Conservative Anglicans challenge Archbishop of Canterbury with rival leadership

Sarah Mullally, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the world's 85 million Anglicans, speaks inside Canterbury Cathedral in Canterbury, England, Oct. 3, 2025. (AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali, File)

ABUJA -- An influential group of conservative Anglicans announced on Thursday the establishment of a new council to lead the global Anglican Communion, in a direct challenge to the authority of the Archbishop of Canterbury as she is about to be installed.

The move by the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) - which brings together conservative churches mainly from Africa and Asia and claims to represent a majority of the world’s Anglicans - highlights a deepening rift within the Church after years of tension over theological and social issues.

GAFCON opposes liberal shifts in parts of the Communion, including the ordination of women and greater inclusion of LGBTQ2S+ members. It strongly criticized the Church of England’s appointment last October of Sarah Mullally as its first female Archbishop of Canterbury, and thus spiritual leader of the world’s 85 million Anglicans spread across 165 countries.

“Believing the current instruments of communion no longer meet the needs of the majority of Anglicans around the world, the global Anglican Communion is to be led by a conciliar structure,” Bishop Paul Donison, secretary-general of the new council, told the conference in Abuja, Nigeria.

The council will include bishops, priests and lay members, each with voting privileges, GAFCON announced.

Archbishop Laurent Mbanda, a former Rwandan refugee who later studied in the United States,was elected chairman of the new council but GAFCON said he would not be “primus inter pares” (first among equals) but would share power.

Asked if GAFCON members still recognized the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the group’s spokesman Justin Murff said: “The Global Anglican Council recognizes Archbishop Laurent Mbanda as its leader.”

A spokesperson for the Anglican Communion Office in London said before the announcement: “It hurts the body of Christ when some churches express a desire to separate, not associate, or otherwise renounce any association with those with whom they disagree.”

Mullally, who was officially confirmed in her new role at a ceremony in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, on January 5, is due to be enthroned as the 106th archbishop of Canterbury on March 25.

‘No turning back’

The Church of England broke from Rome nearly 500 years ago under King Henry VIII. Since then, the Archbishop of Canterbury has been the symbolic head of an Anglican Communion that has expanded worldwide through missionary activity, especially in countries that were once part of the British Empire.

Over the last three decades, reforms in the Church of England have allowed women to be ordained first as priests and later as bishops. But such reforms - along with debate over same-sex relationships - have increasingly pushed the Communion toward what some leaders describe as a breaking point.

Many Anglicans in Africa and Asia, where the Church has been growing fastest, reject the more progressive trends seen in England and other Western countries.

GAFCON, founded in 2008 to counter what members describe as the abandonment of scripture, says it is not seeking to break away from the Anglican Communion but to “reorganize and realign” it around Biblical authority.

In October, Mbanda said the grouping had “not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion.”

While leading prayers on Thursday, he said: “The future has arrived, no turning back.”

Additional reporting by MacDonald Dzirutwe and Ben Ezeamalu in Lagos and Alexander Winning in Johannesburg; Editing by David Lewis and Gareth Jones, Reuters