NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) — Five African Anglican women bishops said they will attend the historic installation of the first female archbishop of Canterbury, even as GAFCON, an alliance of conservative primates strongly represented in Africa, has urged a “principled disengagement” from the traditional center of Anglican power in England.
The Most Rev. Sarah Mullally, a 63-year-old former nurse, will be installed on Wednesday (March 25) at Canterbury Cathedral in England, the final step in making her the head of the Church of England and the convener of the worldwide Anglican Communion. She is the 106th archbishop of Canterbury and the first woman to hold the office in the church’s 1,400-year history.
“We are standing in solidarity with the archbishop of Canterbury,” the Rt. Rev. Rose Okeno, bishop of Butere, in Kenya, told Religion News Service, “strongly witnessing the love of Christ that transcends all social, religious, economic, cultural and political barriers, and which affirms the dignity of all humans as equal, created in his image, imago Dei.”
Top row, from left: the Rt. Revs. Rose Okeno, Vicentia Kgabe and Emily Onyango. Bottom row, from left: the Rt. Revs. Dalcy Badeli Dlamini and Filomena Tete Estêvão. Photos courtesy of (respectively) Giluwa/Wikimedia/Creative Commons, Durham Diocese, Diocese of Bondo, Anglican Communion Office and MANNA
The other African women bishops who will attend the installation in Canterbury are the Rt. Revs. Filomena Tete Estêvão, bishop of Bom Pasteur in Angola; Vicentia Kgabe, bishop of the Diocese of Lesotho; Emily Onyango, an assistant bishop of Bondo, Kenya; and Dalcy Badeli Dlamini, the bishop of Eswatini.
Rounding out the so-called Africa Six — a collective reference to the six Anglican women bishops in Africa — is Elizabeth Awut Ngor, an assistant bishop of the Diocese of Rumbek, South Sudan, who said she would miss the installation due to local commitments in her area.
The five who are attending are doing so in defiance of the wishes of the bishops of GAFCON, the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, who rejected Mullally’s appointment at a gathering in Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, in early March. While the group shelved a plan to elect a rival to the archbishop of Canterbury, the prelates launched the Global Anglican Communion, which …