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The Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion (EFAC) held the second part of its 2018 international Council meeting in Nairobi in October.

The successful establishment of the Council heralds EFAC’s reemergence as a powerful international Anglican ministry. EFAC’s vision is to encourage and develop biblically faithful fellowship, teaching and mission, as well as to resource church leaders throughout the Anglican world. There were 22 participants, including those from existing, reviving (four) or developing EFAC national Chapters. Five continents were represented and 11 participants were bishops.

Cape Town South Africa is a bewildering mix of fabulously beautiful landscapes and vineyards which provide a resource for a booming tourist industry, within a few miles of vast stretches of shanty towns where people attracted by its stable economy come to seek well-being for themselves and their families.

The irony is that this ‘rainbow nation’ of many different languages, races and cultures did not start off as nation at all. Cape Town was only intended from the 16th to the 19th centuries to be a refuelling port for food and water for sailing ships of the merchant companies of Portugal, Holland, France and, finally, England en route to their trading empires in the East Indies and India.

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 Evangelical Fellowship in the Anglican Communion (EFAC) has re-emerged after being somewhat dormant over the last decade.

That it is re-emerging with global participation and recognition among clergy and lay leaders in national groups indicates where apostolic succession truly lies – in the faith deposit entrusted to the people of God. For the news that EFAC was starting up again was met with instant brand recognition and welcome from evangelical Anglicans around the world.

‘You can say you are not a man or a woman, you can say you are not a Kurd, but you cannot say you are not a Muslim; it’s in your DNA.’

This is according to a Muslim-background believer in Jesus (MBB), who indeed told his family he was now a believer in Isa [Jesus]. He came to Christ through an atheist newspaper telling the accounts of people who had turned from Islam to Jesus (the paper held no candle for any religion but was vaguely interested in those who converted from one to another!)

St. Thomas’ Church, Edinburgh, has a long history as an evangelical congregation.

It was founded in 1844 as an Independent Anglican Church, following the introduction of the Oxford Movement to the Scottish Episcopal Church (SEC). It gradually grew closer to SEC from the 1940s onward. Rectors have included George Duncan, Gordon Bridger (later of Oak Hill College), John Wesson (later of Trinity College, Bristol) and Philip Hacking (later of Christ Church Fulwood, Sheffield).

‘Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.’

The successful conclusion of GAFCON 2018, ten years after its formal beginnings as a global Anglican movement that had its roots in, among others, the Lambeth Conference of 1988 of which Archbishop Manasses Kuria of Kenya said: ‘This was our Lambeth’ and (then Bishop) David Gitari of Kenya said: ‘Anyone who wants a resolution passed in 1998 will have to come to terms with the African bishops.’

In this column last month, Chris Sugden and Vinay Samuel helpfully answered the question ‘Why GAFCON ?’. This month, as the full significance of the third GAFCON conference held in June becomes clearer, I want to offer a personal reflection on the question of where GAFCON is going.

The short answer is nowhere! The appeal in GAFCON’s Letter to the Churches to the Archbishop of Canterbury to restore godly leadership has been ignored and there can be no doubt now that it is through GAFCON that the faithful Anglican tradition will be continued. The powers-that-be seem determined that the Communion should embrace the optional orthodoxy of ‘good disagreement’.

In his insightful contribution for this column last month, Chris Sugden showed that the lack of accountability and anxiety about brand protection revealed in the Oxfam scandal are also unresolved problems for the Anglican Communion.

Both have a global reach and both have to deal with imbalances of power and the need for inclusive leadership.

In January two new Anglican Primates were elected, the Bishop of Maridi, Justin Badi Arama, as Archbishop of South Sudan and the Bishop of Shyira, Dr Laurent Mbanda, as Archbishop of Rwanda.

Both nations have suffered internecine violence, and by far the most notorious example remains the Rwandan genocide of 1994 in which an estimated 1 million people died. Given the long history of insecurity which predated South Sudan’s recent independence, internal strife was predictable, but Rwanda was an established kingdom well before the colonial era, in which different ethnic groups lived peacefully. Moreover, Rwanda was the home of a powerful revival in 1929 which spread spontaneously during the 1930s and became known as the East African Revival.

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.

The Anglican Network in Canada (ANiC) consists of over 70 congregations, which over the past ten years have seceded from the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC), or have begun as new plants.

The movement began with biblical-ly orthodox groups coming together as ‘Anglican Essentials’ in the 1990s, to re-state the basics of apostolic faith in a context of increasing influence of secularist and liberal thinking among the leadership of Anglican and other mainline churches.

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.

Anglicans claim to be part of the Reformed Western catholic tradition and one of the most visible ways that continuity over the centuries is maintained is through episcopacy, which the English evangelical reformers of the 16th century quite deliberately retained in contrast to their continental counterparts.

Was that wise? In the present-day Anglican Provinces of the West, the claim to Reformed catholicity is looking ever more dubious as apostolic substance ebbs away. Moreover, disunity and doctrinal incoherence in the Anglican Communion has been an episcopally led phenomenon.

Rwanda is a land of contradictions. Arriving at Kigale one is immediately aware that this is quintessential Africa, and yet, ‘This is not Africa as I know it!’

One of the first hints is the airport inspection for plastic bags, banned in the country for environmental reasons. This beautiful, hilly, and in parts mountainous land is spotlessly clean – almost manicured.

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.’

The Mothers Union (MU) is one of the great success stories of the Anglican Communion.

Beginning in 1876 with Mary Sumner’s vision for Christian marriage and family life, the movement now numbers some 4 million members worldwide, with the largest concentration being in Africa.

Most Christians in the UK probably have only the haziest idea of what Anglicanism looks like in South America. The Edinburgh Missionary Conference of 1910 inhibited Protestant and Anglican missionary work in the continent, while the English language has always been marginal, unlike most other areas of the Anglican Communion where British influence was much stronger.

This is a pity, because out of the continuing crisis in the world-wide Anglican Communion a reinvigorated and missionary church is emerging in South America, in spite of official persecution and rejection. In fact the pattern of North America is being repeated. Just as a new GAFCON-recognised Province, the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), arose out of the aggressive and assertive revisionism of the American Episcopal Church (TEC) and the Anglican Church of Canada, so in South America a new orthodox Province is coming into being as the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil (IEAB) and various TEC satellite provinces in central and northern South America follow the lead of their North American counterparts.

GAFCON has confirmed the dates for its third international conference. Between 17-22 June 2018 it will return to Jerusalem, the venue of the first Global Anglican Future Conference in 2008 (from which the movement takes its name).

The GAFCON announcement explains that ‘The city stands as a constant reminder of the birth of the gospel and the movement’s determination to remain true to the teachings of our Lord and his Word’ and so, to appreciate the significance of the 2018 conference, it is worth recalling how it all began.