Remarkable questions are being asked among Anglicans: Could the Archbishop of Canterbury soon relinquish his role as “first among equals” in the worldwide Anglican Communion? If he does, could new leadership emerge from the Global South?
Those questions have been prompted by the Church of England’s decision in February to let its clergy bless same-sex marriages. Following that decision, twelve archbishops aligned with the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) said in a statement that their coalition “is no longer able to recognise the present Archbishop of Canterbury, the Rt Hon & Most Revd Justin Welby, as the ‘first among equals’ Leader of the global Communion. He has sadly led his House of Bishops to make … recommendations that … run contrary to the faith & order of the orthodox provinces in the Communion whose people constitute the majority in the global flock.”
If new Anglican leadership is to reflect the demographics of Anglicans worldwide, it will have to be more orthodox and more centered in the Global South than the Communion’s leadership to date.
For his part, Welby seemed open to stepping aside from leadership in the Communion. During a February 12 speech in Ghana, he expressed openness to changing Canterbury’s role if that is the will of other Anglican Instruments of Communion (groups that help provide leadership for Anglicans).
“I will not cling to place or position,” Welby said. “I hold it very lightly, provided that the other Instruments of Communion choose the new shape, that we are not dictated to by people, blackmailed, bribed to do what others want us to do, but that we act in good conscience before God.”
If new Anglican leadership is to reflect the demographics of Anglicans worldwide, it will have to be more orthodox and more centered in the Global South than the Communion’s leadership to date.
New options for Anglican leadership could be among topics of conversation at the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) April 17-21 in Kigali, Rwanda. GAFCON’s rise within the Anglican Communion coincides with a broader shift of Christianity’s center of gravity from the West to the Global South.
“As the West has become more liberal, and in conjunction with missionary efforts, the Lord has blessed the church in the [Global] South,” said Foley Beach, chairman of the GAFCON Primates Council and Archbishop of the Anglican Church in North America. “It has grown tremendously.”
Moving South
Christianity’s turn southward has been documented by scholars. At the turn of the twentieth century, 83 percent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe and North America. By 2050, the picture will have shifted dramatically. Seventy-two percent of Christians will live in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, according to church historian Philip Jenkins in his book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. By 2030, Africa will have more Roman Catholics than Europe.
As Jenkins puts it, “If we want to visualize a ‘typical’ contemporary Christian, we should think of a woman living in a village in Nigeria, or in a Brazilian favela. In parts of Asia too, churches are growing rapidly, in numbers and self-confidence” (Jenkins, p. 17).
The growing cohort of Global South Christians generally holds tight to orthodox theology and ethics against pressure from western liberalism. Anglicans are not the only example of this phenomenon.
Consider African Lutherans. As mainline Lutheran churches in Europe and North America have declined in membership, Africa has seen a spike in Lutheran church membership, with 14 million of the world’s 70 million Lutherans. Among them, the Ethiopian Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus formed in 1959 with just 20,000 members but swelled to more than 5 million by 2008.
In Tanzania, Lutherans’ commitment to orthodox Christianity has been costly. In 2010, the Lutheran church of Tanzania declared it would no longer accept financial aid from European churches that permitted same-sex marriage. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Tanzania (ELCT) said it “accepts that moral values may change among people as their situations change; however, ELCT believers know and believe that there are some things that cannot change … One of these unwavering values concerns the issue of marriage and its meaning” (Jenkins, p. 220).
The growing cohort of Global South Christians generally holds tight to orthodox theology and ethics against pressure from western liberalism. Anglicans are not the only example of this phenomenon.
More recently, the Global Methodist Church (GMC) has exemplified the shift southward and toward orthodoxy in global Christianity. After years of debate over same-sex marriage and other progressive theological views among the United Methodist Church, conservative Wesleyans formed the GMC last year. Global participation in the new denomination has been strong. African membership could swell in 2024 by some estimates, after African Methodists see the outcome of the UMC’s next General Conference.
GAFCON manifested the same trend among Anglicans. Since the 1970s, liberal and orthodox wings of the Anglican Communion have clashed over theology and ethics. The conflict came to a head in the early twenty-first century when the Episcopal Church in the United States of America consecrated Gene Robinson as its first openly gay bishop and a diocese of the Anglican Church of Canada approved the blessing of same-sex unions. Some orthodox Anglicans claimed the Church of England and its ruling bishop, the Archbishop of Canterbury, were complicit with the erring churches.
Those challenges to biblical sexual ethics helped prompt the first GAFCON meeting of theologically orthodox Anglicans in Jerusalem in 2008. Nearly 1,200 Anglicans from 19 provinces attended and issued The Jerusalem Declaration, a statement of “a way forward together that promotes and protects the biblical gospel and mission to the world.” Many GAFCON attendees were from the Global South.
Those challenges to biblical sexual ethics helped prompt the first GAFCON meeting of theologically orthodox Anglicans in Jerusalem in 2008.
As GAFCON has grown, mainline Anglican churches have shrunk. Between 1961 and 2001, for example, Canada’s Anglican Church lost 53 percent of its members. At that rate of decline, the Anglican Church of Canada could shrink to one member by 2061 (Jenkins, p. 115).
The Way Forward
Demographers of Christianity are asking whether Anglicanism will continue to embody the shift of Christianity to the South and toward greater orthodoxy. Beach thinks it will. He points to Nigeria as evidence. In all Western nations combined, there are roughly 20 million Anglicans in church on any given Sunday, by Beach’s estimate. In Nigeria alone, however, there are approximately 25 million Anglicans in church each Sunday.
Those numbers have jumped markedly over the past 40 years. In 1979 the Church of Nigeria had sixteen dioceses organized in a single province. Now it has more than 120 dioceses organized in ten provinces. It is projected to have 35 million members by 2025 (Jenkins, p. 215).
Such growth suggests the Global South should take a leading role in Anglicanism, according to Beach.
“My term as chair of GAFCON will end in April,” Beach said, “and we will have a new leader from the Global South. All the leaders of GAFCON have been from the Global South except for me.”
That’s appropriate, given the southward trend across the Anglican Communion. Most Anglican bishops today are African or Asian.
“We’ve got new wine in old wineskins,” Beach said of the Communion’s current leadership structure. “We have these colonial structures that have tried to be revamped for the modern age by the Anglican establishment. But they still have a colonial intent to them because the English still pretty much call all the shots.”
At times, theological progressives have sought to fend off critiques from the Global South by implying Global South clergy are primitive or backward. When African and Asian churches voted against a liberal statement on homosexuality at the 1998 Lambeth conference, Bishop John Spong of New Jersey said African bishops had “moved out of animism into a very superstitious kind of Christianity.” Claiming the Africans didn’t understand the issues at hand, Spong said, “I never expected to see the Anglican Communion, which prides itself on the place of reason in faith, descend to this level of irrational Pentecostal hysteria” (Jenkins, p. 135).
Yet Global South leaders are undeterred by such attacks. Their biblical stands, along with the growing membership of the churches they lead, have continued to exert influence in the Communion. Among the Global South Archbishops to whom Anglicans have looked for leadership is Peter Akinola. A retired Archbishop of the Church of Nigeria, he helped found GAFCON and consistently has stood against Western attacks on biblical sexual ethics.
Yet Global South leaders are undeterred by such attacks. Their biblical stands, along with the growing membership of the churches they lead, have continued to exert influence in the Communion.
The challenges to a biblical worldview are “much worse” today than they were at GAFCON’s founding in 2008, Akinola said. “GAFCON 2008 came into existence primarily because the leadership of the entire Communion failed in their responsibility” to uphold biblical truth.
The increasing severity of theological drift, GAFCON leaders say, necessitates continued willingness of Global South clergy to step forward and lead. That will be a major theme at April’s GAFCON meeting.
“The Holy Spirit’s movement of drawing people has drawn [the church] back to the Global South,” Beach said. “That would be Africa, South America, Asia, and Australia. The majority world is now the center of Christianity.”
David Roach is pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Saraland, Alabama. He is a church historian and journalist, and teaches across the theological disciplines at several Christians colleges and seminaries. His writing has appeared in Christianity Today and Baptist Press among other outlets.