The third Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) met in Jerusalem this past week. It was the largest gathering of Anglicans since 1963’s Pan Anglican Congress in Toronto, with ‘some 1,966 [representatives coming] from 52 countries,’ including 472 from Nigeria, 367 from the United States, 232 from Uganda, 218 from Australia, and 204 from the United Kingdom.[1] GAFCON’s 1st conference in 2008, just ten years ago, was the result of and response to the cultural distortion of Christianity in Western nations that came to a focus when Western Anglican provinces, along with other mainline denominations, began to reject the Church’s 2,000 year old, and Biblical, teaching on homosexuality. GAFCON took a decidedly orthodox view on the issue of sexuality and the authority of Scripture. The third GAFCON conference included 316 bishops, 669 other clergy, and 965 laity.[2] The number of Anglicans worldwide is estimated at over 80 million, by far the largest body of Protestant Christians in the world. GAFCON represents the majority, some 50 million, of these Anglicans.[3]
Yet the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, has recently called GAFCON a ‘ginger group.’ He went on to explain his point in a positive way, although leaving open the possibility of a negative meaning as well. Positively, he said, ‘where [GAFCON] is acting as a ginger group, a source of prayer and renewal, of spiritual life within God’s people around the world and within the Anglican Communion, within that it is a very good thing.’[4] Yet ‘ginger group’ can be a British way of dismissing something as the smaller group within a larger group that pushes its own agenda—possibly a single issue—to pressure the organization to adopt its concern. There is every reason to believe that Welby sees GAFCON primarily as a negative ‘ginger group,’ for it is hostile to the revisionist agenda of the Church of England, which is also his agenda.
GAFCON is actually the larger group within Anglicanism. It is Anglican orthodoxy and so, by definition, not a ginger group. Welby’s dismissal of GAFCON as a ginger group would be like saying that Winston Churchill and his friends, arguing for rearmament in the face of German aggression during the Nevill Chamberlain government, formed a ginger group within the government. They soon replaced Chamberlain. Churchill famously said to Chamberlain, ‘You were given the choice between war and dishonour. You chose dishonour, and you will have war.’ We might say something similar to Archbishop Welby, who has equally presided over a catastrophic governance of a British institution under attack: ‘You were given the choice between division within Anglicanism and cultural revisionism. You chose cultural revisionism, and you will have division.’
Also, while the catalyst for GAFCON’s formation had to do with the attempt to revise the Christian Church’s Biblical understanding of homosexuality, this was only the nose of the camel at the door of orthodoxy itself. GAFCON stands for historic, Christian teaching based on the authority of Scripture. It is opposed to altering and distorting the Church to accommodate itself to changing culture. Nor is it correct to think of GAFCON as pushing its own agenda; rather, it stands for what the Church has always taught. It would be more accurate to call the liberals of the Church of England a ‘ginger group,’ a smaller group pushing its agenda of sexual promiscuity onto an ancient Church.
Nevertheless, there is something to Welby’s description of orthodox Anglicanism, GAFCON, as a ‘ginger group’ where the epithet references an active, reforming group within an institution. Indeed, this might be said of any number of other Evangelical groups that have formed and continue to form in response to the inexorable, it would seem, decay of institutional Churches. What Protestantism was to Roman Catholicism, Evangelicalism is to institutional, Protestant denominations. ‘Evangelicalism’ can be defined, as David Bebbington does, in terms of four emphases: conversionism (transformation of lives through belief in and following Jesus), activism (missionary and social reform efforts), Biblicism (obedience to Biblical authority), and crucicentrism (a focus on Jesus’ sacrificial death on the cross).[5] The first two of these characteristics are dynamic—conversion and activism. Indeed, Evangelicalism is a movement, not an institution, and Anglicans have always been central in defining the Evangelical movement. If ‘ginger group’ means an active group (the ‘ginger’) seeking a good cause within a crusty institution that has lost its focus and purpose, then GAFCON is just that.
GAFCON III met under the title, ‘Proclaiming Christ Faithfully to the Nations.’ If, over against the false Gospel of liberal revisionism, what is meant by this is a call to faithful teaching in the international communion of Anglicanism, then the emphasis falls on GAFCON being an orthodox rock in the stormy seas of cultural accommodation. There is much to such an understanding of GAFCON, and it is to be most welcomed. However, if by this title is meant a more dynamic focus for GAFCON, one that is drawn around a commitment to mission, then GAFCON will continue to be a movement that calls for transformation and activism in its faithful commitment to Christ. This, too, will be most welcome.
Actually, one cannot have orthodoxy without active mission, and one cannot have active mission without orthodoxy. If separated, both morph into a distorted expression of Christian faith. The reason for this is simple: belief in and proclamation of Jesus is transformative and missional. Conversion is not—as too many freshman courses at Christian colleges teach—merely about adopting a different worldview. Conversion is life-transforming. Yet the lurking danger for the GAFCON movement is that, in its fight with liberal revisionism, it will define itself more as an orthodox institution over against something like the Church of England, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Church of Scotland, the Episcopal Church (USA), or the Church of the Province of New Zealand—all committed to heretical teaching—than as a missional, reform movement calling for transformation. The fight for orthodoxy must not diminish the call to mission.
By way example, let us take the Anglican Church of North America. It is a remarkable story of growth over just a few years. Its first archbishop, Robert Duncan, called for planting 1,000 new congregations in 2009. While this is a missional call, it can be understood as a concern of institutional orthodoxy. Will these 1,000 new congregations be break-aways from the Episcopal Church? Will they arise as ‘three songs and a sermon’ Evangelicals seek something deeper to their worship and that is more expressive of the historical Church? Or will they arise from an active effort at evangelizing the lost? Moreover, in this, will an inward focus on establishing new congregations in North America diminish an active effort in foreign missions? Will small, struggling churches try to support a new church plant rather than define themselves missionally as active congregations engaged in international missions? Will the focus fall on ‘groups’ rather than on ‘ginger’?! Let’s hope and pray that GAFCON not become merely an orthodox version of institutional Anglicanism but that it forms around a dynamic Gospel of transformation and an activism in mission. And let us hope that its understanding of mission is thoroughly determined by the cross of Jesus Christ—crucicentrism—and not by an active pursuit of social justice that treats Jesus as nothing more than a good example of justice.
So, here’s to GAFCON being and remaining a ‘ginger group’ in the particular sense suggested here. After all, one might easily imagine the Sadducees, chief priests, elders of the people, Pharisees, and the Sanhedrin dismissing Jesus as the leader of a Jewish ‘ginger group’ up in Galilee and not in Jerusalem. His single focus was his call to repent and be transformed in light of the coming of the Kingdom of God (e.g., Matthew 4.17). His movement was a reform movement that broke old wine skins unable to accommodate themselves to the new wine of His Kingdom message. His Galilean ‘ginger group,’ within a few years, was accused of ‘turning the world upside down’ in the far-away city of Thessalonica (Acts 16.6).
One might also imagine Jonathan Edwards and his ‘New Lights’ followers in the 1700s being dismissed by the ‘Old Lights’ (those rejecting the Great Awakening) as a ginger group. John and Charles Wesley, too, were rejected by the Church of England for their Evangelical message, with the result being a new denomination, Methodism, that, by our times (as it always happens) desperately needs reform. Pentecostals were at one point rejected by a more ‘heady’ version of Christianity, but they had recovered an understanding of Christianity as a movement of God’s Spirit in the hearts of people and throughout the world. Let us hope that GAFCON remains a movement with its newly designed networks to accomplish its mission and never become an atrocious institution with its heretical teaching presided over by an archbishop more concerned about disunity than heresy and who will see both.
[1] Mary Ann Mueller, ‘Anglican Consultative Council in a snit over GAFCON III's success,’ Virtue Online (June 21, 2018); online at: http://www.virtueonline.org/anglican-consultative-council-snit-over-gafcon-iiis-success (accessed 22 June, 2018).
[2] ‘JERUSALEM: Letter to the Churches - GAFCON Assembly 2018,’ Virtue Online (June 22, 2018); online at: http://www.virtueonline.org/jerusalem-letter-churches-gafcon-assembly-2018 (accessed 22 June, 2018).
[3] George Conger, ‘Foley Beach and Ben Kwashi to lead GAFCON,’ Anglican.Ink (22 June, 2018); online at: http://www.anglican.ink/article/foley-beach-and-ben-kwash-lead-gafcon (accessed 22 June, 2018).
[4] See Stephen Noll, ‘Contention 3: Is GAFCON a Ginger Group?,’ (April 22, 2018); online at: http://contendinganglican.org/2018/04/22/contention-3-is-gafcon-a-ginger-group/ (accessed 22 June, 2018).
[5] David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Routledge, 1988).
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