Lest it be said

... that ADU makes no mention of GAFCON 2018, let's mention it!

David Ould muses on his blog whether the Anglican Communion News Service will get around to acknowledging that the largest Anglican gathering for 50 years is taking place this week in Jerusalem.

I cannot speak for the ACNS but I can speak on this blog. GAFCON is happening. And ACNS should recognise that it is happening. GAFCON is the major global movement of Anglicans today. I cannot imagine any other part of the Communion announcing a conference and getting 2000 people to gather from the four corners of the earth. (Later: ACNS has a story!)

And I am doing my bit - leading services in a parish while its priest is at GAFCON!

GAFCON news can be followed on Twitter (@gafconference ); also via the Twitter hashtag #gafcon2018

For a feel for what GAFCON generally and GAFCON 2018 is about, read Archbishop Glenn Davies here.

Quite rightly ++Glenn states what is the sole driving force for GAFCON's existence as a separated set of Anglicans who, nevertheless, wish to remain at the heart of the Anglican Communion. It is all to do with this, the first sentence in his article:

"This year marks the 20th anniversary of the momentous resolution concerning human sexuality adopted by the 1998 Lambeth Conference of bishops from around the Anglican Communion."

It is difficult to imagine that GAFCON would exist without the motivating force of difference in the Communion over sexuality.

Nevertheless ++Glenn argues otherwise when he writes near the end of his article,

"They [the 1100 who met at the first GAFCON Conference in 2008] believed the gospel had been compromised by the renunciation of the doctrine of Christ, and specifically Resolution I.10, plainly seen in the consecration of Gene Robinson as the first bishop living openly in a same-sex relationship.  

Yet the movement did not form solely for this reason. It is mission focused."

I agree that GAFCON is mission focused; that once it had come into being as a movement, it has readily embraced a mission focus rather than a sexuality focus. Though the sexuality issue is not far away: not agreeing with change in Western Anglican churches is becoming a significant identity marker for many Anglicans, both in the West and not in the West; and energy for a different form of Anglicanism - it seems to me - is being derived from the conflict over sexuality.

I suggest that if, generally, an Anglican conference on "mission" was announced, and if there were no conflicts among us, then there would not be 2000 Anglicans motivated to travel across the world to conference over mission.

So GAFCON represents Anglican rumblings, it is a sign of godly discontent about the state of the Anglican church around the globe, or perhaps it is only discontent about the state of the Western church.

That at least is one reason why ACNS should be reporting on GAFCON 2018: the conference represents not just a very large number of Anglicans, it also represents a future direction for global Anglicanism. That this direction is not (so to speak) under the control of the ABC, the ACC, or the Primates makes it more newsworthy rather than less!

From an historic perspective this direction is fascinating. We know that early Reformational and post-Reformational Anglicanism involved tension between Puritan tendencies, (in the language of the day) Papist tendencies, and the Hookerian vision of a Church of England which was neither. Largely the Hookerian approach has driven Anglicanism so many Anglican provinces have successfully incorporated, in more recent terminology, evangelicalism and Anglo-Catholicism, to say nothing of moderate as well as progressive Anglicanism.

GAFCON, it strikes me, noting the drivers of both sexuality and mission, is a fusion of both Puritan and evangelical tendencies, as well as a strongly missional Anglo-Catholicism, with the latter closer to Roman conservatism on sexuality than its modern counterpart, liberal Anglo-Catholicism.

To the extent that the Anglican Communion remains committed to a Hookerian vision of Anglicanism as a grand coalition, it has its work cut out (e.g. in the run up to Lambeth 2020) to gather all members of the coalition in one place.

Conversely, it is reasonably clear that GAFCON is not committed to that Hookerian vision. GAFCON has willingly fostered and supported Anglicans breaking away from (so to speak) Hookerian-vision Anglican provinces. Thus GAFCON represents an evolution or development in what it means to be Anglican.

What fellow Anglicans must eschew is any talk of "unAnglicanism" in respect of this development. Hooker's writings as the Elizabethan settlement settled during the late 16th century were themselves a development of the stringency of the Edwardian Reformation. Laudianism was another development. Anglicanism is a history of such developments and only history determines which developments survive (e.g. by becoming, as evangelicalism, Anglo-Catholicism, and liberalism have done, embedded in the mainstream of Anglican life).

GAFCONism and (so to speak) non-GAFCONism will jostle along through the next decades. The future of Anglicanism may not be a new Hookerian holding together of the two directions. The future of Anglicanism may be what might have happened in the 16th and 17th centuries: the Puritans and the Papists dividing and heading in quite different directions.

UPDATE: important reflection on GAFCON in the Communion here.