
COMMENTARY
By David W. Virtue, DD
January 21, 2025
It is time to boldly state the truth.
The Anglican Communion, as it is presently constructed is finished. What we have now is unsustainable.
Attempts to reconfigure, revive, restate, reconstruct and reconstitute the Anglican Communion have simply failed.
The departure of Archbishops Justin Welby, John Sentamu, George Carey, and one hopes Stephen Cottrell, were signposts of failure along the way. The problems were coming on long before John Smyth’s sadistic behavior was uncovered throwing the church into complete turmoil. The Makin Review merely highlighted not just a failed safeguarding system, but a church both morally and theologically bankrupt.
The rot set in with the passage of Lambeth Resolution 1:10 passed at Lambeth ‘98, a withering indictment on western pansexual hopes to engineer a new sexuality into church. It failed. For 27 years 1:10 has hung like a Damoclean sword over the communion defying all attempts to parse it, spin it or ignore it.
The resolution and its demands refused to go away. Justin Welby tried to deflect it at the last Lambeth conference by focusing on climate change, but the Global South led by South Sudan Archbishop Justin Badi refused to let the issue die, and Welby found himself blindsided, and when called upon to repent he refused.
The appalling arrogance of Welby in believing he is the center of the Anglican universe was painful to watch. I have observed the decline over four Lambeth conferences. An effort by Rowan Williams to produce the Windsor Report to right the ecclesial deficit, was simply a blip in the road. Nothing changed. Williams was politely told to leave and went. His replacement was the worst appointment ever in the history of Anglicanism.
One very knowledgeable CofE insider said this about Welby; “He is a nasty piece of work. Ruthlessly ambitious and arrogant, always conscious of his upper-class status. But a second-class history graduate and a fourth-rate thinker.”
I doubt one could be more definitive than that. Certainly, his choices and compromises got him the press he deserved. Most British newspaper columnists and commentators over time, both sacred and secular skewered him.
From his knee weakening over homosexuality, to reparations, to immigration, to euthanasia (the only thing I agreed with him about) to climate change and an ebbing of the gospel mandate, Welby kept playing losing hands in a communion poker game. He never once had a full house.
His departure raises serious questions about who should follow in his footsteps. The temporary arrangement sees York Archbishop Stephen Cottrell taking the reins, with many believing he too should have stepped down over his failed safeguarding issues.
Justin Welby’s departure begs the question as to who will fill his shoes.
The plethora of English bishops are all progressive including the most likely successor, Iranian born Bishop of Chelmsford, the Rt. Rev. Dr Guli Francis-Dehqani who is on board with the blessing of same-sex couples. Five Anglican Communion representatives will play a part in selecting his successor. This opens the possibility of a Global South bishop or archbishop being selected. They would, of course all be orthodox in faith and morals, a sticking point for the majority of the House of Bishops.
A GAFCON or GSFA bishop would be a cat among the pigeons in the CofE House of Bishops and give York Archbishop Cottrell heartburn. As GAFCON bishops have already detached themselves from the CofE it is unlikely one would be selected.
It should not come as a surprise that there are proposals afoot by a working body in the communion to decrease the centrality of the Archbishop of Canterbury. This would be a huge nail in the coffin of colonialism that has been the hallmark of the CofE’s power.
By any reckoning the Church of England is finished as a global player. With fewer than 700,000 practicing Anglicans in England, the communion’s largest province (note the colonial ring to that term) now is Nigeria and they continue to grow with new dioceses and bishops added almost annually.
Nigerian Archbishop Henry Ndukuba has made it abundantly clear he wants nothing to do with the Church of England. “We cannot walk with you unless you repent,” he and his fellow African bishops once told Welby. The leader of the Church of England never did, and now he has gone. He will not be missed. Furthermore, there is nothing to suggest his successor will repent.
A new day is dawning. If the Church of England goes ahead with a woman archbishop who is progressive on sexuality issues it will be an easy call to separate completely from the CofE.
Women bishops, while few in number in the Global South are not recognized by the Anglican Church in North America and many other jurisdictions. It remains a sticking point for any talk of unity.
As things now stand, the Global South owns the Anglican Communion just with the sheer weight of numbers. Despite efforts to buy their support by western pansexualists it has not worked. While they have not felt the full weight of post-modernism in their cultures, there is still no evidence that they can be bought or are ready to roll over. They have watched the devastating consequences of compromise with cultural Marxism in the West resulting in empty churches, to know that is a non-starter.
You know it speaks volumes when the head of the Anglican Church of South Sudan whose country is being destroyed by tribalism, poverty, war and genocide cannot be bought and is utterly committed to a Biblical view of sexuality, then it is curtains for Western pansexualists.
Whatever the future holds, Western pan-Anglicanism is dying and the Global South will continue to rise with no signs of it abating now or in the foreseeable future.
As the writer to the Hebrews put it; “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful,” a lesson the West never truly learned.
END
This might be likened to so much of what we can read in the Old Testament, where many kings had so much going in their favor and then they became unfaithful to the Lord about sexuality.