the faith once for all delivered to the saints.’

It all fell on deaf ears. The smooth-talking Robinson; the false cries of homophobia; the screams of outrage over the lack of inclusion and diversity from the increasing ranks of gay and lesbian clergy, won the day. The fabric of the communion was irrevocably torn. It would never be repaired.

Repeated warnings were given but not heeded. Western Anglicans in thrall to a shrill minority of pansexualists in their churches; the culture and to their governments bent over “and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.”

It was time to gather up the remnants of the faithful in countries like New Zealand, Australia, the U.S., Canada, even England and begin again to rebuild the Anglican communion.

No easy task. The U.S. led the way with the birth of the AMIA and then the ACNA. Lawsuits, property disputes followed, but 100,000 faithful had had enough and made their way out the Episcopal red doors never to return.

And now it would seem we have reached the end of the road. Pleadings and cajoling’s have all failed. GAFCON leaders have had enough, perhaps the GSFA have seen the writing on the wall and perceive that they can no longer heed the cries of compromise and join their Gafcon brethren.

Archbishop Rowan Williams’ failed Hegelian-driven approach to theology, and Justin Welby’s betrayal of his evangelical heritage, doomed the Church of England.

When the GAFCON bishops meet early next year, there will be no more pleadings. A rudderless Church of England might just as well sail down the Thames River, hit Tower Bridge and sink under its own weight. Some 98 percent of the British public could care less about the CofE.

And now the final chapter is being written. We await the judgement of history.

END