Conservative Anglicans opting to break away

JERUSALEM | Anglican conservatives are set to form a “church within a church,” keeping informal relations with the Archbishop of Canterbury but severing ties with the Episcopal Church.

A communique being prepared by participants in the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) here will likely formalize a break with the Episcopal Church.

In a Thursday press briefing, Archbishop of Kenya Benjamin Nzimbi said “more permanent structures need to be established for those faithful Anglicans who live and serve in provinces that have abandoned the traditional teaching of the Bible.”

This includes a break with the progressive wing of the Episcopal Church, a common approach to reading the Bible, a new catechism and a new Book of Common Prayer shared by conservatives across the Communion, Nigerian Bishop John Akao said.

GAFCON pilgrims are “determined to stay true to the Bible, to continue the work of mission and to do so as Anglicans,” Archbishop Nzimbi said. Asked by The Washington Times whether this meant working with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Archbishop Nzimbi said: “We would like to come together. We are not excluding anybody as such,” except “those who are fighting with the word of God.”

The “center of Anglicanism has shifted from Europe to Africa,” said Robert Tong, delegate from Sydney, Australia. Past Anglican international gatherings had been jamborees where we “were all scouts together,” he said, but the rise in numbers and influence of African Christians means a change is coming in what it means to be Anglican.

About three-quarters of all active Anglicans are Africans, including 25 million in Nigeria, 10 million in Uganda, 4 million in Kenya and 1 million in Rwanda.

“It’s a question of ‘doctrine’ or ‘structure.’ Which of these makes one Anglican?” said Anglican Bishop John Rodgers, former dean of the Trinity Episcopal School Ministry in Ambridge, Pa.

Both views were contending for control of the meeting, which will set the future course of the conservative movement within Anglicanism, he noted.

Anglicanism does not mean loyalty to an institution headed by the Archbishop of Canterbury in England, some GAFCON delegates said, but fealty to a set of theological principles embodied by Anglicanism’s historic creeds and statements of belief.

This understanding of Anglicanism was encapsulated in a 2005 revision of its constitution by the Church of Nigeria that removed all references to “communion with the see of Canterbury” as its defining principle and replaced them with a confessional statement, according to Archdeacon Akintude Popoola, a spokesman with the Church of Nigeria.

Instead, Nigeria said it would be in fellowship with those Anglican churches that held and maintained the “historic faith, doctrine, sacrament and discipline of the one holy, catholic, and apostolic church,” placing the emphasis on the 1662 Book of Common Prayer and the historic Articles of Religion.

Other bishops are saying that Canterbury is no longer necessary to the Anglican Communion, including Archbishop of Rwanda Emmanuel Kolini, who noted that “Lambeth is irrelevant to us,” referring to the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali of Rochester, England, said the Anglican ways of ordering the church no longer work “because in the end they were based on English good manners. In our world, we have found that English good manners are not enough.”

The conference ends Sunday.