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.

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.