The Global Anglican Communion Comes Home to Abuja
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COMMENTARY
By David W. Virtue, DD
September 1, 2026
The Global Anglican Council — the conciliar body GAFCON raised up as an alternative to the Anglican Consultative Council, the Instruments of Communion, and the Archbishop of Canterbury — announced this week that the headquarters of the reordered Global Anglican Communion will be established in Abuja, Nigeria.
No Sign of Repentance
This should surprise no orthodox Anglican, whether of the West or the Global South, who has watched in vain for more than two decades for a single sign of repentance from Western Anglicanism and its pansexual agenda.
From Lambeth Resolution 1.10, through the Windsor Report, to the present hour, the West has been running Gadarene-like toward the cliff. It has ordained gay and lesbian bishops in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Church of Canada, and it has now enthroned a partnered lesbian, Cherry Vann, as Archbishop of Wales — the first such primate in the history of the Communion. Down the slope they go, hastening to join the swine our Lord sent over the edge two thousand years ago, never to return.
Rowan Williams once conceded that on this question the Church felt “out of step with what the rest of the culture take for granted.” The West resolved to close that gap, and it succeeded. Never mind that the more it caught up, the more the pews emptied.
The Decision at Recife
The decision to plant the Communion’s headquarters in Abuja was taken at the Council’s meeting in Recife, Brazil, on Saturday, August 22, 2026, and announced in a communiqué from its chairman, the Most Rev. Dr. Laurent Mbanda, “to strengthen and support the future life and ministry of the global fellowship.”
Abuja was the natural — perhaps the only — choice. It was there, at G26 in March, that the Abuja Affirmation declared the old Instruments of Communion to have failed and proclaimed the Anglican Communion reordered into a truly global Church, with the Jerusalem Declaration as its doctrinal spine and the newly minted Global Anglican Council as its conciliar voice. The city that named the new order should fittingly become the seat from which it is governed.
Where the Believers Are
There is a deeper fitness still. Abuja is already the administrative home of the Church of Nigeria, the largest and most vigorous province in the Anglican world, numbering some eighteen to twenty-five million souls. The reordered Communion is not planting its flag on neutral ground. It is planting it in the most fertile soil the Communion possesses — among Anglicans who are multiplying while the West buries its dead.
That is the whole story of the realignment in a single geographic fact. The center of gravity has not merely shifted from Canterbury to the Global South; it has been relocated, deliberately and with intent, to a city where the faith is growing. Modern technology lets a communion be governed from anywhere. The choice of Abuja says what a Zoom link cannot: that the future of Anglicanism will be written where its people actually are.
Canterbury kept the buildings, the history, and the letterhead. Abuja has the believers. And the Church has always, in the end, followed the believers — as it is doing again.
David W. Virtue, DD, is founder and managing editor of VirtueOnline. His writings can be found at www.virtueonline.org, where you can subscribe to receive his free biweekly VIEWPOINTS. His Substack on the Middle East is at davidvirtue2.substack.com.
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I wonder if GAC will continue with the "dual integrities" of the GAFCON churches. Nigeria has the strength and courage to hold this line.
There is a question however: will all the GAFCON provinces join the Global Anglican Communion? Jackson Ole Sapit seems to have betrayed GAFCON, judging by his recent warm meeting with Sarah Mullally, where the two exhanged gifts, showing that he refuses to break communion with Canterbury. There are several other provinces who haven`t decided to join, at least for now, the GAC: South Sudan, Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, Southeast Asia.