The conservative Anglican group, the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON), is meeting in Nigeria’s capital this week to elect its own leader of the Anglican Communion.
The appointment, which will happen just weeks before the installation of Sarah Mullally as the 36th Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, is seen as a direct challenge to her leadership.
GAFCON, which claims to represent 85 per cent of the world’s practising Anglicans, though those numbers are likely inflated, formed in 2008 in response to a perceived sense that the Anglican Communion was deviating from biblical principles.
The group is a movement rather than a church, so it did not formally sever ties with the Anglican Communion, as it was not itself a church capable of being in communion.
However, some of the provinces it represents have formally separated themselves from Canterbury.
The group has met periodically since its founding in Jerusalem in 2008, roughly every five years, for its global conference.
The Abuja conference represents a change, as it is meeting just three years after the 2023 conference and is being described as a “mini-conference” of bishops and leaders.
In October 2025, GAFCON chairman Laurent Mbanda explained that the GAFCON Communion would officially be renamed the Global Anglican Communion and that its members would select a new primus inter pares instead of recognising the Archbishop of Canterbury at the mini-conference.
The decision represents a significant moment in the history of the Anglican Communion.
A clear dividing line between two factions is now apparent. Dr Gavin Ashenden, formerly a Continuing Anglican bishop and associate editor of the Herald, explains: “Open civil war has arrived among Anglicans as the conservative majority are meeting together at this very moment in Nigeria to elect a chairman who will do two things.
The first is that he will replace the Archbishop of Canterbury, who has traditionally shaped the Anglican Communion, until now the only global expression of Anglicanism; and the second is to act as a form of conservative guardianship in the civil war between conservative and progressive Anglicanism.”
Parts of the Anglican communion have been on a path of liberalisation for almost one hundred years.
The acceptance of birth control at the Lambeth Conference in 1930 became a defining moment in the Communion’s approach to ethics, alongside various provinces within the Communion beginning to ordain women in the second half of the twentieth century.
In 2014 the Church of England introduced women bishops, and in 2015 the Episcopal Church introduced same-sex marriage, making it compulsory across all its dioceses in 2018.
Conversely, many provinces have been reluctant to change doctrine, particularly across the Global South.
The Church of Nigeria, the Church of Uganda, the Anglican Church of Kenya, the Anglican Church of Tanzania and the Anglican Church in North America do not permit women bishops in their provinces and have maintained traditional teaching with regard to marriage and the sanctity of life.
The conservative provinces represented by GAFCON have become increasingly dismayed at leadership choices within other parts of the Anglican Communion.
Last year Cherry Elizabeth Vann was announced as Archbishop of Wales, having received the required two-thirds majority of votes on the second day of the meeting of the electoral college at Chepstow.
Vann is the first woman to be elected as an Anglican archbishop in the United Kingdom and the first openly lesbian and partnered bishop to serve as a primate in the Anglican Communion.
In response, Henry Chukwudum Ndukuba, Primate of the Church of Nigeria, said: “The recent election of the Rt Rev Cherry Vann on Wednesday, July 30, 2025 as Archbishop of Wales is a further indication of the abandonment of the faith once delivered to the saints, Bishop Vann being a practising homosexual.”
The dissatisfaction reached its height with the election of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury, an office which is described as “primus inter pares” (first among equals) within the Anglican Communion.
The response from GAFCON, whose provinces largely have a male-only episcopacy, was unequivocal in its condemnation. Laurent Mbanda, the Archbishop of Rwanda and chairman of GAFCON’s leadership council, argued that “the majority of the Anglican Communion still believes that the Bible requires a male-only episcopacy”.
He also described Mullally as harbouring “unbiblical and revisionist teachings regarding marriage and sexual morality”.
Dr Ashenden explains: “This has been a long time in preparation, but the catalyst is undoubtedly the election of Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury. She is an ex-nurse who believes in abortion and gay marriage and has become the final straw that broke the conservative Anglicans’ back.”
The primate GAFCON elects will likely represent an acknowledgement that much of Anglicanism is now, and will only increasingly be in the coming years, practised in Africa.
Henry Ndukuba, the Primate of the Church of Nigeria, the largest Anglican province in the world, and Archbishop of Abuja, or Laurent Mbanda, would both be clear indications of this.
With the Abuja conference finishing at the end of this week, the announcement will likely be made on Friday.
The election will not represent a schism as such, as the provinces of the Anglican Communion do not exist within such rigid structures, but rather it will create rival “primus inter pares” representing significantly different visions for the world’s third-largest Christian denomination.