Earlier this month, a body known as GAFCON — the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans — declared it was “now the Global Anglican Communion.”
In the Oct. 16 declaration, entitled “The future has arrived,” the alliance of conservative Anglican church leaders said it had resolved to “reorder” the Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest Christian communion after the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodoxy.
“Today, GAFCON is leading the Global Anglican Communion,” said the statement signed by Rwandan Archbishop Laurent Mbanda, chairman of GAFCON’s Primates’ Council.
“As has been the case from the very beginning, we have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion,” he added.
What are the roots of the Anglican Communion? Where does GAFCON fit in? And what does its new declaration mean?
A communion’s roots
The Anglican Communion was born out of the missionary activity of the Church of England under the British Empire.
The Church of England — the established (state) church in England — believes itself in continuity with the Gregorian mission, the expedition commissioned by Pope Gregory I in 596 to convert the Anglo-Saxons, the inhabitants of what is now England.
The mission was led by St. Augustine of Canterbury, a Rome-based monk who became the first Archbishop of Canterbury in 597.
This Anglican conviction of continuity explains why Bishop Sarah Mullally was described as “the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury since St. Augustine arrived in Kent from Rome in 597” in the Oct. 3 press release announcing her appointment.
But the conviction is not accepted by Catholics, who point out that St. Augustine of Canterbury acted under the pope’s authority, used the Roman Rite, and introduced Roman liturgical practices to Britain.
For Catholics, the more relevant date is not 597 but 1534, when the English Parliament declared King Henry VIII the supreme head of the Church of England, breaking with Rome.
From that point, the Church of England was a body separated from Rome and therefore in discontinuity with the Gregorian mission.
While early Anglicanism retained elements of the Roman Rite, the vernacular Book of Common Prayer, published in 1549, marked a decisive break.
The Edwardine Ordinals of 1550 and 1552 changed the form of ordination, leading Pope Leo XIII to declare in his 1896 apostolic letter Apostolicae curae that they rendered Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void.”
The Church of England’s overseas expansion began in the American colonies, with Anglican churches established in Virginia from 1607 under the authority of the Bishop of London.
The first overseas diocese was created in Nova Scotia in 1787, followed by Quebec (1793), Calcutta (1814), Jamaica (1824), Barbados (1824), and Cape Town (1847).
But the Anglican Communion didn’t come into being formally until 1867, when the then-Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Longley, invited 76 bishops from around the world to gather at his London residence, Lambeth Palace.
This “pan-Anglican synod” became known as the first Lambeth Conference and was followed by similar meetings roughly every 10 years of the worldwide Anglican leadership with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Lambeth Conferences were eventually defined as one of the four “instruments of communion” that bind the Anglican Communion.
The other three are the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Consultative Council, a body of bishops, priests, and laity that has met regularly since 1971, and the Primates’ Meeting, which has brought together leaders of national Anglican Communion provinces since 1979.
The communion today has 85 million members belonging to 42 autonomous provinces in 165 countries.
Around 63 million are based in Africa.
Perhaps the greatest mistake Catholics can make in understanding the Anglican Communion is to assume its structure is similar to that of the Catholic Church. It isn’t.
For example, it’s accurate to describe Pope Leo XIV as the Primate of Italy and head of the global Catholic Church.
But as the Anglican lay theologian Martin Davie recently pointed out, it’s misleading to call the Archbishop of Canterbury the “head of the Church of England” and “head of the Anglican Communion.”
Official Anglican documents recognize no such positions, he observed.
“Thus, the ‘Governance’ page of the Church of England’s website describes the Archbishop of Canterbury as ‘the most senior bishop of the Church.’ It does not say that the archbishop is head of the Church of England,” he wrote.
“In similar fashion, the Anglican Communion website states that the Archbishop of Canterbury is ‘is a focus of unity and has pastoral responsibilities in the Anglican Communion.’ It does not say that the archbishop is head of the Anglican Communion.”
While Anglican provinces are independent, Archbishops of Canterbury do have “ordinary jurisdiction” — permanent, ex officio authority — over the Anglican parish in the Falkland Islands, an archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean.
They also exercise limited metropolitan oversight, largely pastoral and symbolic, over “extraprovincial” Anglican churches in Bermuda, Portugal, Spain, and Sri Lanka.
“What this means is that just as the Archbishop of Canterbury does not have governmental authority over the Church of England as a whole, so also the Archbishop of Canterbury does not have governmental authority over the Anglican Communion as a whole,” Davie said. “The archbishop cannot tell the Communion what to do.”
The rise of GAFCON
The Anglican Communion began to show signs of deep strain in the early 2000s.
A notable controversy occurred in 2003, when the openly gay Gene Robinson was consecrated as the Bishop of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church, a member of the Anglican Communion.
Conservative Anglican leaders, including those in the Global South, denounced the step, arguing it was unbiblical and violated a resolution at the 1998 Lambeth Conference that same-sex relations were incompatible with Scripture.
They boycotted the 2008 Lambeth Conference, opting instead to hold an event near Jerusalem called the Global Anglican Future Conference, or GAFCON.
In their final statement, participants said that, while they were not breaking with the Anglican Communion, they believed the doctrinal foundation of Anglicanism lay in the Scriptures.
“We intend to remain faithful to this standard, and we call on others in the Communion to reaffirm and return to it,” they said.
“While acknowledging the nature of Canterbury as an historic see, we do not accept that Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
Conference participants said their final statement — known today as the Jerusalem Declaration — would form “the basis of our fellowship.”
The organization launched by the declaration was initially called the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans. The name seemed to allude to the Confessing Church in Nazi Germany, associated with the Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose members were committed to confessing the Christian faith in opposition to Nazi efforts to force all Protestants to join a state-controlled body called the Reich Church.
In 2017, the group was renamed the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, but retained the GAFCON acronym. Today, it claims to represent “the majority of all Anglicans” — a statement contested by liberal Anglicans, who argue it stands for a vocal minority rather than a numerical majority.
GAFCON’s recent statement that it was “now the Global Anglican Communion” followed the nomination of the first female Archbishop of Canterbury.
The declaration did not mention Archbishop-designate Sarah Mullally or make any explicit statement about women priests and bishops in the Anglican Communion.
In an earlier statement, Archbishop Mbanda, chairman of GAFCON’s Primates’ Council, decried the appointment, saying “the majority of the Anglican Communion still believes that the Bible requires a male-only episcopacy” and “her appointment will make it impossible for the Archbishop of Canterbury to serve as a focus of unity within the Communion.”
The GAFCON declaration “reordering” the Anglican Communion underlined that there was “only one foundation of communion, namely the Holy Bible.”
It also rejected the four “so-called instruments of communion,” saying they had “failed to uphold the doctrine and discipline of the Anglican Communion.”
In taking this step, GAFCON said, it was restoring the Anglican Communion to “its original structure as a fellowship of autonomous provinces bound together by the Formularies of the Reformation, as reflected at the first Lambeth Conference in 1867.”
GAFCON said its provinces would not take part in any meetings called by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It urged all provinces “to amend their constitution to remove any reference to being in communion with the See of Canterbury and the Church of England.”
GAFCON also announced plans to create a “Council of Primates,” bringing together the leaders of its provinces to elect a chairman to preside over the council as primus inter pares (“first among equals”).
But the declaration was somewhat vague about who exactly would belong to the body it called “the Global Anglican Communion” — prompting skepticism about the scope of the new organization.
The body’s precise composition may become clearer following a gathering in March 2026 in Abuja, Nigeria, where GAFCON’s bishops “will confer and celebrate the Global Anglican Communion.”
What does it mean?
GAFCON’s declaration has made the already complex reality of the Anglican Communion even more intricate.
Fr. Ed Tomlinson, a former Anglican who now serves in the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham, said Anglicanism’s current situation was chaotic.
“I think the first problem for any Anglican body today is that they can’t even define what Anglicanism actually is without other Anglicans refuting the definition. This leads to total chaos and breakdown the moment any serious scrutiny takes place,” he told The Pillar via email Oct. 20.
“The reality is that Anglicanism has morphed into a very loose umbrella holding together many different congregational bodies of such divergent beliefs that any claims of unity seem as impossible and daft internally as they do externally.”
“Even within the Church of England, one can now find high Anglicans claiming to be Catholic, low Anglicans preaching extreme Protestant theology, and a whole raft of post-Christian modernists more interested in Gaza, net zero, and the rainbow movement.”
“The fracture of the global Anglican network therefore merely reflects the genuine chaos at the heart of Anglicanism. It’s hard to know where they will go from here.”
Msgr. Michael Nazir-Ali, a former Anglican bishop who was received into the Catholic Church in 2021, said GAFCON’s declaration was inevitable following the appointment of an Archbishop of Canterbury perceived as pro-choice and in favor of same-sex relationships.
“Many GAFCON members don’t ordain women to the priesthood and episcopate so this is also an issue,” he told The Pillar in an Oct. 20 email.
Assessing the declaration, he said: “As is usual for Anglican documents, they reaffirm provincial autonomy, which has caused so many of the Anglican Communion’s problems. What are its limits and how can interdependence be promoted?”
“The Catholic Church should have no objection to what they say about Scripture, but the question remains as to how this relates to the lived Tradition, what they call the consensual reading of the Scriptures by the Church.”
“There is also the question about an adequate teaching authority to declare what Scripture actually means when this is challenged by activists or scholars. What is essential to a common faith and what are adiaphora, where difference can be tolerated? Who decides this?”
From a Catholic point of view, the GAFCON declaration raises the question of who speaks on behalf of the Anglican Communion. Is it the Archbishop of Canterbury or GAFCON’s primus inter pares?
For now, the Vatican’s position seems clear.
The Catholic Church’s chief ecumenical relationship is with Anglicans associated with the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conferences.
Earlier this month, the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, which has brought together bishops and theologians from the two communions since 1967, held a plenary meeting in Melbourne, Australia.
Since 2019, commission members have been discussing “how the Church, local, regional and universal, discerns right ethical teaching” — an issue at the heart of the rift within Anglicanism (and also a source of Catholic tensions).
The commission’s deliberations will continue into 2026, suggesting the ecumenical status quo remains so far untouched by GAFCON’s claim to be the authentic voice of Anglicanism.
The structural fracture within the Anglican Communion has not yet become a significant issue for the Catholic Church.
But perhaps in time it will.