Archbishop Wabukala defends GAFCON

Posted on November 15, 2013 
Filed under GAFCON

Archbishop Eliud WabukalaOn Tuesday night, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala, Chairman of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans spoke at The Ridley Institute in South Carolina.

He spoke on “In Defense of GAFCON” with reference to The Thirty Nine Articles.

His address deserves wide distribution and is most encouraging. Archbishop Wabukala’s address begins 16 minutes into the video recording. (The address runs for about 45 minutes, followed by the question time which begins, after a break, at 1 hour 15 minutes into the recording. Also worth watching.)

Update: The text of his address is now available (PDF) on the GAFCON website as well as at The Ridley Institute.

Here’s a quote:

“I am so thankful to God that Christianity as moralism was not, on the whole, the gospel brought from England and the West to Africa and what we now call the Global South during the great missionary initiatives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although the GAFCON movement coined the phrase ‘Confessing Anglicans,’ Provinces like mine which are the fruit of missionary endeavors have always been ‘confessing.’ For many of us the writings of John Stott and J.I. Packer simply were normal Anglicanism and too many of us assumed that the rest of the Communion thought the same way!

However, in the past thirty years it has become clear that the West has finally exhausted the capital of its Christian heritage. The combination of secularization and the growth of global media and communications has laid bare a fundamental theological divergence between Western secularized moralistic Anglicanism and confessional Anglicanism. The resulting strains have seriously damaged the Communion — many faithful orthodox Anglicans have been marginalized or even ejected from the formal structures of their Churches. Sexual immorality has not only been tolerated but held out to be holy and the Archbishop of Canterbury and the other formal instruments of Communion are no longer able to fulfill their basic purpose of gathering the Communion. …”