Conservative Anglicans Reshape Church Leadership At Historic Gathering
For more than four centuries, a single office in the south of England has served as the spiritual center of global Anglicanism. In Nigeria, conservative leaders from across the world voted to change that.
Meeting in Abuja from March 3-6, the Global Anglican Future Conference, known as GAFCON, dissolved its existing Primates' Council and replaced it with a new body called the Global Anglican Council.
Delegates elected Rwandan Archbishop Laurent Mbanda as the first chair. The move completed what is arguably the most consequential structural shift in Anglican history since the first Lambeth Conference gathered bishops in London in 1867.
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The gathering drew 436 delegates from 48 countries representing over 180 dioceses. With such a scale, GAFCON demonstrated that this was not a fringe rebellion — but a global majority making a formal claim on the future of Anglicanism.
“The future has arrived, no turning back,” Mbanda declared during the convention held in the Nigerian capital.
That historic assertion is at the heart of one of Christianity's most consequential institutional disputes.
A long divorce, finally formalized
The tensions driving this month's decisions go back more than two decades, to 2003, when the Episcopal Church in the United States consecrated Gene Robinson — an openly gay, non-celibate man — as Bishop of New Hampshire.
For conservative Anglicans in Africa, Asia and the Global South, that decision represented a departure from what they saw as clear biblical teaching on human sexuality. When the broader Anglican Communion declined to discipline the Episcopal Church, many concluded that the traditional instruments of authority had failed them.
GAFCON was born from that frustration, emerging formally at a 2008 gathering in Jerusalem. There, conservative leaders issued the Jerusalem Declaration, a doctrinal statement outlining their theological commitments and began operating as a parallel fellowship within — or alongside — the broader communion.
For years, the movement maintained a careful ambiguity that was critical of Canterbury's leadership but not formally separate from it. That changed last October, when Mbanda announced that the Anglican Communion would be “reordered” and that GAFCON would no longer recognize the four traditional “Instruments of Communion” — the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates' Meeting — as authoritative.
The Abuja meeting was the institutional follow-through on that declaration.
The Canterbury question
The timing was not incidental. In October 2025, the Church of England appointed Sarah Mullally as the Archbishop of Canterbury — the first woman to hold the position. Mbanda responded sharply, saying Canterbury had "chosen a leader who will further divide an already split Communion" and repudiating her spiritual authority.
The installation of a female archbishop, for many in the GAFCON orbit, was the final signal that reform from within was no longer possible.
GAFCON's official statement from Abuja, called the Abuja Affirmation, draws an explicit parallel to the English Reformation. "The Church of England was reformed by Thomas Cranmer, leaving the errors of the Church of Rome behind," it states. "Like Cranmer, we are reforming the Communion from within and leaving the Canterbury Instruments behind."
The new Global Anglican Council breaks from the older model of leadership by primate. Under the previous structure, the Archbishop of Canterbury served as "primus inter pares" — first among equals. The new council distributes authority more broadly, including bishops, clergy and lay members all with equal voting rights. The chair, Mbanda, will lead the council but will not hold a higher rank than other primates.
Schism or reform?
GAFCON leaders have been emphatic that what happened in Abuja was not a schism. "This is not a schism. It is actually a claim to continuity," said GAFCON spokesman the Rev. Canon Justin Murff.
Not everyone accepts that framing. The Rt. Rev. Rose Okeno, bishop of the Diocese of Butere in Kenya — an Anglican leader in Africa who is not aligned with GAFCON — said the Instruments of Communion have historically served as the relational architecture that holds autonomous provinces together. "It is therefore concerning when movements within the church begin to distance themselves from these shared structures," she said.
The question of numbers further complicates the picture. GAFCON claims to represent upwards of 85 percent of the world's practicing Anglicans, a figure its leaders use repeatedly to assert that the Global South is the true Anglican mainstream. Independent peer-reviewed research, however, has placed that figure closer to 45 to 50 percent of practicing members.
What is not in dispute is that the Anglican Communion, which has long been a bridge between Catholic tradition and Protestant theology, spread across 165 countries with roughly 85 million members, is undergoing a rupture that may not be reversible.
The office of the Archbishop of Canterbury has not yet formally responded to the Abuja Affirmation. But with Mullally's installation slated for March 25, she will inherit a church reorganizing itself without her.
Joseph Maina is a Kenyan journalist. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism and media studies from the University of Nairobi. For the past decade, he has served as a correspondent for various print and digital publications in his native Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa.