For months, conservative Anglican leaders aligned with the Global Anglican Future Conference had been hinting at something historic. The expectation, fueled by sympathetic commentary and optimistic speculation, was that Abuja would mark the moment when the movement launched a rival to the Anglican Communion.
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JAMES TALARICO
The plan, as widely reported in advance, involved creating what was being called a “Global Anglican Communion,” complete with a primus inter pares — a first among equals — who would effectively replace the symbolic leadership exercised by the Church of England’s archbishop of Canterbury.
That would have been a genuine ecclesiastical revolution.
In Anglicanism, the archbishop of Canterbury does not reign like the bishop of Rome. Each province, largely drawn upon national borders, is autonomous but interdependent. The See of Canterbury is a symbolic point of reference connecting Anglican churches around the world.
If you intend to replace that structure, you don’t create a committee.
You create a rival center of authority.
But that is not what happened in Abuja.
Instead of electing a primus inter pares, the summit abruptly retreated. The anticipated leadership position disappeared. In its place is something called the Global Anglican Council, a new body composed of bishops, clergy, and laity.
In other words, after years of rhetoric about a decisive realignment in Anglicanism, the outcome was a council.
The Most Rev. Laurent Mbanda, archbishop of Rwanda, was elected chairman, but without the power of a chief executive.
The irony is striking.
The theological conservatives who have spent 20 years criticizing theological liberalism in the U.S.-based Episcopal Church and the broader Anglican Communion — a Protestant tradition that maintained the episcopacy — have now created something that resembles a structure that looks Presbyterian.
It is difficult to see how this changes anything.
If press reports are accurate, only three recognized primates of Anglican provinces even attended the summit. Primates are the most senior archbishops or presiding bishops of Anglican churches. The absence of a significant number of them only underscored how far GAFCON still is from commanding anything resembling global Anglican authority.
Yet, Abuja had been billed as the moment when it would become an alternative communion.
None of this should come as a surprise.
For all the confident rhetoric surrounding GAFCON, the movement’s principal institutional engine, the Anglican Church in North America, is hardly a model of stability.
Founded as a breakaway body from the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, the ACNA is embroiled in lawsuits and other allegations of misconduct. And then there is the unresolved question of women’s ordination.
On that issue alone, the ACNA has managed to embody nearly every contradiction within the Anglican world. Some dioceses ordain women to the priesthood. Others categorically refuse to do so.
For a church that presents itself as the doctrinally traditional alternative to the Episcopal Church, the result often looks less like principled clarity and more like institutional improvisation.
Which brings us back to Abuja.
The grievances are well known. Many Anglicans believe the historic Anglican Communion has drifted away from biblical teaching.
Those concerns are not imaginary. They reflect real divisions within Anglicanism.
But if the theological conservatives truly intended to replace Canterbury as the symbolic center of Anglican unity, then Abuja was the moment to do it.
Instead, the movement blinked.
Perhaps the political reality proved more complicated than anticipated. Perhaps key provinces were unwilling to break with Canterbury, not least because connections to the English state church, governed by King Charles III, can be politically and diplomatically useful.
Perhaps the leaders themselves realized that creating a rival communion would expose just how fragmented their coalition really is.
Whatever the explanation, the result is unmistakable: a half-measure.
The deeper irony is that the very people who have spent years criticizing institutional Anglicanism have now produced a structure that abandons the traditional model of episcopal leadership.
They did not replace the archbishop of Canterbury. They formed a committee. And committees rarely change the course of church history.
If GAFCON intends to become the leader of Anglicans, it must establish clear leadership and a coherent structure.
Until then, dissenting Anglicans — an alliance of frustrated provinces, protest movements, and breakaway churches — are still searching for the institution to finish the job they started.
Because when you strike at a king, you must kill him.
And in Abuja, the king survived.
Dennis Lennox is a political commentator and public affairs consultant. Follow @dennislennox on X.
