Global Anglicans have been congratulating themselves ever since their 2023 Ash Wednesday Statement declaring they would no longer recognize the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury because of the Church of England’s decision to bless same-sex couples. Their recent Abujah Affirmation gives its leaders a high-five for obeying the Bible’s “plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church’s historic and consensual reading.”
It is ironic, then, that global Anglicans who claim to prize the Bible and historic tradition are circumventing both biblical and traditional approaches to ministry and polity (church government).
These are not secondary issues. On the long front in the war between secularism and orthodoxy, they are sites of the fiercest battles. For secularism’s god is, arguably, Equality. There is to be no distinction between man and woman in ministry, and laity should join clergy in determining church practice and doctrine.
Yet the historic Church has paid careful attention to both Scripture and tradition on these matters. Jesus was a revolutionary in the way he treated women and had plenty of godly and gifted women to choose from, but he restricted the apostolate to men. Paul reserved pastoral and sacramental ministry to men as well: “I do not permit a woman to have authority over a man . . . A bishop must be the husband of one wife . . . . Let deacons be the husbands of one wife” (1 Tim 2:12; 3:1-2; 3:12).
Paul made clear that this sexual distinction followed from creation rather than the Fall when in justifying sexual differences in ministry he pointed to God’s order in creation: “Adam was created first, then Eve . . . . For man was not made from woman, but woman from man” (1 Tim 2:12-13; 1 Cor 11:8).
The Church did not reserve all ministry for men, only ordained ministry. In the first millennium in the East, deaconesses exercised a variety of ministries under the authority of the rector or bishop, such as pastoral care, counseling, caring for the sick and poor, teaching, spiritual formation, prayer ministry, preparing candidates for baptism and confirmation, assisting at baptisms, leading morning and evening prayer, and conducting other forms of social and educational work. Most of these continue among the ministries of deaconesses in several Anglican provinces.
The historic Church also taught an apostolic succession in which Christ rules the church through bishops whom Jesus said are successors to the apostles: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you” (John 20:21). And as St. Irenaeus taught, “The apostles instituted bishops in the churches . . . leaving [them] behind as their successors, delivering up their own place of government to these men” (Against Heresies 3.3.1).
Yet the Canterbury-rejecting Abujah Affirmation has recently formed a new Global Anglican Council that consists of primates, advisors, and guarantors—the latter of whom will be laity. This is a rejection of the historic Anglican commitment to Christ’s rule of the Church through bishops. Laity have always been involved in advising priests and bishops and archbishops, but final decisions for application of apostolic practice and doctrine have been left to the episcopacy.
Now, however, global Anglican leaders are inviting laity to join bishops in making final decisions on Christian practice and doctrine. This reverses the 2024 decision of the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans to restrict final church governance to provincial bishops. The new result is presbyterian–not Anglican–polity.
This rejection of Holy Tradition and the plain sense of Scripture is exactly what the Abujah leaders condemn as “normalizing hermeneutical pluralism.” What better way to describe “dual integrities”—the incoherent phrase which Anglicans use to describe contradictory views on Holy Orders? These leaders justly criticize Canterbury for “elevating cultural capitulation.” But is not this Abujah statement capitulating to secularism and current feminisms in its bowing before the altar of the new godword “equality,” which denies the sexual difference that is broadcast so loudly in both nature and revelation?
And while these Anglican leaders aptly lampoon Canterbury for reframing the rejection of biblical authority as “good disagreement,” what about their own rejection of biblical authority and suggesting we can have good disagreement on Holy Orders and historic polity?
Global Anglicans have hereby telegraphed to the world that their new structure and doctrines represent just another liberal Protestant denomination.
It is not surprising that the arguments for women’s ordination in those Protestant denominations used the same hermeneutical methods that were later employed for an actively gay priesthood and so-called marriage. After all, if sexual difference is indifferent and the sexes are interchangeable in Holy Order, why not also in marriage?
Anglican leaders in recent years have sought unity for the Anglican fight against the LGBT+ juggernaut threatening the Church and society. We commend them for bold leadership on this set of issues. But there is a danger that in seeking unity and numbers under a “big tent” they are embracing a premature and superficial unity that violates biblical and traditional norms.
We exhort global Anglican leaders to consider two examples—one ancient and one recent—of recognizing the need for God’s people to turn (the Hebrew word for “repent”) toward deeper unity based on revealed truth. The first example is from Nehemiah 9. The great Jewish reformer has led his flock out of Babylon and realizes they have not broken from pagan ways—even after suffering from exile and condemning their idolatrous overlords. He leads them in one of the Bible’s most majestic prayers of corporate repentance: “We have acted wickedly (v 33), we have not kept your Law (34), we are slaves [of unreformed ways] (36), [but now] we make a firm covenant [to repent and follow Your law]” (38).
The Latvian Lutheran Church is about the same size as the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA). The former has 250,000 souls and 300 parishes while the ACNA has 135,000 souls in 1000 parishes. From 1975 to 1993 the Latvian Lutheran Church (LLC) ordained women to the pastorate. But in 1993 Archbishop Janis Vanags led his Church to obedience to the Scriptures and the Great Tradition. The Church formally agreed that ordination to the pastorate should be restricted to men. Ordained women were permitted to keep ministering until retirement. And under the new Church constitution approved in 2016 women were given ministries as lay readers, teaching theologians, and evangelists. The LLC has always maintained the truth of marriage between a man and woman, and the sanctity of human life against abortion and euthanasia.
It took humility for Nehemiah and Latvian Lutherans to admit they had gone wrong. It always takes humility for church leaders to “turn.” But just as Jesus taught that true unity must be based on truth (John 17:17, 19), global Anglicanism will have a deeper and stronger unity if its leaders turn toward full biblical obedience in both Holy Order and Church polity. Then it will be able to say in truth that it is obedient to the ancient “church’s historic and consensual reading.”
Mouneer Anis is the emeritus Archbishop of Alexandria; Barbara Gauthier is an Anglican theologian and editor of Anglican News Update; Gerald McDermott is a priest in the Reformed Episcopal Church who teaches at Reformed Episcopal Seminary (Philadelphia) and Jerusalem Seminary (Israel).
