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At a meeting of Trustees in October, the Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion (EFAC) restated its vision and appointed new leadership.

EFAC’s purpose remains to encourage and develop biblically faithful fellowship and mission throughout the Anglican world. It is adjusting its goals and strategies to best serve its constituency, which has seen tremendous change since John Stott founded the Fellowship in 1961.

The scandal surrounding Oxfam staff in Haiti in 2011 has brought to light the need for the leadership in global organisations to address the imbalance of power between well-resourced institutions and desperate people struggling to survive in a disaster zone.

At the heart of the issue is accountability. The history of Christian mission, and of the Anglican Communion in particular, suggests that accountability must be rooted in the local situation. Anglican bishops around the world long since ceased to be accountable to any UK-based ecclesial body. They are leaders in their own ‘provinces’ and accountable to their own people. Powerful charities, which are the 21st-century equivalents of 19th-century missionary societies, could do well to develop similar models of local accountability, to address the issues and implications of the imbalance of power and its misuse.

Five bishops in the Anglican Church of Australia have asked their church lawyers whether bishops can take part in consecrating another bishop of a church which is not formally part of the Anglican Communion.

They raised objections to the consecration in May of the Rt Revd Andrew Lines of the Anglican Church in North America by the Archbishop of Sydney and bishops of Tasmania and Northwest Australia. These proceedings were set to dominate the meetings of the Church’s General Synod in September.

In February, the Secretary General of the Anglican Communion, a Nigerian Archbishop, Josiah Idowu-Fearon, addressed the General Synod of the Church of England; and Growth and Decline in the Anglican Communion – 1980 to the Present, edited by David Goodhew of Cranmer Hall, Durham, was launched at a conference.

Archbishop Fearon clarified that the term ‘Anglican Communion’ referred to churches which find their common roots through the CofE and its tradition to the witness and mission of the apostolic church. ‘The very word anglicana implies a living tradition of faith in the gospel as this church has received it … from Augustine of Canterbury … to renewal in the English Reformation and beyond.’ ‘They feel they owe so much of their faith, in human terms, to the faithful giving of Christians in the CofE over the centuries.’

Delegates from 16 Anglican Provinces attended the sixth Global South conference at All Saints Cathedral, Cairo from 3-8 October, along with guests from Australia, Canada and England.

They issued a conference communiqué which gives strong counsel to the Church of England and foreshadows development of a structure to sustain orthodox Anglicanism. The Primates Councils of the Global South and GAFCON issued a further joint com-muniqué concerning same-sex unions.

The Council of the Anglican Provinces of Africa (CAPA) was founded in 1979 in Chilema, Malawi, by the Anglican Primates of Africa. It reaches out to individuals, communities and groups through more than 40 million dedicated Church members in the 25 African countries with an Anglican presence. That 40 million is over half the Church-going Anglicans in the world.

CAPA is headed by a council to run the Provinces’ activities. Its secretariat, headed by General Secretary Canon Grace Kaiso from Uganda, is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Canon Precious Omuku from Nigeria, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Adviser on Anglican Communion Affairs and seconded from the Anglican Communion Office, was consecrated assistant bishop in Juba, South Sudan, in a televised ceremony on 3 January at the age of 68.

Bishop Omuku will remain in London as a special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury and be an international advocate for the Anglican Province of Sudan and South Sudan.

South Africa witnessed two major campaigns in October and November. Tens of thousands of students protested against a rise in student fees, ‘Fees must fall’, and the Anglican Archbishop, Thabo Makoba, and the Director of the Evangelical Alliance of South Africa, the Revd Moss Ntlha, led an anti-corruption march of 6000 people.

These protests against the government by churches which had supported the anti-apartheid struggle marks an important step in the development of South Africa since freedom from apartheid came in 1994.

‘Summitry’ was a regular part of the Cold War. The USSR and the USA faced each across the Iron Curtain with separate alliances, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the Warsaw Pact. Their leaders could not meet as part of one organisation, without recognising the unrecognisable: the West did not recognise the division of Berlin. In 1963 John F. Kennedy proclaimed across the Berlin Wall: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’.

But US and Russian Presidents did meet in ‘summits’. And Archbishop Justin Welby has called a summit of Anglican Primates in Canterbury for 11–16 January 2016 in these words:

In the Western hemisphere, September saw a new year for schools, universities and many professional bodies. This year it saw the elections for the new five year term of the Church of England General Synod and four new appointees in the Anglican Communion and the Church of England take up their office and ministries.

They all come from evangelical and orthodox backgrounds and commitments.

Christian Aid Week in May is an established national institution. Thousands of volunteers, including me, drop red envelopes through people’s letter-boxes and collect them at the end of the week. Thousands who never attend church respond generously to appeals to help the most deprived in the world.

Christian Aid began in response to the refugee crisis at the end of the Second World War. It puts into practice the teaching of Jesus to love our neighbours and to obey him in helping the poor, the hungry and the naked. Jesus did not specify that these poor people had to be Christian.

Transition of leadership is always a testing time for organisations.

This is certainly true for the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), which came into being in 2009. Following the consecration to the office of bishop of a man who was in a samesex relationship, those who could not accept this within a Christian church formed a new church, faithful to Anglican teaching. It was recognised by the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON), which first met in 2008 in Jerusalem.

On Sunday June 29, Canterbury Cathedral hosted a service of Celebration and Thanksgiving, marking the 150th anniversary of the consecration of Samuel Ajayi Crowther in the Cathedral as Bishop of the Niger.

Bishop Crowther had been a slave and was made the first Anglican black bishop, of the Niger. He was an evangelist and church planter and promoted ‘wholistic mission’ especially combatting the slave trade. His slogan was ‘The Bible and the Plough’. The tragedy was that the Anglican church worldwide had no further non-white bishops until Bishop Azariah in India in 1912. Crowther, who was a distinguished linguist with a DD from Oxford, was too much of a threat.

GAFCON 2013, which met at the Conference Centre and Cathedral at All Saints Nairobi, can legitimately claim to be the largest worldwide gathering of Anglicans since Lambeth 1998 which was attended by all Anglican bishops and their wives.

331 bishops and archbishops and 1,358 delegates, including over 300 women, met together, among whom 120 were from England, Ireland and Wales.