There is nothing in Anglicanism like GAFCON. The Lambeth Conferences have all the bishops and their wives; the Anglican Consultative Council has a few representatives from each province. The Third Divine Commonwealth Conference in Nigeria from November 18-22 with 5000 people is largely composed of members of the Church of Nigeria.
GAFCON2013 is made up of bishops, clergy and lay people drawn from 38 countries numbering over 1300 people.
The Archdeacon of Cardigan, the Venerable Will Strange, describes the worship, led by a choir and a drummer as fantastic. The morning bible expositions of the Book of Ephesians have been spectacular and models of their kind.
I agree, of course, with this basic diagnosis or assessment of the huge challenge we face in re-evangelizing the Global North. Bishop Nazir-Ali emphasized a similar diagnosis of the state of the culture in “the West” when he said that the three great challenges we face are: 1. aggressive secularism; 2. thei rise of militant Islam; 3. syncretism within the Church.
Paul Perkin’s brief summary ignored the Islamic factor, but essentially saw the situation as otherwise the same. Clearly, those other two problems are two sides of the same coin: in essence, the aggressive secularization of the public life and the general culture in the Global North (although it’s more obvious and advanced in the UK than the US, the same trend is clearly evident on this side of the Pond), together with a more hidden and subtle secularization of the Church.
But I like the term that +Nazir-Ali used for the latter problem. What we’re confronting is nothing less than the perversion of the Christian faith through what he rightly called syncretism, the mixing of Christian truth with alien elements in the broader culture that corrupt and grossly distort that truth. Whether you call that rival ideology “secular humanism,” or “theological/moral relativism” or “Liberalism” or whatever term you prefer, the point is that the true gospel can’t be mixed with an alternative gospel that is no gospel at all.
What Paul Perkin described is the polarization of the CoE, as two increasingly different, divergent, and indeed incompatible churches struggle for dominance within the established church structures. One is dying and one is growing. Clearly, they are on different trajectories and can’t forever remain under the same institutional roof. The only questions therefore are these two in the end:
1. Which side will win the power struggle?
2. When will the two mutually incompatible groups finally separate, and how will the assets be divided after the divorce takes place?
The formation of the AMiE, the Anglican Mission in England, is the harbinger of that fateful division that awaits the mother church in the not-so-distant future. But whereas the corresponding AMiA on the American side of the Pond was sponsored by just two orthodox provinces at first (Rwanda and SE Asia), and then support dwindled to just one (Rwanda), and then none (today), in the case of the similar-sounding AMiE, this time the movement to re-convert England is backed by ALL the GAFCON provinces, and support for this major new initiative will probably grow over time, not shrink. Time will tell.
But the polarization of the CoE is unstoppable. It’s the inevitable result of the two inexorable forces at work that +Nazir-Ali and Paul Perkin+ have aptly summarized: the aggressive secularization (or even DE-Christianization) of society and public life, and the more covert de-Christianization of the Church through the spread of a highly syncretistic form of Christianity that subverts the gospel so that the Church, which should be “the salt of the earth,” loses its saltiness and becomes indisnguishable from the pagan world surrounding and permeating it.
Paul Perkin is right also in stressing while we can look at the glass as half empty (i.e., how bad it’s getting), we can also take heart by looking at the fact that it’s also half full.
David Handy+
“One coach load watched two lionesses cross the park track right in front of the coach as if they were on a zebra crossing.”
Witty.
Thanks for the article Dr Sugden. Its sad, but also very encouraging at the same time.