GREAT MAJORITY
OF ANGLICAN BISHOPS
TO ATTEND LAMBETH 2020
The Anglican Communion News Service has announced that 65% of the bishops of the Anglican Communion have already signed up to attend the Lambeth Conference next year. Find their announcement here . Altogether more than 1,000 bishops and spouses have registered. 566 of the 877 bishops of the Anglican Communion have committed to attend the meeting. Attendance is not free. Each bishop must pay a fee of $6,285 plus pay for his/her own transportation. By the time the conference meets next year, it could well meet the attendance level of the 2008 meeting when 623 bishops attended.
This means that the GAFCON leaders' efforts to break up the Anglican Communion have failed. GAFCON claims to have more than half of the Anglican bishops. If two-thirds of all the Anglican bishops in the world have signed up for Lambeth, this means that many of the GAFCON bishops will attend despite the GAFCON leaders' attempts to suppress attendance.
So far, only 4 of the 40 primates of the Anglican Communion have publicly announced boycotts of the Lambeth Conference. They are Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and Rwanda. This equatorial African band is the original heart of GAFCON which was set up in 2008 on the eve of the Lambeth Conference of 2008 to oppose equality for and inclusion of open homosexual persons in the life of the church. While the four primates will not attend, it is possible that many of their bishops will go to Lambeth. They have all been invited.
Since its inception in 2008, GAFCON has tried hard to re-make classical Anglicanism. They have created a fundamentalist anti-homosexual-rights and anti-feminist coalition anchored in equatorial Africa outside of the institutional structure of the Anglican Communion. GAFCON claims it has the majority of Anglicans in the world. They created the Anglican Church in North America in 2009 and have "recognized" ACNA as the only legitimate Anglican province in North America. This is contrary to the structure of the Anglican Communion which recognizes the Episcopal Church as the only branch of the Communion in the United States. The GAFCON primates' council has placed the archbishop of ACNA, who is not a bishop of the Anglican Communion, as its chair.
Last year, the GAFCON primates' council sent a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury demanding that TEC bishops be replaced at Lambeth by bishops of ACNA. The ABC, Justin Welby has not responded and certainly will not agree to this illegal demand which, if accepted, would effectively end the leadership of the ABC in the AC. In fact, he has invited the TEC bishops to Lambeth (minus the same-sex spouses).
Without compliance of the ABC to their demand, the GAFCON primates called an anti-Lambeth conference the month before Lambeth. It is to meet 8-14 June 2020 in Kigali, Rwanda. GAFCON has not announced how many bishops have signed up to attend this alternative conference but the number must not be great. If it were, we would know it. No GAFCON conference has ever assembled a majority of Anglican bishops. The most has been forty percent. Bear in mind that the GAFCON primates' council has not officially called for a boycott of the Lambeth Conference and probably will not do so now since two-thirds of Anglican bishops have already signed up to go to the Conference. A failed boycott would be an embarrassment.
Mark Lawrence and all of the fifty-odd bishops of ACNA have not been, and will not be, invited to the Lambeth Conference simply because they are not bishops of the Anglican Communion. They call themselves Anglicans but they are not recognized as Anglicans by the Archbishop of Canterbury. To be an Anglican, one has to be in communion with Canterbury. The ABC has said more than once he is not in communion with ACNA. GAFCON's "recognition" of the ACNA bishops is meaningless in the structure of the Anglican Communion.
Yet, the Diocese of South Carolina, and some of their congregations continue to insist they are parts of the Anglican Communion. This is flatly false. They may call themselves "Anglicans" or whatever they wish but the bare fact is they are not in the Anglican Communion. They know it and the Archbishop of Canterbury knows it. The people following Lawrence should know it. If the laity of DSC believe they are in the Anglican Communion, they are believing something that is not true. There were two great claims that the DSC leadership made to their followers at the schism. One was that the diocese was independent and sovereign and therefore could leave TEC at will with the property in hand. The SC Supreme Court proved that claim to be false. The second was that they could leave TEC and remain in the Anglican Communion. Exclusion of DSC from the Anglican Communion's decennial conference next year proves that notion false. The schism in SC was based on two assertions that turned out to be untrue (at the cost of millions of dollars).
Likewise, DSC's parent, the Anglican Church in North America claims, brazenly, to be a part of the Anglican Communion. On their website here we find this: "On April 16, 2019 it [ACNA] was recognized as a province of the global Anglican Communion by the Primates of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans." This implies obviously that ACNA is a province of the Anglican Communion. Such an idea is flatly false. The AC is composed of 40 provinces. ACNA is not now, never has been, and never will be a province of the Anglican Communion. This group of primates had no authority to "recognize" anyone in or out of the AC. Just saying something is true does not make it true. If it were, we would have 12 million new American citizens in an instant.
Likewise, DSC's parent, the Anglican Church in North America claims, brazenly, to be a part of the Anglican Communion. On their website here we find this: "On April 16, 2019 it [ACNA] was recognized as a province of the global Anglican Communion by the Primates of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans." This implies obviously that ACNA is a province of the Anglican Communion. Such an idea is flatly false. The AC is composed of 40 provinces. ACNA is not now, never has been, and never will be a province of the Anglican Communion. This group of primates had no authority to "recognize" anyone in or out of the AC. Just saying something is true does not make it true. If it were, we would have 12 million new American citizens in an instant.
The bottom line is that, despite its eleven year effort, GAFCON and its American proxy ACNA have failed to break up the Anglican Communion just as they have failed to replace classical Anglicanism with their new narrow and intolerant fundamentalist version of Anglicanism. Now, it is still entirely possible that some of the GAFCON primates could remove their provinces from the AC and form a separate communion. The 40 provinces are independent churches after all and perfect free to leave the AC at any time.
The clear majority of the Anglican bishops around the world will be attending the Lambeth Conference of 2020. This is a huge victory for the traditional Anglican Communion and a stinging defeat for the new dissenters. For the moment, at least, the center of power in the Anglican world remains in Canterbury, not in equatorial Africa and Anglicanism continues to be the broad and enlightened religion it has always been. This is true because the majority of bishops of the Anglican world want it to be true.
The clear majority of the Anglican bishops around the world will be attending the Lambeth Conference of 2020. This is a huge victory for the traditional Anglican Communion and a stinging defeat for the new dissenters. For the moment, at least, the center of power in the Anglican world remains in Canterbury, not in equatorial Africa and Anglicanism continues to be the broad and enlightened religion it has always been. This is true because the majority of bishops of the Anglican world want it to be true.
