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The law of ‘Go Woke, Go Broke’ is not confined to big business or once-beloved entertainment franchises (I’m looking at you, Doctor Who, Star Trek: Starfleet Academy and The Acolyte). Even churches succumb to Wokeism at their peril. While the leadership of churches like the Anglicans go ga-ga for drag queen sermons and simpering lesbian archbishops from DEI Seminary, their congregations are dropping off faster than the population of a nursing home during Covid.
The irony of this is that it means the church is rapidly alienating itself from its few growth areas. Handing over the pulpit to Muslims to preach that Jesus isn’t really the Son of God, that in fact saying so is a grievous sin, might play well to the tiny clique of bourgie, lettuce-leaf leftists who run the church in England. But the major area where the Anglican faith is growing is in places like Africa.
Where, it might surprise UK wokies, they tend not to be real big on the whole ‘progressive’ thing.
Conservative leaders of numerous Anglican churches are gathering in Nigeria on Tuesday for a four-day meeting. They’ll discuss a plan that could result in a historic split in one of the world’s largest Christian communions.
At the same time, representatives of the historic Anglican Communion on Monday announced a revised restructuring plan of their own. It would decentralize its leadership away from its longtime base in England and potentially enable cooperation despite strong theological disagreements.
It’s uncertain whether such a plan will sway members of Gafcon, or the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. Their gathering in Abuja, Nigeria, is bringing together numerous primates – national Anglican leaders – and other bishops, clergy and lay people.
Three guesses what their biggest beefs with the London ‘progressives’ are.
Gafcon leaders have opposed liberal trends such as same-sex marriage and the ordination of openly LGBTQ+ clergy in the Anglican churches of Europe and North America, including the Episcopal Church in the United States. Divisions have widened so sharply over recent decades that some national churches stopped participating in Anglican Communion gatherings.
The schism threatens to split the Anglican church into, essentially, ‘progressive white’ and ‘conservative brown’ factions.
Gafcon’s chairman, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda, last year issued a statement essentially calling for a break from the historic communion as it’s currently structured, declaring that “the Anglican Communion will be reordered.”
The statement envisioned a reformulated “Global Anglican Communion,” overseen by a new council led by elected chairmen regardless of country. Historically – although churches are self-governing and cooperate on a voluntary basis – the archbishop of Canterbury in England has been considered “first among equals,” a symbolic spiritual leader.
Even though the rift is still not to the point of triggering a schism, it’s notable that the Anglican leadership in the UK are only driving their conservative flock further and further away.
The meeting comes shortly after the Church of England installed Archbishop Sarah Mullally as the first woman to be archbishop of Canterbury.
While some conservative Anglican leaders in other countries criticized her selection on the basis of gender, they mainly opposed her stance on LGBTQ+ issues. Mullally has affirmed the Church of England’s current definition of church marriage as between a man and a woman, but she supported a plan for blessings of same-sex couples and has acknowledged “the harm that we have done” as a church to LGBTQ+ people […]
While Global South churches are prominent in Gafcon, other participants include the Anglican Church in North America, formed by conservatives who broke from the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada.
Agree with them or not, at least the conservatives know what they stand for.
