Trusting God at GAFCON

Let me be personal. The Global Anglican Future Conference in Jerusalem was one of the highlights of my life.

Primarily it was a spiritual conference and a spiritual experience. As one of the organisers, I was in a position to see how the Lord answered prayer again and again. To organise a conference of this nature in the time available was simply extraordinary and I must testify to you the Lord’s continual faithfulness. I know that many people all round the world were praying for us during the whole time, not to mention that the conference itself was much given to intercession.

There was a sense of seeking the Lord’s will. I will illustrate. My natural personality prefers to have things organised well in advance. I was therefore giving a great deal of thought in the run-up to the conference about what the conference should say and do. The chairman Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria asked us all to stop doing this. To him, it was very important that we sought the mind of the Lord in listening to God’s word and listening to each other. I found this decision a difficult one, as I was conscious of how little time there was to achieve our purposes, the sheer variety of people attending and the complexity of the issues facing us. It meant a new level of trust in the Lord.

We followed the chairman’s wisdom. The result was the Jerusalem Declaration, a document which in my opinion is going to be regarded as one of the most significant statements in the unfolding history of the Anglican Communion. I have to say that as I heard the final version read out by Archbishop Orombi, I was in tears. In part this was because of the content, which meant so much to the people who had shared their painful stories with us. But it was also because I had seen the Lord do something in our midst which I could not have anticipated.

And there was so much more: I have just received an email from an immensely courageous Sudanese bishop who was blessed by meeting some of the Sydney delegation. He went home with fresh resources to use in education and evangelism. He reports that he used Two Ways to Live recently, and nineteen people came to know the Lord! He is also using material from Youthworks and from Moore College. Indeed there is no limit to the help we can give in resourcing overseas churches with the tools for ministry which we have developed here.

THE LAMBETH STRATEGY

But what of the big issues confronting the Anglican Communion? I know that not all of you were comfortable about our decision not to attend Lambeth this year. Sometimes people do not know the whole story extending over many years which lay behind that decision.

Opinions will still differ.

Overwhelmingly, the Communion is still opposed to the sexual revolution which sparked this crisis. Both GAFCON and Lambeth have made that clear. Yet there are powerful forces which will not retreat when it comes to the ‘sanctification of sin’ as Jim Packer calls it. 

Fundamentally there is a difference of strategy for responding to this. I would say that the period of negotiation and patience is well and truly past. That is why we had to have a ‘Future Conference’ to work out where we go from here. At GAFCON, the sociologist Dr Os Guinness likened the situation to a nuclear explosion. Those closest to the centre of it will suffer first – as so many faithful Anglican Christians in North America have done. The rest of us will receive the fallout in due course. It may take some time, but we will not escape.

The other approach, apparently favoured at Lambeth, involves continuing to call for a temporary cessation of the offensive activities (including providing pastoral care across diocesan boundaries). I say ‘apparently’ because one of the strategies of Lambeth was not to make any decisions. It is an approach which requires long periods of time and much talk. In the meantime, lawsuits continue, parishes and even whole dioceses are leaving the American Church, and Anglicans just like ourselves are left without the benefit of fellowship and pastoral care.

I appreciate that quite a number of people who share the GAFCON view of the Bible and its authority have pressed for the second approach. In my view this is continuing a process which has demonstrably failed to protect orthodox Anglicans let alone deliver a return to biblical standards. Worse, it plays into the hands of those who believe that the longer time goes by the more we will all accept the novel teaching.

Holding GAFCON before Lambeth was absolutely necessary and the results of the Lambeth conference only serve to confirm in my mind the wisdom of not attending. When people say that we should have gone to Lambeth to make our voices heard, they fail to understand how Lambeth was designed. The best way to make our voices heard in world Anglicanism – and indeed well beyond Anglicanism, since the ecumenical support for GAFCON has been significant – was to attend GAFCON instead.

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