I was General Secretary of the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion in the eighties. I saw this development before my eyes. While EFAC groups grew in England and North America and Australia, in Africa there seemed no need for them: for the Church of Kenya was evangelical; the Church of Uganda and Rwanda, fresh from the inspiration of the East African Revival was charismatic and evangelical. The Church of Tanzania had both evangelical and orthodox Anglo-Catholic roots. Where there was biblical evangelical and orthodox faithfulness, the churches grew. Where these elements were not present, the Anglican church stagnated as in Japan.
The result today is that two-thirds of the non-western Anglican Churches are biblically faithful Anglicans of the evangelical variety.This is the fruit of the identity and space forged for evangelical Anglicans in the Communion by the Keele Congress. Keele and its products validated the possibility of there being evangelical Anglicans in a liturgical Church that was seen as Catholic . As a result the Church of Nigeria for example could grow as an evangelical Anglican church.
The first time this reality came to global prominence was the 1988 Lambeth Conference. It was there that the African Bishops in particular were able to make a united stand for calling for a decade of evangelism. That was their idea. Then in 1998 they made a stand for orthodoxy in the communion’s teaching on sexuality. Then in 2008 they [chose for reasons of conscience no to attend]… the Lambeth Conference and held GAFCON.
It is not possible to understand these developments without understanding the emergence of Global non-western Anglicanism that is fundamentally orthodox. Since 1988 they have been slowly taking responsibility for the whole Anglican Communion.
This responsibility has been exercised carefully in the years since Lambeth 1998. There the non-western orthodox Anglicans took responsibility to safeguard the orthodox teaching of the communion on marriage. When this was challenged in the years after 1998, again and again the orthodox primates ensured that the primates meetings and the ACC repeatedly stood by Lambeth 1.10 and called for order and discipline.
After reading this, a lot of the dust of the last few years has settled on the ground and not in my head.
Would that be after shaking the TEC dust off your shoes? 😉
No, but l have attempted to make some sense of this since first meeting Dr. Packer as a visiting lecturer at DTS in 1967, the year of the Keele conference. All Christians are involved in this dust up, whether we realize it or not. This kind of historical perspective does edify the body of Christ worldwide.