January 12, 2025 - 4:00pm

All over the globe, in neglected cemeteries, lie Anglican missionaries who left behind home and hearth and family to take the Christian Gospel to distant parts of the world. To borrow the poet Rupert Brooke’s immortal words, there are many corners of many foreign fields that are forever the Church of England. These efforts were at their height in the 19th century, when the expansion of the European empires opened up new possibilities for evangelists.

Such is the root of the Anglican Communion, by some measures the world’s third-largest Christian denomination, originally formed more than 150 years ago. There have always been tensions and disagreements, but two particular transformations — the dissolution of the British Empire, and the rapid spread of liberal moral views in Western churches — have gradually undermined the traditional view that the Archbishop of Canterbury was in some sense the head of the Communion, primus inter pares.

Now it seems that this loss of confidence in Canterbury as the focal point for Anglican unity may be formalised in new plans for the leadership of the Communion. The Times reports that in future the role of head of the Communion may be shared, on a rotating basis, similar to the presidency of the European Council which cycles between EU members.

This kind of development has been on the cards for a very long time. Disagreements over sex, marriage, gender and — to a lesser extent — women’s ordination have laid bare deep and irreconcilable differences between and within various national churches. The Anglican churches of the old “white dominions” of Canada, New Zealand and Australia, as well as America’s Episcopal Church (TEC), have largely yielded, in practice if not in formal doctrine, to the dogmas of social liberalism.

In other nations — those in which a majority of all practising Anglicans live — there has been no such adjustment to post-Sixties norms, and attempts by Anglicans from the developed world to export liberal theology have been regarded, not always unjustly, as a new form of imperialism. Coincidentally or not, these countries tend to have very well-attended churches. It is an over-simplification to say that Western churches have most of the money and the implicit expectation that they get to set the agenda, while the Global South has the vitality, the numbers, and the doctrinal rigour, but it is, as they say, directionally correct.

There are already well-established dissenting blocs within the Communion, such as the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON) and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA), who have both declared themselves opposed to the revisionism coming from the English-speaking world. Individual churches that have fully broken away from the Communion have also aligned themselves with such groups. In 2023, 10 Anglican archbishops declared themselves to be in “impaired communion” with the Church of England after the authorisation of blessings for same-sex relationships.

If this proposal is adopted, then, it is more a case of bowing to the inevitable and recognising implacable facts on the ground, than a bold new experiment. The era of British cultural dominance within the Anglican world has long passed. With the Empire a fading memory, believers around the world are no longer willing to be ordered around by bishops from countries where observance is in sharp decline, and who have lost their confidence in the Christian moral order.


Niall Gooch is a public sector worker and occasional writer who lives in Kent.

niall_gooch