GAFCON Chairman’s Participation in ACNA Archbishop's Investiture: What It Implies

By Robin G. Jordan

Has anyone else noted the incongruity of Archbishop Iliud Wabukala, chairman of GAFCON, assisting at the investiture of the ACNA’s new Archbishop Foley Beech? Archbishop Wabukala has on a number of occasions championed the Thirty-Nine Articles as historic Anglicanism’s confession of faith. See the article“Archbishop Wabukala Defends the 39 Articles” and Archbishop Wabukala’s address“The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion: The Church and Its Mission.” Archbishop Wabukala has gone on record as saying “…confessions of faith, whether they are the ancient catholic creeds or later statements such as the Church of England’sThirty-nine articles cannot be seen just as historical documents to be reinterpreted as we wish.”

Archbishop Beech, on the other hand, in a recent interview in a reference to Anglican confessionalism made no mention of the Thirty-Nine Articles, which form the basis of that confessionalism. He has been promoting in his own diocese the use of Texts for Common Prayer whose doctrine conflicts with doctrine of the Thirty-Nine Articles and the two other Anglican formularies that along with the Thirty-Nine Articles constitute Anglicanism’s long-recognized doctrinal standard. Archbishop Beech joined with the other members of the ACNA College of Bishops in enthusiastically endorsing To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism which, where it does not disregard the doctrine of these formularies reinterprets that doctrine as it wishes.

By his actions Archbishop Beech has shown that he does not share Archbishop Wabukala’s views on the Thirty-Nine Articles. Beech heads a denomination that relegates its affirmation of the 2008 GAFCON conference’s Jerusalem Statement to the preface of its constitution where it is purely incidental to the preface’s account of the establishment of the Anglican Church in North America and is not binding upon the denomination’s clergy and congregations. The ACNA’s constitution in its fundamental declarations equivocates in its recognition of the authority of the Thirty-Nine Articles and treats the other Anglican formularies as one of a number of doctrinal standards that the denomination recognizes. Its canons, Texts for Common Prayer, and To Be a Christian: An Anglican Catechism show that the denomination in practice does not accept the authority of the Anglican formularies at all.

What message is Archbishop Wabukala sending to the Anglican Church in North America and to Anglicans around the world in assisting at Archbishop Beech’s investiture?  What does his presence and the presence of other global South Primates at the investiture say about the depth of their commitment to the fourteen tenets identified as underpinning Anglican orthodoxy in the Jerusalem Declaration and to the values articulated in The Way, the Truth, and the Life: A Pilgrimage to a Global Anglican Future and Being Faithful: The Shape of Historic Anglicanism Today? As my grandmother was wont to remind me, “Actions speak louder than words.”