ABUJA, Nigeria — Conservative Anglican leaders have restructured their group, signaling a break from the traditions of the historic Anglican Communion as they search to reorder the 400-year-old church group.
The International Anglican Future Convention, or Gafcon, dissolved its Gafcon Primates Council and changed it with the International Anglican Council.
The brand new council will embrace primates, advisers and guarantors, made up of bishops, clergy and lay members, every with full voting privileges, Gafcon basic secretary The Proper Reverend Paul Donison stated in a press release.
The announcement got here throughout a gathering of the church’s conservative leaders in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital metropolis, that drew 436 delegates from 48 international locations representing over 180 dioceses from internationally.
“Whereas the Chairman of the Council might be a Primate, he won’t be primus inter pares (first amongst equals),” Donison stated. “Believing that the present Devices of Communion now not meet the wants of the vast majority of Anglicans all over the world, the International Anglican Communion is to be led by a conciliar construction.”
Gafcon leaders have opposed liberal developments corresponding to same-sex marriage and the ordination of overtly LGBTQ+ clergy within the Anglican church buildings of Europe and North America, together with the Episcopal Church in america.
Divisions have widened so sharply over current many years that some nationwide church buildings stopped taking part in Anglican Communion gatherings.
Archbishop Laurent Mbanda from Rwanda, who was unanimously elected as chair of the brand new International Anglican Council, informed the Creation Cable Community Nigeria, the televangelism arm of the Church of Nigeria, on Thursday that leaders inside Gafcon’s ranks should “reject these devices that haven’t labored for us prior to now.”
One of many Anglican Church’s devices of management contains the Archbishop of Canterbury, at the moment Sarah Mullally, the church’s non secular head and the primary lady in that place. Mullally has confronted opposition in her function as chief of the church.
Final yr, Mbanda referred to as for a break from the historic communion because it’s at the moment structured, declaring that “the Anglican Communion might be reordered.”
