As bishops and church leaders gather in Abuja, Nigeria for the 2026 GAFCON Council, another conversation about the future of the Anglican Communion is unfolding at the same time. The Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) recently announced that it will consider revised versions of the Nairobi–Cairo proposals later this year: structural reforms intended to rethink how the Communion is organized and how authority is exercised across its global fellowship of provinces. (You can read that announcement here.)
The timing is difficult to ignore. While GAFCON leaders meet to reaffirm their vision for Anglican unity rooted in the authority of Scripture and articulated in the Jerusalem Declaration, the Communion’s official institutions are advancing their own proposal for restructuring global Anglican leadership. Whether this represents a genuine effort to respond to the Communion’s long-standing divisions, or a strategic attempt to preempt the momentum of the GAFCON movement, is a question many observers are now asking.
This would not be the first time institutional leadership within the Communion has attempted to respond to pressure from the Global South with structural adjustments rather than theological clarity.
At the opening press briefing in Abuja, the Rev. Canon Justin Murff, Communications Director for GAFCON, addressed a question that has followed the movement since its founding in 2008: whether it represents a break from the Anglican Communion. “The goal is not to break apart the Communion,” Murff said. “This is a claim to continuum.” Murff emphasized that GAFCON continues to define itself through the Jerusalem Declaration, the theological statement adopted at the first GAFCON gathering in Jerusalem. Far from being merely a protest against developments in Western provinces, Murff said the declaration was intended to articulate what unites Anglicans who believe the Communion must remain rooted in the authority of Scripture. “We will be reaffirming and upholding the Jerusalem Declaration,” he said, reemphasizing that it is not designed to show what they oppose but what unites GAFCON.”
For many within the movement, the declaration has increasingly functioned as a theological center of gravity for Anglicans who believe the Communion’s institutional structures failed to respond adequately to doctrinal divisions that have widened over the past two decades. “It has become a basis of communion across boundaries,” Murff said, noting that it provides theological grounding for cooperation, and at times cross-provincial oversight, among churches that share the same doctrinal commitments. Murff also stressed that GAFCON does not see itself as creating a separate church. Instead, he suggested that many within the movement believe they are preserving the historic faith of Anglicanism, even as the Communion’s institutions struggle to address theological conflict. “We are the Anglican Communion,” he stated, describing the movement as committed to “defending the faith as the Word of God has taught and commanded.”
Murff also pushed back against portrayals of GAFCON as defined primarily by opposition to contemporary social debates. The purpose of the movement, he said, is not to define Anglicanism by what it opposes, but by what it affirms. “We are,” he said, “a Communion centered around the Bible.” The deeper issue, Murff suggested, concerns authority within the global church. Many GAFCON leaders believe that the Communion’s current structures allow a relatively small group of Western provinces, representing a minority of the world’s Anglicans, to exert disproportionate influence over the direction of the wider body. “The Church should exercise democratic rights and values in the Communion,” Murff said, rather than allowing a small Western church with limited global representation set the tone for the entire fellowship.
Questions inevitably turned to the Church of England and the historic role of the Archbishop of Canterbury as a focal point of Anglican unity. Asked whether current tensions could eventually lead to a definitive break with Canterbury, Murff offered a striking response: “The invitation is always open to England to join us.” The remark reflects a perspective increasingly heard within the movement, that GAFCON represents not a departure from Anglicanism but an effort to preserve its historic theological identity.
Yet while GAFCON leaders gather to reaffirm the Jerusalem Declaration, the Communion’s official structures are advancing their own effort to address the same global tensions.
The Nairobi–Cairo proposals now before the Anglican Consultative Council seek to rethink how the Communion is described and governed. Among other ideas, the proposals suggest redefining Anglican unity less in terms of formal communion with the See of Canterbury and more in terms of shared inheritance, mutual service, and common counsel among provinces. They also explore distributing leadership more broadly across the Communion rather than centering it primarily on the Archbishop of Canterbury.
On the surface, these proposals appear to acknowledge the shifting reality of global Anglicanism, particularly the growing influence of the Global South, but they also ignore the theological problems that are underlining those shifting realities. The ACC is proposing structural changes as a solution to deeply theological and spiritual problems.
Nevertheless, this proposal, announced at this time, does raise a number of important questions for the GAFCON movement.
If the Communion’s institutions are now proposing a form of democratization that gives greater authority to Global South leaders and provinces, how will GAFCON respond? Will such reforms be seen as a meaningful step toward addressing long-standing concerns, or as another attempt to preserve existing structures while diffusing pressure from the Global South? Will the GAFCON council directly address the Nairobi–Cairo proposals and the forthcoming ACC discussions this summer in a decisive way?
These questions are not merely procedural. They go to the heart of how Anglican unity will be understood in the years ahead.
For nearly two decades, the Anglican world wrestled with the consequences of theological division and institutional paralysis. Now two possible paths forward appear to be emerging simultaneously: one focused on structural reform within the Communion’s existing institutions and another centered on theological alignment around the Jerusalem Declaration.
Whether these paths ultimately converge, compete, or diverge further may prove to be one of the defining questions facing the global Anglican movement today. Yet one reality is already clear: the energy, conviction, and theological clarity driving the future of Anglicanism are increasingly found among the churches of the Global South and the leaders gathered through the GAFCON movement. While the ACC considers structural adjustments and institutional reforms, GAFCON continues to press a more fundamental question: the faithfulness of the Communion to the authority of Scripture and the historic teaching of the Church. As bishops meet in Abuja and reaffirm the Jerusalem Declaration, it is that theological center, rather than any institutional proposal, that is likely to shape the future of global Anglicanism.
In 2024, the Rt. Rev. Phil Ashey, as then President of the American Anglican Council, wrote about the proposed Nairobi-Cairo proposals and pointed out their flaws. He did this in the context of the Cairo Covenant, the GSFA’s attempts to implement structures that will help reform the Anglican Communion. Now, as Gafcon attempts to do the same, the recent announcement of the ACC’s continuing work on those proposals is not coincidental. These critiques of Canterbury’s proposals are as relevant to Gafcon’s efforts to reform as it was in 2024 to the GSFA’s efforts to reform. Our hope at the American Anglican Council is that leaders in both biblically-faithful networks will continue to discuss ways to work together and move forward in Gospel mission. Click the image below to read the article.
