NAIROBI, Kenya (RNS) — Conservative Anglican leaders gathering in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, are planning to unveil a new leader of the worldwide Anglican Communion, even as Archbishop Sarah Mullally is set to be installed as the first female leader of the body later this month.
The Global Anglican Future Conference, a conservative Anglican movement better known as GAFCON that has encouraged its provinces to cut ties with Canterbury and that rejects Mullally’s election, called the meeting to reorder the communion. During the four-day gathering, which began Tuesday (March 3), the global network of 10 provinces — representing at least half of the world’s Anglicans — plans to formalize the Global Anglican Communion, which it announced in October, and to elect a new leader.
Mullally’s election in October further widened a rift within the 85 million-member worldwide Anglican Communion, which since the 1990s has struggled with controversies around female leadership and same-sex marriage in the church. Conservative bishops and clerics with GAFCON accuse Mullally and other leaders of the communion of abandoning the inerrant Word of God to support the blessing of same-sex unions, ordain women bishops and elect Mullally archbishop of Canterbury.
Archbishop Henry Chukwudum Ndukuba, the primate of the Church of Nigeria, told those at the opening ser …