Chair of the CMS Board of Trustees, Bishop Paul Butler, and Bishop Keith Sinclair of Birkenhead reflect on the GAFCON Conference in Jerusalem.
"Find out what is pleasing to the Lord." (Ephesians 5.10)
"You hate my instruction and cast my words behind you." (Psalm 50.17)
These two verses were in our minds over the last remarkable week of the GAFCON Conference in Jerusalem, attended by over 1,200 people, including nearly 300 bishops from all over the world, chiefly from the provinces of Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya and Tanzania.
Part of the joy of the conference was its make-up of laity and clergy, women and men, from all the continents of our world.
The Rev Professor Stephen Noll and Bishop Michael Naxir-Ali at GAFCON(Photo: © CEN)Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, Bishop of Rochester, addressing the conference, referred to the ‘miracle of Gafcon’, describing it as part of God’s purposes for our church.
It was extraordinary that so many people, from so many different parts of the world, had come together within the space of eight months’ preparation time.
There were bishops from Nigeria, who had been recently consecrated and sent out into Muslim areas to plant new churches. There was the Province which represented the Western Nile that had seen 120 churches planted in the last 20 years, following the translation of the Bible into the Kukuwa language, a church which was made up of 70 per cent youth, whose cathedral had 1,200 children in the Sunday school, between the ages of 7 and 14, where 60 per cent were below the age of 35, described by their bishop as "praying hard, singing loud and dancing a lot".
Self-examination However, there was plenty of self-examination and criticism within the churches represented at Gafcon.
All the way through the conference there was the question as to the relationship between the Gospel and Anglicanism, with the insistence that Anglicanism has been shaped by the Gospel, and that this must remain the case.
In addition to the national and ethnic diversity, different traditions within the world-wide Church were very evidently present --- from evangelical to catholic to charismatic.
A theme throughout the week was given by superb expositions from Scripture, bringing us the ‘one story’ of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, one of the most powerful expositions being the last from Revelation 21, given by Archbishop Yong Ping Cheung, former
Archbishop of the Province of South East Asia, who spoke of the "clear intention to erode and change the fundamentals of the Gospel" being the challenge facing the Anglican Communion at this time.
But Gafcon was not about narrow introspection. There were major sessions on ‘The Gospel and Secularism’, led by Os Guinness; ‘The Gospel and Religion’, led by Professor Lamin Sanneh, Professor of World Christianity at Yale University; sessions on tackling HIV and AIDS, learning from projects in Uganda and Nigeria, promoting micro-economic finance and transformational business networks.
We heard from Palestinian Christians and Messianic Jews as to how they were seeking to resolve their conflicts in the Holy Land.
One of the most powerful presentations came from Lamin Sanneh, as he spoke about the Gospel and religion in the world at this time, with specific
reference to Gafcon.
PilgrimageHe identified three steps in any pilgrimage: 1) preparation and separation, breaking the habits of routine, shaking up awareness of who we are; 2) transition: we are going somewhere, we have left
somewhere and, in between, we need to pray and to concentrate on transformation; 3) incorporation, when we are brought into a new family, a new situation, a new fellowship, a new sense of community, we won’t be the same as we were before.
He identified Gafcon as part of a bigger picture, an awakening of the Christian Church in the post-Western world.
He shared with us his thoughts on how it was that
Christianity had been marginalised in the land of its birth. It had no territorial call on any place, just as it had no elite.
The essence of its growth throughout the world was the
translatability of the Gospel. Christianity does not invent its own language, it adapts language and the principle of translatability means that at the heart of the Gospel is the rejection of any idea of superior culture or any culture that is so unclean that it cannot be the recipient of the Gospel and be transformed. Exclusivity to any culture is denied. All cultures are relativised, and he shared some
wonderful stories about the growth of the Church once the Bible has been translated into the language of the people, and he thought that Gafcon belonged to the sweep of Christian history and part of the wave of the future.
When asked what should the rest of the Anglican Communion’s response be to the Gafcon movement, he thought the answer was obvious.
The communion should not respond to Gafcon as a movement or as a rival or as a threat, but as an asset, an asset to be grasped, to be worked with, to follow the impact of the Gospel that is animating it.
There were also workshops on ‘The Gospel and Culture’, ‘Anglican Identity’, theological training, the family and marriage and evangelism and church planting, but at the heart was the question: "What is it to be an Anglican in the world today?"
The Anglican Communion and the futureBishop Michael Nazir-Ali was asked to address the question of the Anglican Communion and the future, and he, addressing our current conflicts and how our fellowship should be maintained and not impaired, set out what he thought was needed for our Communion at
this time.
(1) that we needed to be clear that we were a confessing
church, articulating the Gospel in terms of our own tradition;
(2) to be clear that we are a conciliar church, that there are councils at every level of the church that are authoritative to make decisions
that stick; and
(3) to be clear that we are a consistorial church,
which means that we are a church in which councils needed to exercise a teaching office, so that our faith could be articulated clearly.
Bishop Michael was particularly concerned for us to recover our Christian values in the West, so that the Gospel was not lost.
No one was underestimating the difficulties that we face and the whole conference was shaped by worship and prayer, both in the conference itself and out on the sites of the pilgrimage, including the Mount of Olives and the steps leading to the Temple.
Towards the end of the conference, its purpose and hope were summarised in the statement and the Jerusalem Declaration.
There was laughter and joy and there was anguish and tears.
One of the Bible expositions concluded with the call for us to be humble, obedient, evangelistic and hopeful.
We have come back wanting to commend the statement and declaration for everyone’s prayer and testing, not as a full and final declaration but clearly expressive of the needs, longings and possible directions for the whole communion.
We should all pray and test, trying to find out what the will of the Lord is, loving his instruction and never casting his words behind us.
This piece first appeared as an article in 11 July 2008 edition of The Church of England Newspaper and is reproduced here by kind permission of that newspaper. © CEN