Foley Beach

Global South Anglicans are convinced that it's time to look forward (Part II)

Global South Anglicans are convinced that it's time to look forward (Part II)

Want to know how to cause a church split?

The deepest fault lines -- sex, money and pride -- have been obvious for centuries, said Archbishop Kanishka Raffel of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, Australia.

"We use nationality or age or gender or wealth or clothing or accent or profession or politics -- to show off and communicate who we are and what sort of person we will or will not engage with," said Raffel, who was born in London, of Sri Lankan descent, and raised Buddhist.

"God's people are frail and very human. We bear the marks of weakness and humiliation. We can be loveless, faithless, tolerant of the intolerable and wretchedly self-satisfied. … God is angry about the abuse of people that comes through sexual immorality, greed and hateful, deceitful and cruel speech. We are not surprised."

For decades, he acknowledged, the 42 churches in the Anglican Communion have been rocked by divisions over biblical authority and colonial-era ecclesiastical structures -- with LGBTQ disputes grabbing headlines.

During the recent Global Anglican Future Conference, held in Kigali, Rwanda, Raffel was one of several bishops -- 315 attended, from 52 nations -- who stressed that traditionalists now need to look forward. It's time to focus on life in their rapidly growing churches, while dedicating less time and energy to clashes with declining churches in England, America, Canada and elsewhere.

This will, Raffel stressed, require looking in the mirror.

"We have been engaged in decades long conversation about sexual immorality. But we have often focused on one form of sexual sin, to the neglect of sexual sins which perhaps are more common among us and just as displeasing to God," he said. "How many women ... have shed rivers of tears over the way their sexuality has been misused by others? I suppose it would be millions. There is a self-serving blind spot of which we must repent, a log in our own eyes with which we are yet to deal. Lord, have mercy."


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Schism or not, what's next for the huge, disrupted global Anglican Communion?

Schism or not, what's next for the huge, disrupted global Anglican Communion?

If the Anglican Communion did not suffer schism on April 21, it’s the next best thing.

A declaration issued that day at the conclusion of an international church assembly in Kigali, Rwanda, means the media and other religion-watchers should gird loins for years of maneuvers, legalities, confusion and acrimony.

Here’s what’s at stake. This major segment of Christianity encompasses an estimated 85 to 90 million members worldwide in 46 regional branches. Its older western churches have a rich heritage in religious thought, worship, and fine arts, while the younger churches in the “Global South” are at the forefront of today’s creative Christian expansion.

This loose confederation has been organized like so.

(1) The archbishop of Canterbury, its titular leader as head of the “mother” Church of England, is no pope but summons and presides at these meetings.

(2) The Lambeth Conference, which gathers all Anglican bishops worldwide, most recently held — with many Global South leaders absent —last summer.

(3) The Primates’ Meeting (the confusing P-word refers to the leaders of regional branches), held most recently in March, 2022.

(4) The Anglican Consultative Council, a body of bishops, clergy and lay delegates that met most recently in February in Ghana.

The April 21 “Kigali Commitment,” which includes an emphatic vote of no confidence in all four of those entities, was issued by 315 bishops, 456 priests and 531 lay delegates from 52 countries. Sponsors claim their churches constitute nearly 85% of the world’s active Anglicans; for certain they represent a substantial — and growing — majority.


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Global South Anglicans cut their ties to Canterbury? Maybe that's a news story worth ink

Global South Anglicans cut their ties to Canterbury? Maybe that's a news story worth ink

One of the most depressing things about being a reporter these days is trying to accept the fact that we live in a split, divided, warped news marketplace in which stories that, in the past, would have been Big News for everyone are now “niche” news items that half of our journalism culture feels totally comfortable ignoring.

This happens on the journalist “right” as well as the journalism “left,” or whatever word people are using instead of “left” these days.

This just in: One of the world’s great Christian traditions — the global Anglican Communion — ran into a wall late last week. The big idea: Anglican leaders from nations that represent about 80% of all Anglicans regularly IN PEWS — as opposed to being names on membership lists that may or may not be relevant — voted to cut the ties between Canterbury and the most of the Anglican Communion.

I’ve been watching for elite media coverage all weekend. Here is a Google News file with logical search terms. Please click that search, which was made Sunday night. What do you see? Obviously, at that moment, this was a “conservative” and/or “religious” media story.

You see, the Anglicans in the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) represent the growing (in some cases booming) churches of Africa, Asia and the Third World. They do not, however, represent the zip codes in which the major newsrooms of the Western world are located. They also do not represent the world’s richest Anglicans. Thus, to be blunt, what these “lesser” Anglicans say is NEWS is not news until the New York Times says that it’s news. Right?

With that in mind read the top of this report — long, but essential — from the venerable Anglican publication called The Living Church: “GAFCON Rejects Archbishop Justin Welby’s Leadership.”

On April 21, primates representing a large majority of the Anglican Communion formally repudiated the historic leadership of the See of Canterbury.


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What's up in 2023? The Guy offers a first draft of a religion-beat agenda

What's up in 2023? The Guy offers a first draft of a religion-beat agenda

The new year could be climactic for two aspects of LGBTQ issues, first, the rights of religious and conservative dissenters within liberalized western culture, and second, the ongoing conflicts within church groups.

What should journalists be prepared to cover?

By June, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the 303 Creative case, in which a website designer — based on First Amendment claims — seeks exemption from Colorado’s anti-discrimination law to avoid work on postings that celebrate same-sex weddings (background here). The Court might broadly define what rights various forms of religious traditionalists have in a host of legal conflicts facing e.g. U.S. religious colleges, social-service agencies and individual businesses now that same-sex marriage is legalized.

Inside a specific religion brand, this could be a pivotal year for the global Anglican Communion with its 46 national branches and some 85 million baptized members. A mid-January meeting of bishops in the “mother” Church of England may well decide dioceses can permit same-sex weddings. That historic change would then need approval from clergy and lay delegates at the February 6–9 General Synod.

Such a move would add explosive potential to the April 17-21 meeting in Kigali, Rwanda, of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (“GAFCON”), long vexed by liberal moves in England, the United States and elsewhere in declining First World churches. GAFCON unites the heads of 10 Anglican branches, three of which alone (Kenya, Nigeria, Uganda) encompass half the world’s Anglicans. GAFCON’s chairman, Archbishop Foley Beach (admin@anglicanchurch.net and 724-266-9400), heads a church of conservatives who’ve left the U.S. Episcopal Church and Anglican Church of Canada.

Already, key archbishops have boycotted global Anglican confabs, continuing a slow-motion breakup that began decades ago. Will the maneuvers in England and elsewhere provoke a huge, definitive break from the London-based Anglican Communion by churches in GAFCON and the related Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches?

The United Methodist Church could be on the brink of the biggest U.S. Protestant split since the Civil War. That’s a huge story at the local, regional, national and global levels.


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Major news events among Episcopalians and American Anglicans: Still worth covering?

It’s been more than 10 years since the conservative portions of various Episcopal dioceses began the Great Split-Off. That is, they left dioceses -- some of which had been around since the 18th century -- to form a new entity, the Anglican Church in North America, that billed itself as the truest representation of Anglicanism on the North American continent.

This didn’t go over too well with The Episcopal Church (TEC), as you may imagine, and many were the lawsuits filed by TEC leaders to keep their property, most of which they won. I covered churches in northern Virginia that lost everything in this battle. One church lost property they had already bought on which to build a new sanctuary. Another church lost millions of dollars in property that dated back to colonial times.

This was a big, big story year after year -- receiving major coverage from many major newspapers and wire services.

Take, 2007 for example. I was able to cover one of the ACNA’s formative sessions in Pittsburgh in 2008 and their inaugural assembly in 2009 in Bedford, Texas. As the two sides have drifted further apart and the Episcopal Church has continued losing membership, the secular media has almost stopped covering this story. Religion News Service is the one exception.

This is a shame, in that there’s still news going on.

The conservative Anglican journalist David Virtue, who has followed this story since the beginning, chronicled what happened at a recent gathering at Wheaton College near Chicago.

The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is planting one new church a week, Archbishop Foley Beach told delegates to the triennial gathering of some 1400 Anglicans, at Wheaton College, in the heartland of America's Bible belt. The ACNA also officially received The Anglican Diocese of South Carolina as the newest diocese with some 9,000 members -- the largest of 31 dioceses in the orthodox Anglican body. The diocese broke away from the Episcopal Church over the authority of Scripture and TEC's embrace of homosexuality and gay marriage in defiance of Lambeth resolution 1.10. ...


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How aggregating: The Atlantic goes halfway in reporting on Anglican primates meeting

I’ve been happy to see more religion pieces in The Atlantic in recent years, as such coverage was not occurring in that publication during my 16 years in Washington, D.C. I’m not sure what led to a change in heart among editors there, but it’s nice to see articles like last week’s piece on the Archbishop of Canterbury’s last-ditch attempt to hold the Anglican Communion together. That’s the good part.

The bad part is the piece is aggregated, in that it’s a patchwork of quotes from three British media outlets along with segments from the archbishop’s press release about a gathering of Anglican primates in January 2016. And there were some gaping holes. The article starts thus:

Justin Welby was named archbishop of Canterbury with high hopes that he was the man who could save the Anglican Communion. Now it appears he may oversee its breakup—a calculated destruction intended, paradoxically, to save it.


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