Conservative Anglicans around the world want to build their own church structures. The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in Jerusalem announced this in its final document released Sunday. Because liberal church leaders deviated from "right doctrine," such measures were a pastoral necessity, the "Jerusalem Declaration" said.
More than 1.000 mainly African church representatives, including 291 bishops, had spent a week in Jerusalem discussing how to deal with the crisis in the Anglican Communion that escalated in 2003 with the consecration of a homosexual bishop. The African-led conservative wing of the church represents about half of the approximately 78 million Anglicans worldwide. Religious relativism With the entry of religious relativism into theology and the ordination of professed homosexuals to the priesthood, the liberal wing has clearly gone against biblical teaching and the Anglican faith tradition, the document said. Millions of believers no longer feel represented by current governing bodies under the "historic presidency" of the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Jerusalem Assembly had therefore decided to form a "Council of Bishops of the GAFCON Movement" to make forward-looking decisions and encourage other "professing Anglicans" to join them. In North America in particular, the time is ripe for the establishment of a separate ecclesiastical province to be approved by the new council, it says. In the U.S. and Canada in recent years, individual parishes had renounced allegiance to their liberal diocesan leadership and aligned themselves with a conservative bishop of another diocese. This had led to disputes about the church property of the parishes concerned. The Jerusalem Declaration, while recognizing in principle a diocese's land ownership in its territory, makes an exception for "those areas where church leaders deny the right faith". "Devastating conclusions" GAFCON participants again opposed the Lambeth Conference scheduled for late July, saying it was co-chaired by bishops who had strayed from true Anglican teaching, and was also structured to avoid "tough discussions. It is obvious that the existing disciplinary instruments of the communion have failed in the face of the current crisis. Instead, he said, the "devastating conclusion has been reached that we are a global communion with colonial structures.". The Lambeth Conference is held every 10 years and has been considered the top decision-making body of the world Anglican Communion. In economically developed nations, "militant secularism and pluralism" have compromised and weakened the witness of churches, the statement underscores. Thus, the teaching, contrary to the Bible, that "all religions lead equally to God" had spread. Moreover, this "false gospel" proclaims the diversity of sexual preferences as a universal human right. Scripture, however, defends Christian marriage between a man and a woman as the proper place for sexual intimacy and the basis of the family.