Jerusalem Crossroad
Twelve Hundred Pilgrims Meet in the Holy Land to Reclaim the Anglican Communion
by Lisa Severine Nolland
While the meeting of Anglican bishops from around the world every decade or so at Lambeth Palace has been considered the place to take the pulse of the worldwide Anglican Communion, another meeting in Jerusalem this past summer may signal the full emergence of an alternative global Anglican communion. Several weeks before the Lambeth meeting, nearly 1,200 Anglican leaders—archbishops, bishops, clergy, and laity—gathered during the final week of June at the Renaissance Jerusalem Hotel in West Jerusalem to discuss something called the Global Anglican Future. Hence the conference was billed as GAFCON.
The purpose of the conference was to respond to a crisis “involving three undeniable facts concerning world Anglicanism,” as the GAFCON website explained it. The first fact is “the acceptance and promotion within the provinces of the Anglican Communion of a different ‘gospel,’” undermining the authority of Holy Scripture and the uniqueness of Jesus Christ as the only Savior. Further, this false gospel “promotes a variety of sexual preferences and immoral behaviour as a universal human right. It claims God’s blessing for same-sex unions over against the biblical teaching on holy matrimony.”
The second fact, in the words of the conference organizers, is the declaration by provincial bodies in the Global South that they are out of communion with bishops and churches that promote this false gospel. . . . These actions have also led to the appointment of new Anglican bishops set over geographic areas already occupied by other Anglican bishops. A major realignment has occurred and will continue to unfold.
And the third fact is the manifest failure of the Communion Instruments [i.e., Canterbury and the Anglican Primates] to exercise discipline in the face of overt heterodoxy.
A Global Week
The meeting was unlike any Anglican gathering I have attended in the UK or North America. It was far more passionate and had a definite non-Western “edge.” More than two dozen nations were represented, the majority non-white and non-Western. There are roughly 55 million active Anglicans around the globe, and the Jerusalem assembly represented over 35 million of them. The Church of Nigeria, with its 20 million active members, had by far the largest contingent of representatives (termed “pilgrims”).
GAFCON pilgrims embraced God and his Word fervently, publicly, and unapologetically, in an easy, natural way. For some, maintaining their faith in their home countries is a never-ending struggle; for others, it is a matter of life and death. Gloria Kwashi, the wife of Nigerian archbishop Ben Kwashi, shared a testimony of being humiliated, beaten, and tortured by a group of radical Muslim youths because of her faith.
I was on the administrative and workshop teams as well as a lay participant. Each day began very early with many participating in services of Holy Communion, some of them surprisingly “high” liturgies, in designated hotels across the city. After pilgrims arrived via bus, the conference formally commenced with worship and biblical exposition.
The exposition was followed by intense interactive workshops, the leadership and composition of which comprised an intentional mix of East and West. As conclusions were reached in the workshops, they were handed on to the senior leadership team, which also was intentionally mixed. This feeding-back loop was essential for what would emerge at the week’s end.
Lisa Severine Nolland is the author of A Victorian Feminist Christian (Paternoster, 2003) and a contributor to and co-editor of God, Gays and the Church (Latimer, 2008). As web consultant for Anglican-Mainstream.net, she tracks and posts material on the sexual trajectory in the culture and the church. An American by birth, she has made her home for many years in Bristol, England, where she lives with her husband and their teenage daughter.
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