Why the Anglican Global South and Global North Will Never Reconcile

COMMENTARY

By David W. Virtue, DD I www.virtueonline.org I June 15, 2026

Archbishop Sarah Mullally has set herself an impossible task. She wants to reconcile what cannot be reconciled, and short of a miracle — a commodity in increasingly short supply in the Church of England — she will not succeed in shaping the Communion into her own image.

In time she will sit down with the provinces sympathetic to her vision: those still tethered to Canterbury, still willing to play by the old Instruments of Communion, still hoping that enough goodwill and careful language can paper over a chasm that has already become a canyon.

That chasm was made unmistakable in Abuja, Nigeria, this past March, when 347 bishops and 121 lay and clergy leaders from 27 provinces — hosted by the Church of Nigeria, the largest province in the Communion — gathered for the G26 Bishops Conference. What they affirmed was not novel. It was ancient: the authority of Scripture, the centrality of the person and work of Jesus Christ, the Bible as the living heart of the Anglican Communion.

There is not a single progressive Western province that could honestly sign its name to that statement — and everyone on both sides of the divide knows it.

What the revisionist provinces of the Global North offer instead is "inclusion," a word that quietly nullifies the Great Commission. Inclusion means the freedom to ordain men and women in active same-sex relationships to every order of ministry — deacon, priest, and bishop alike. It means treating any call to repentance and conversion as narrow-minded and unwelcoming. The Great Commission says go and make disciples. Western inclusion says there is nothing to be converted from, and therefore nothing to disciple anyone into.

Archbishop Laurent Mbanda, the Rwandan primate now chairing the newly formed Global Anglican Council, put it bluntly when GAFCON leaders gathered in Abuja: "the future has arrived." With those words, GAFCON announced it would no longer treat the Canterbury-centered Instruments — the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates' Meeting — as the defining structures of global Anglicanism. In their place stands the Global Anglican Council: primates, advisors, and guarantors from 27 provinces, bound not by an address in Lambeth Palace but by a shared confession, the Jerusalem Declaration.

These are not ceremonial words. Archbishop Mbanda chairs a movement that, by GAFCON's own reckoning, now represents the majority of the world's Anglicans. When he asks for prayer, he is asking on behalf of a global fellowship holding the line and contending for the faith once delivered to the saints.

The work of the Global Anglican Council is anything but abstract. It is:

Theological education for the next generation of orthodox pastors, many serving where sound biblical training is scarce or actively opposed.

Frontline mission among the unreached — church-planting partnerships stretching from sub-Saharan Africa to the Middle East and beyond.

Relational infrastructure holding together 27 provinces across deep cultural, linguistic, and national divides — bound not by institutional power or property settlements, but by a shared confession of the Jerusalem Declaration.

By contrast, Western Anglicanism — the Episcopal Church, the Church of England, and their fellow-travelers — offers task forces, listening processes, and liturgies for blessing what Scripture calls sin. It offers declining attendance, shuttered parishes, and bishops more fluent in the language of diversity and inclusion than in the language of the Great Commission. It offers "walking together" as a euphemism for walking apart, and "good disagreement" as a euphemism for surrender.

Archbishop Mullally inherits a Communion that has, in every meaningful sense, already reordered itself without her. She can convene conversations and speak of unity. But unity built on anything other than a shared confession of Scripture's authority and the Lordship of Christ is not unity — it is merely proximity.

The Global South said so in Abuja, in 27 voices speaking as one. The Global North has yet to admit it is preaching a different gospel — and until it does, no archbishop, however well-intentioned, will reconcile what God himself has already divided along the fault line of truth.

For more on my take on the Anglican Communion click here: www.virtueonline.org  My Substack on the Middle East can be viewed here: davidvirtue2.substack.com