first published on Australian Presbyterian

he Anglican Communion is getting a divorce. The irony of that statement shouldn’t be missed given that the mother church of the Anglican Communion, the Church of England, began with a divorce.

Well, sort of. In 1527 Henry VIII separated from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. He had married her after the untimely death of his older brother almost 20 years earlier and yet the marriage had only produced one child – a girl called Mary. Towards the end of those two decades Henry became increasingly convinced that his failure to produce a male heir was because the marriage itself was (forgive the pun) ill-conceived to the point of being sinful. No doubt this growing disquiet was catalysed by the 1525 appearance in court of Anne Boleyn with whom Henry quickly became infatuated. But to break up a marriage is a serious thing. Not just because of the relationship itself but what it symbolises. The Bible is clear – marriage is a powerful image of the relationship between Christ and his Church. It was the image that Jesus used the most and one which the Apostle Paul strongly emphasised. That which God had joined together, man should not put asunder. To say that marriage could be easily broken was to say that Jesus wasn’t totally committed to his church.

So, what to do? Under normal circumstances a king would get permission from the pope for an annulment or divorce. But it all got a bit tricky when Catherine appealed to her uncle King Charles of Spain who just happened to also be Emperor Charles V, the latest in a long line of powerful Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperors. Guess who the pope was more anxious to please?

Rome said “no” and so Henry looked for a “yes” elsewhere. Enter Thomas Cranmer. He argued that Henry should be looking to university scholars, learned in the Bible, to find the answer to his biblical question. This was a relatively new, but rapidly growing, concept fanned into flame by the Protestant Reformation that was sweeping across Europe, and which had captured Cranmer’s imagination. Its foundation was a conviction that the ultimate authority in Christendom was not the Bishop of Rome but the Scriptures. The Reformers were convinced that God spoke not through a man in the Vatican but through the Bible. It was, after all, the word of God and so it was to Bible scholars and not Popes that one needed to turn to work out the answer to Henry’s difficult question. Perhaps a new right-thinking Archbishop of Canterbury to summarise and declare the results of that academic enquiry would also help move things along and so Cranmer found himself clothed in purple. While they were at it, how about a national church where the pope no longer interfered from a distant land and someone else like, say, the king himself could be Governor?

In 1531 Henry had made exactly such a declaration in Parliament and the Church of England was effectively born. It was the first of a number of divorces. England split with Rome, Henry split formally with Catherine and, more fundamentally, the Church in England began a long breaking away from Roman Catholic theology towards Bible-based religion. That last movement only really got going once Henry finally died. It was given firm roots in the short reign of Edward VI, survived the scourging of Mary’s rule, and then flourished as Elizabeth I brought the stability that England so badly needed. Under her oversight the marriage of the state with a decidedly Protestant Church of England got beyond its seven-year itch and settled in for the long haul. Cranmer’s work to make two divorces happen was really a work to keep a marriage going – that between the church and the God that they worshipped.

Centuries passed. The Church of England survived a civil war and then sailed out on the same ships that expanded the British Empire across the globe. If the sun never set on the Empire then it was equally true that evensong could be heard during all those twilights. In 1867 the then Archbishop of Canterbury called Anglican bishops around the world to what would be the first Lambeth Conference and the Anglican Communion was born amongst all those national churches that traced their descent back to Canterbury.

But parts of the Anglican Communion gradually drifted away from their Scriptural moorings as surely as Rome had 500 years before, this time towards theological liberalism. The presenting issue was human sexuality but under the surface the disease was what it has always been – no longer seeing the Bible as authoritative in the rule of the Church. The rot set in in western national churches in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and in the UK itself. A crisis moment came at the Lambeth Conferences of 1998 and 2008. In 1998 a strong resolution was passed reaffirming orthodox Biblical ethics; marriage was between a man and a woman, and sex belonged there and nowhere else. But those who wanted to act otherwise just carried on their own way. When Archbishop Rowan Williams called the 2008 Lambeth Conference he was faced with a strong boycott as many bishops (especially from the developing world) refused to meet with those who had so readily broken their trust 10 years before. Instead, they met in Jerusalem for the first Global Anglican Future Conference – GAFCON. As Lambeth rearranged the deck chairs on a slowly sinking ship, GAFCON steamed on with conferences every five years – Nairobi, back to Jerusalem and then to Kigali. As the official Communion structures tried to find every possible way to act like nothing was going wrong, GAFCON spoke clearly into the growing void. The 2023 ‘Kigali Commitment’ summed up the crisis moment that the Communion had more than arrived at:

Public statements by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other leaders of the Church of England in support of same-sex blessings are a betrayal of their ordination and consecration vows to banish error and to uphold and defend the truth taught in Scripture.

…

The 2022 Lambeth Conference demonstrated the deep divisions in the Anglican Communion as many bishops chose not to attend and some of those who did withdrew from sharing at the Lord’s table.

And most striking of all:

We have no confidence that the Archbishop of Canterbury nor the other Instruments of Communion led by him (the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Primates’ Meetings) are able to provide a godly way forward that will be acceptable to those who are committed to the truthfulness, clarity, sufficiency and authority of Scripture. The Instruments of Communion have failed to maintain true communion based on the Word of God and shared faith in Christ.

…

Successive Archbishops of Canterbury have failed to guard the faith by inviting bishops to Lambeth who have embraced or promoted practices contrary to Scripture. This failure of church discipline has been compounded by the current Archbishop of Canterbury who has himself welcomed the provision of liturgical resources to bless these practices contrary to Scripture. This renders his leadership role in the Anglican Communion entirely indefensible. 

And so we arrive at the announcement by GAFCON on 16 October: “The Future Has Arrived” – an effective “we’re done!”. Perhaps this moment was spurred on by the recent appointment of Dame Sarah Mullally as the new Archbishop of Canterbury. The news was met with real dismay in most of the Communion. It wasn’t just that she was a woman (and many, because of their biblical theology, couldn’t countenance such a thing), but more fundamentally that she represented an embedding of the liberalising theology that had already done so much damage and from which GAFCON can already effectively separated itself. “The Future Has Arrived” declared that the split was now permanent. But GAFCON has no intention of surrendering the marital home. On the anniversary of the deaths of 16^th century Anglican Reformer martyrs Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, the GAFCON bishops declared another reformation, another moment of bringing a church back to where it should be:

we have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion

Media headlines that “the Anglican Communion has split” don’t quite capture the reality of the situation. Like any difficult divorce the split happened a long time ago and GAFCON’s statement, announced in an email with the strapline “the Bible at the heart of the Anglican Communion,” is really just the decree absolute. Absolute. And absolutely necessary. The announcement by GAFCON is another sad divorce in the history of a church that has been known far too many. But it serves, as its precursor did 500 years earlier, to keep something even more important going  – the faithfulness of the church, the bride of Christ, to her husband.