Gafcon supports second jurisdiction in England

THE ARCHBISHOPS of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans/Gafcon have pledged their support towards the creation of a second Anglican jurisdiction in England. In a statement released on 22 September, the chairman of FCA the Most Rev Eliud Wabukala, Archbishop of Kenya, observed the “focus of the struggle for biblical faithfulness has shifted from North America to England.”

Past statements from the Gafcon leader lamented the direction taken by the Church of England over issues surrounding human sexuality and its continued accommodation of those who wished to change, or broke with impunity, its moral teachings. The point had now been reached, he suggested, that if the bishops of the Church of England were unable or unwilling to act, Gafcon would.

The vehicle, through which they would act, he said, was the Anglican Mission in England (AMiE) – hitherto a support organization for conservative evangelicals. AMiE would now be an English Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), a parallel conservative Anglican jurisdiction overlaid upon an existing liberal province. Read more

As a long-time observer of the Anglican Church in North America and the Common Cause Partnership from which it was formed, I would hope that a “second jurisdiction” formed from the Anglican Mission in England would NOT be modeled upon the ACNA. Its form of governance gives a very limited role to the laity and to an increasing extent resembles that of the Roman Catholic Church with its College of Bishops increasingly usurping the role of its official governing body–the Provincial Council. Its Provincial Assembly plays a negligible role in the denomination’s governance: it ratifies changes to the ACNA constitution and canons but it cannot amend these changes or initiate such changes. The ACNA bishops and its former archbishop have shown little respect for constitutionalism and the rule of law and have on a number of occasions violated its constitution and/or canons. The ACNA College of Bishops has endorsed a number of doctrinal statements, including trial services and a catechism, that exclude the teaching of the Protestant Reformed faith of the classical Anglican formularies in the denomination and take Anglo-Catholic and even Eastern Orthodox or Roman Catholic positions on a number of key issues. The ACNA has some congregations and clergy that are faithful to the Protestant Reformed faith of the formularies. They, however, are an anomoly. Their existence is a precarious one as what they teach is in conflict with the official doctrine of the denomination.