Two Boats, Not One Ship

Why the GSFA Bishops’ Retreat in Uganda Signals Divergence, Not Merger

By David W. Virtue, DD

www.virtueonline.org

July 25, 2026

LWEZA, UGANDA — When the bishops of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches gathered at the Lweza Training and Conference Centre this month, they came not to negotiate a treaty but to be formed. From July 14 to 20, under the theme “Rooted in Christ, Renewing the Church, Reaching the Nations,” bishops and their wives from Burundi, South Sudan, the Indian Ocean, and the Ghanaian Diocese of Sunyani sat under seasoned teachers to learn the unglamorous disciplines of the episcopal office — delegation, accountability, retirement, and the health of a marriage stretched thin across the demands of a diocese.

It was, on its face, a modest affair. But modest gatherings often disclose more than grand communiqués, and this one discloses something the headlines have missed.

A Hope Quietly Buried

For months, orthodox Anglicans who long to see the fracture lines of realignment healed have nursed a single hope: that GAFCON and the GSFA — the two great orthodox bodies that between them speak for the overwhelming majority of the world’s practicing Anglicans — might at last converge into one instrument, one fellowship, one voice against the collapse of the Canterbury-centered Communion.

Lweza buried that hope. Not with a slammed door, but with something quieter and more eloquent. The GSFA is building its own house.

Formation Is a Statement of Permanence

Give the Fellowship its due. The retreat was no exercise in vanity. Archbishop Stephen Kaziimba Mugalu of Uganda, who hosted the gathering and serves as the Fellowship’s treasurer, preached servant leadership from Galatians 1:10, pressing his brother bishops to seek the approval of God rather than of men, to delegate rather than to hoard, to build systems of accountability rather than to rule by exhaustion. Bishop Alfred Olwa of Lango, who chairs the Ministerial Formation Track, set before them a curriculum most Western dioceses would envy: Christian leadership, healthy ministry relationships, retirement planning, and dedicated sessions for the bishops’ wives on boundaries and mutual support.

This is wisdom. It is also strategy. A fellowship that trains its bishops before and after consecration, that plans for their retirement, that tends to their marriages, is not a fellowship preparing to dissolve into a larger body. It is a fellowship digging foundations. You do not build a seminary in a house you intend to vacate.

Read the Guest List

The surest tell at any Anglican gathering is not what is said but who is in the room — and who is not. At Lweza the cast was unmistakably GSFA. Archbishop Justin Badi Arama of South Sudan, the Fellowship’s chairman. Archbishop Mouneer Anis of Alexandria, retired, one of its founding fathers. Bishop Danald Jute of South East Asia on the daily expositions. Canon Charles Raven of the GSFA secretariat. The provinces represented — Burundi, South Sudan, the Indian Ocean, Sunyani — belong to the Fellowship’s own orbit.

And the absences? Louder still. There was no Nigeria. There was no Rwanda. There was no mention of the Jerusalem Declaration, no invocation of the Global Anglican Communion that GAFCON proclaimed from Abuja in March. The formularies, the language, the power centers of GAFCON were nowhere on the program. Uganda and South Sudan carry leadership in both camps, as they have since Kigali; but a retreat convened by the dual-badge provinces, in the absence of GAFCON’s engine rooms, is not a merger in embryo. It is a fellowship keeping its own house in order.

The Kigali Bargain Has Broken Down

To grasp why, one must return to Kigali in 2023, where GAFCON and the GSFA struck a bargain: the GSFA would take responsibility for faith and order — the harder, slower work of ecclesiology — while GAFCON would give itself to evangelism, church planting, and the care of the alienated. Two boats, in Archbishop Badi’s own memorable image, rowing alongside one another toward the same shore.

That bargain has broken down. In October, on Martyrs’ Day, GAFCON announced unilaterally that it would “re-order” the Communion and launch a Global Anglican Communion — a faith-and-order move of the first magnitude, made without consulting the very body to whom faith and order had been entrusted. GAFCON’s primates gathered in Abuja in March to consummate it. But the gathering was thin: the primates of Alexandria, Chile, Congo, Kenya, Myanmar, and South Sudan stayed away. Archbishop Steve Wood of the ACNA was absent, inhibited pending his ecclesiastical trial.

The GSFA’s answer has been the most articulate silence in recent Anglican memory. Its primates met and reaffirmed that they are staying within the Anglican Communion, committed to reform it from within. Their communiqué did not so much as name GAFCON’s Global Anglican Communion. A Fellowship spokesman declined to comment on GAFCON’s plans at all. When men who share a pulpit decline to share a paragraph, the distance between them is no longer merely theological. It is structural.

Convoy, Not Fusion

So where does Lweza leave us? Precisely where Archbishop Badi’s metaphor placed us: two boats, not one ship. The orthodox may yet sail in convoy — sharing the same charts, hailing the same enemy, bound by the same Gospel — but they will not, for the present, sail under one keel. GAFCON has chosen to build a communion. The GSFA has chosen to build bishops. Each is doing what it believes the hour demands, and each is doing it apart.

I had hoped for more. Many of us had. But hope is not analysis, and the evidence at Lweza is plain. The Fellowship is not folding its tent to join GAFCON’s caravan. It is teaching its bishops to delegate, to age, and to endure. That is the posture of a body that intends to be here in twenty years — on its own bottom, under its own flag.

No merger, then. Not this year. Perhaps, as the machinery now stands, not for a generation. The two great orthodox fleets of the Anglican world will keep station within sight of one another, signaling across the water — and each, for the foreseeable future, will answer to a different captain.

David W. Virtue, DD, has covered Anglican and Episcopal affairs for over thirty-five years. He is founder and editor of VirtueOnline. Some 21,000 stories are archived at Virtueonline’s website: www.virtueonline.org His Substack on the Middle East can be found here: davidvirtue2.substack.com