From Canterbury to Abuja. Women and the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people at the center of the Anglican schism

Article by Davide Romano* published in the fortnightlyAdista New SignsN°12 of 28 march 2026, pp.14-15

Abuja, Nigeria, 6 March 2026. In St Matthias House, headquarters of the Nigerian Anglican Church, 347 bishops and over one hundred priests and lay people stood up and said enough. Enough in Canterbury. Enough for the archbishop who has sat on that chair for centuries as a spiritual point of reference for tens of millions of faithful around the world. They signed the Abuja Declaration and called their gesture not a rupture but a refoundation. Schisms, moreover, always have a certain terminological modesty: no one likes to openly declare that they have separated, they prefer to maintain that they have saved the true tradition while the others distanced themselves from it.

The curious thing is that the Anglican Church was itself born from a separation. In 1534 Henry VIII broke with Rome when the Pope refused to grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. It was not a theological dispute, but a matter of bed, dynastic succession and political power. However, from that decision an original Christian tradition was born, suspended between Catholicism and the Protestant Reformation: liturgy and sacraments close to Rome, some theological intuitions borrowed from Luther and Calvin. A compromise, but an intelligent compromise, capable of lasting almost five centuries.

The problem came when the compromise has encountered the topic of homosexuality. In 1998 the Lambeth Conference spoke for the first time about the pastoral welcome of homosexual people. It seemed like a prudent, almost bureaucratic phrase, but it was enough to upset a fragile balance. In 2002, the Anglican Church of Canada agreed to bless same-sex unions. In 2003 in the United States the diocese of New Hampshire consecrated an openly gay man as bishop, Gene Robinson. In London it was thought that, like many other internal tensions, too this would have been absorbed. They hadn't taken Africa into account.

In the meantime, in fact, the center of gravity of Anglicanism had silently moved southwards. Today the majority of the faithful no longer live in London or New York but in Lagos, Nairobi, Kampala. The African Churches are growing while the European ones are emptying. And these Churches are, in their great majority, strongly conservative on sexual morality. For them the Bible is not a text to be reinterpreted in the light of Western cultural developments, but the Word of God, full stop. In this story there is also a subtle post-colonial revenge: for decades European missionaries taught Africans what to believe; today it is the Africans who tell the Europeans that, in their opinion, they have lost their faith.

In 2008 a group of conservative bishops decided not to participate in the Lambeth Conference and met in Jerusalem, founding GAFCON, the Global Anglican Future Conference. On that occasion, the Declaration of Jerusalem was approved, a profession of faith in fourteen points which became the reference for traditionalists. For some years it was said that it was an internal current destined to reform the Communion from within. In reality it was the beginning of a separation destined to mature slowly.

The decisive moment came in October 2025, when the Church of England elected Sarah Mullally as Archbishop of Canterbury, the first woman to occupy that position in the history of the Anglican primatial seat. For conservatives it was the definitive confirmation that the doctrinal drift was now irreversible. Mullally took the oath of office on January 28, 2026. A few weeks later, in Abuja, the bishops of GAFCON signed the declaration establishing the break.

The document is written with the solemn tone of someone who feels both victim and protagonist of the story. It is remembered that for over twenty years there have been calls for Canterbury to return to orthodoxy, calls which have gone unanswered. Issues related to sexuality, it is specified, are not the real problem but only the symptom of something deeper: the abandonment of the authority of Scripture and the progressive adaptation to Western cultural fashions. Hence the decision to no longer recognize the traditional instruments of the Anglican Communion - the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Assembly of Primates - and to create a new ecclesial structure. Not a schism, the signatories argue, but the recovery of the true Anglican identity.

The new organization is already operational. GAFCON's Council of Primates has been replaced by a global Anglican Council led by Rwandan Archbishop Laurent Mbanda. Leaders from Africa, America and Asia collaborate with him. Present at the Abuja meeting were representatives of the Anglican Churches of Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Sudan and other entities which together represent an enormous portion of world Anglicanism. Added to these is the Anglican Church of North America, born in recent years from the separation of conservative groups from the US Episcopal Church.

The title of the assembly, taken from the book of Joshua, summarizes the spirit of the meeting: “Choose today who you want to serve... As for me and my house we will serve the LordFour days of liturgies, reports and votes lived with the conviction of being faced with a historic transition.

From Canterbury the response was not theological but institutional. Work is underway on a reform project that envisages decentralizing the leadership of the Communion, sharing the archbishop's authority with other regional primates. The idea is to reduce the centrality of Canterbury to maintain a minimum of unity. The theologian and bishop Graham Tomlin, involved in the process, realistically observed that when Churches separate radically it becomes very difficult to mend the fractures.

Some try to argue that the dispute is only ethical, not theological: an argument about sexual morality rather than faith. But it's a fragile distinction. In reality the underlying question concerns authority in the interpretation of Scripture. On the one hand there are those who believe that tradition and historical formularies should remain the decisive criterion; on the other, those who think that the Church must interpret the Gospel in light of cultural changes and the sensus fidelium. It is not a new discussion: it runs through the entire history of Christianity.

The consequences of this fracture go beyond the boundaries of Anglicanism. Global Christianity is experiencing a season of profound tensions. In the Orthodox world, the 2018 rift between Moscow and Constantinople over the Ukrainian Church has already opened a painful wound. Now even Anglicanism is divided. For ecumenical dialogue it is a serious problem: who to dialogue with? With Canterbury or with Abuja? With Mullally or with Mbanda? The most logical answer is with both, but the practice will be much more complicated.

Then there is the problem of public testimony. A religion that preaches unity in love inevitably appears more fragile when it divides before the eyes of the world. It doesn't mean that the Christian message loses its truth, but it certainly loses something of its symbolic strength: the ability to show that different people can stay together for something that surpasses them.

The story, however, does not end there. Anglican communities will continue to celebrate, baptise, pray and bury their dead. The faithful of Lagos and those of London will continue to call themselves Anglicans, even if they will no longer recognize the same communion. Many believers probably will not even immediately perceive the extent of the rupture.

But the memory of the Church is long. Schisms often begin as temporary and end up lasting for centuries. East and West separated in 1054 convinced that the rift would be temporary. Almost a thousand years have passed.

In Abuja, on March 6, 2026, hundreds of bishops decided to serve God according to their conscience. The sincerity of their beliefs cannot be denied. One can only hope that, one day, the same passion for truth will be able to coexist with the patience of charity. Because this is, ultimately, what every Church asks of its faithful every Sunday.

* Davide Romano is a journalist. He writes for various newspapers. He deals with rights, ecumenism and interreligious dialogue