To Whom Shall We Go: Conservative Anglicans Discuss Divorce from Church of England

Rwanda gathering of Gafcon conservatives draws 1,300 from 53 nations as Global South fellowship moves toward merger.

A “revived, renewed, and reordered” Anglican Communion will be the core message delivered tomorrow to 1,300 conservative Anglicans from 53 countries meeting this week in Kigali, Rwanda to discuss “to whom shall we go?”

The final statement of the fourth Global Anglican Futures Conference (Gafcon) will outline an extremely critical response by the conservative majority of the Anglican Communion to the recent moves by Church of England bishops to adopt prayers to bless same-sex marriages.

Gafcon is the network that welcomed the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) into the Anglican family, if not the official Anglican Communion, in 2008.

“We owe our existence to Gafcon,” said ACNA archbishop Foley Beach. “The first Gafcon called for the formation of a new province in North America.”

Chair of the Gafcon primates council, Beach called for the liberal provinces of the Anglican Communion to repent. He added, “Unless the Archbishop of Canterbury repents, we cannot regard him as the first among equals.”

Then pointing out that “sexual sins are not the only sins in the Bible,” Beach called for Gafcon churches to be repenting churches also.

Archbishop Stephen Samuel Kaziimba Mugalu, leader of the eight-million-strong Church of Uganda, also called archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby to repent.

“I am disappointed because, in Uganda, the message of the gospel came from the Church of England in 1877,” he toldThe Pastor’s Heart, a livestream podcast produced by Sydney Anglicans. “The first missions came, and we had polygamy as a normal way of marriage, and every man had three, four, five women. And they ceased having [that number of] wives because ...

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