The FCA is an outgrowth from Gafcon – formed by the primates of the Anglican Communion who did not attend the last Lambeth Conference principally because of the policy adopted by some member churches on same-sex relationships. Focus presents two reports and an article.
‘We are a Communion: we are together’ says Wabukala
Church Times – by Ed Thornton –
The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA) is not trying to establish a shadow Anglican Communion, the Archbishop of Kenya, Dr Eliud Wabukala, said at the end of a meeting in London last Friday.
Speaking to the press after a conference at St Mark’s, Battersea Rise, in London (News, 27 April), Dr Wabukala said: “We are a Communion: we are together. What we are doing is that we are in a Communion and spiritually recognising the need for us to be scriptural, to uphold the tenets the Bible has taught us, and wanting to make them louder, and to possibly help to form and help others. We are helping ourselves within the Communion to hear more about what God is saying.”
Dr Wabukala said that there was a “misconception about what the entire Communion is”. It was “made up of independent provinces across the world. There is no centre of power. . . All along there is always interaction between dioceses, between parishes.”
The Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, said: “There is no need to think of the Communion, even as it exists now, as some sort of top-down movement. . . People who belong to FCA are Anglicans, of course: it’s a movement within the Anglican Communion, of which there are others.” A “Statement and Commitment” document was published at the close of the conference.
Dr Jensen said that it was “not a communiqué; it’s not been prepared for the world. It’s a commitment for the people at the conference, and those they represent.”
More at :
http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=128017
FCA: ‘Still in communion with the rest of Church’
CEN – By Amaris Cole
The Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans stressed they are still in communion with the wider Anglican Church, despite calling it a ‘broken state’.
The FCA sees a ‘crisis’ in not only the Anglican Communion’s handling of sexuality, but also the authority of scripture. However, in the official statement released after last week’s conference in London, they spoke against the revisionists who ‘lure orthodox people with offers of aid, invitations to conferences, scholarships and the like’.
Chairman of the GAFCON Primates, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, said: “We are a gift to this Communion as a spiritual movement to strengthen the Communion we have.”
He added: “As we stand we are helping ourselves within a Communion to hear more about what God is saying.”
The FCA presented themselves at the end of the week-long leaders’ meeting as a modern day Oxford Movement.
During the conference, the leaders heard of terrorism in Nigeria and the persecution of Christians in Islamic and Hindu societies.
The Statement and Commitment the FCA released also speaks of a pro-life and pro-marriage advocate who has been maligned by the secular media in England – referring to Andrea Williams.
Archbishop Wabukala opened the meeting, saying: “The heart of the crisis we face is not only institutional, but spiritual.”
Speaking after the conference, the Archbishop again asserted that prayer had been dedicated to the process of choosing Dr Rowan Williams successor. “There has been prayer for the people of England so that God may show them the right person,” he said. “We pray for God’s will to be done.”
The Archbishop admitted he knew little about the allegations of racism within the selection process, and so declined to comment.
When asked if members of the FCA would feel more comfortable if the Chairman of the Primates was African, Archbishop Wabukala said it was not a question of who the chair is – it is about the values they uphold.
Thoughts are now being given to GAFCON 2, scheduled for May 2013. At present the location of this next meeting is unknown, but the organisers are considering a number of factors such as visas and costs before they make their decision.
GAFCON is self-funded by the individuals who attend and by a number of anonymous donors.
The leaders conference last week was the first held by the FCA, hosting over 200 leaders from 30 countries and 25 provinces.
The Global FCA’s resurrection of Anglican Conciliarism
The Rev. Theodore L. Lewis
Resident Theologian, All Saints’ Church, Chevy Chase, Maryland
For maybe the past year there have seemed to be no decisive developments in the Anglican Communion—decisive in the sense of changing the course, or courses, on which it has been set. But with the conference of the Global Fellowshsip of Confessing Anglican (GFCA) Primates together with the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans in London from 19 to 26 April, the situation has changed. The keynote address of the Primate of Kenya, Archbishop Eliud Wakubala, asserted the vital role in the Communion of the Global South and the need for the Communion’s return to Scriptural obedience, doing this virtually in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s back garden. No less significantly, the conference issued a call for a governance change which could retrieve the Communion’s three Instruments of Unity (other than Canterbury) from the futility to which Lambeth maneuverings have relegated them. These Instruments as they developed over several decades constituted Anglicanism’s conciliar movement. In this raising up again of conciliarism lies even at this late date the possibility of overcoming the Communion’s present deep crisis.
Archbishop Wakubala delivered his keynote address as chairman of the GFCA Primates’ Council and of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, both established by the Global Anglican Futures Conference (GAFCON) in Jerusalem in June 2008. (GAFCON, the riposte of the Global South and its northern allies to the sidelining of the Instruments, which assembled 1,148 participants including 291 bishops from around the world, produced the extraordinary Jerusalem Declaration, a ringing statement of Anglican orthodoxy.) In his address the Archbishop decried the “other gospel” of the North American churches, their willingness “to bend the word of God to fit the fashionable ideas of their cultural context.” He decried also the patterns of colonialism persisting in the Communion’s governance, through which the relegation of the Instruments had been brought about. And he called for a Communion based on adherence not so much to Canterbury as to Scripture and Anglican doctrine as expressed in the Communion’s traditional formularies. These things had mostly been said before, in the Jerusalem Declaration itself and in subsequent gatherings of the Global South. What gave them a special edge was that they were said this time not off in Africa or Asia but at St. Mark’s Battersea Rise, the church where the conference took place, not far up the river from Lambeth Palace. Further, they happened to come in the wake of Rowan Williams’ announcement that he was stepping down as Archbishop of Canterbury. Thus they served notice that the Global South expected to be taken into account in the choice of his successor.
No less strategic was the change in the Communion’s governance that the conference called for, contained in the concluding statement of the GFCA Primates’ Council. This was that the chairman of the Primates’ Meeting, instead of being the Archbishop of Canterbury as heretofore, be chosen by the Primates themselves. By virtue of their majority representation in the Meeting, the Global South Primates could probably choose one of their own. This would give him (unlikely to be her), and with him the Global South and their allies, a new footing within the Communion. No less importantly it would retrieve the Primates’ Meeting from the futility to which it has been reduced, enabling it to play the role it was set to play until cut off from it by bureaucratic maneuvers. And with it the other Instruments, the Lambeth Conference and the Anglican Consultative Committee, could be raised up too.
To convey the full drama of this development, it would be necessary to review the history of the Instruments: the Lambeth Conference and the Anglican Consultative Council as well as the Primates’ Meeting (as was done in my paper of a year ago, “Anglican Conciliarism: a Bright Hope Extinguished). But for our present purposes an account of the Primates’ Meeting may suffice. In 2003, just prior to the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, the Primates warned that if this were proceeded with, it would tear the fabric of the Communion at its deepest level. But in the absence of any such unequivocacy from Canterbury itself, the consecration was proceeded with anyway. In 2005 the Primates asked for a “panel of reference” to which dissidents from the liberalism of The Episcopal Church (TEC) could address their grievances. Canterbury set one up but so structured it as to make it ineffective. Most egregiously, in 2007 the Primates, this time addressing themselves directly to TEC, called on it to clarify its positions on the blessing of same-sex unions and the consecration of actively homosexual bishops, moreover to do so by a specific date. These requirements could scarcely have been made more definite, yet they were evacuated of meaning by the Archbishop himself, traveling to a meeting of the TEC House of Bishops for the purpose. In the wake of this experience the Primates’ Meeting of 2009 attempted no significant statements, and their Meeting of 2011, which 15 of the 38 Primates failed to attend, in effect confirmed its own irrelevance.
To be sure, the change that the conference called for is likely to be fiercely opposed. TEC and some in the Church of England will resist it, asserting among other things that it has no legal basis. But standing against these objections is the consideration that (as in its complicit concern for the choice of the next Archbishop of Canterbury) it seeks to work within the Communion’s existing structures rather than to set up parallel ones, thus broadly preserving the Communion’s traditional form. By its rejection the Global South and their allies would be left with little alternative but to resort to instruments of their own. And these would open the way to the division of the Communion de jure as well as de facto, an outcome at which all but extreme partisans should hesitate.
What all this amounts to is a revival of Anglican conciliarism as it developed over many decades only to be cut off by archiepiscopal missteps and bureaucratic maneuverings. And conciliarism, by keeping Anglicanism true to the roots which the Global South and its allies have continued to adhere to, could not only preserve the unity of the Communion. It could also make it fit for the world-wide role that it is called play in the 21st century. For the full appreciation what is at stake here, a historical footnote is necessary.
There was a conciliar movement already back in the Middle Ages. This arose when two then three popes came to be in office at the same. To deal with the resulting division, or evacuation, of central authority, a council of the church was convened in the Swiss city of Constance. The council succeeded in deposing all three and in instituting a new one, Martin V. But Martin, not wishing to share power with the council, outmaneuvered it and it fell into abeyance. Had it continued it could have served as an offset to papal absolutism. As such, conceivably, it could have curbed the papal excesses and abuses which led to the Reformation and so have averted it.
A division of similar finality looms over our Communion. Let us fervently pray that Anglican conciliarism, which appeared to have died, will indeed be raised up again and that through it such a division will this time be averted.