Anglican Mainstream

by Charles Raven, CEN

After twenty years of congregational ministry in Worcestershire my wife, Gillian, and I will be moving to Kenya after Easter at the invitation of Archbishop and Primate Dr Eliud Wabukala, where I will be Director of St Julian’s Anglican Studies Centre. St Julian’s is already a well established retreat centre, set in the fertile foothills of the Central Uplands yet within easy reach of Nairobi, and provides a delightful setting for this new venture. In the past it has hosted training conferences for new bishops under the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa and many similar gatherings.

Although this project will first and foremost serve the Anglican Church of Kenya, it reflects changes that are transforming the Anglican Communion globally. Numerically, the makeup of the Communion has reflected the dramatic southwards shift in the centre of gravity of global Christianity over the past century. Governance and theological leadership did not however follow.

But Western liberals precipitated a long overdue adjustment by pressing forward with the homosexual agenda and the watershed moment came in 2008. With the formation of GAFCON as a movement of reform and renewal, led by six Global South Provinces, a new narrative was established; it recovered Anglicanism’s Reformation identity as a confessing Communion and opened up the way to reconfiguring global governance on a Conciliar rather than neo-colonial model.

So where does St Julian’s fit into this picture? The vision for this project has come out of the global perspective of Archbishop Wabukala as Chairman of the GAFCON Primates’ Council. Not needing to award academic qualifications, St Julian’s will develop short term courses and programmes responsive to the needs of pastors, laity and senior leaders. In addition to addressing the need to reshape Anglican ecclesiology, sustained engagement is envisaged with pressing global issues of public policy and cultural change, such as the direction of human rights legislation, religious pluralism and secular society, Christian churches and Islam, and marriage and family. Although primarily serving the Anglican Church of Kenya, St Julian’s will also be a resource for the Great Lakes region and Africa as a whole, with two international conferences expected every year.

Partnership with Anglican scholars in different parts of the world, including the UK, will be a priority as similar challenges now face Anglicans in all parts of the world. The Jerusalem Statement and Declaration, explicitly rooted in the Thirty-nine Articles and the Anglican formularies, will provide an overarching framework of biblical faithfulness.

Such theological work is appropriate for the increasingly confident leadership now emerging in the Global South. At their meeting in China in September 2011, the Global South Primates formally recorded their loss of confidence in the Lambeth based ‘Instruments of Unity’. More recently the Archbishop of the Sudan, Dr Daniel Deng Bul courageously disinvited TEC’s Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, despite the major financial investment her church has made in Sudan, and in a very positive initiative, Archbishop Wabukala, as GAFCON Chairman, last week called leaders of the Church of Rwanda and the AMiA to Nairobi for reconciliation talks.

The St Julian’s project is a strategic contribution to the long term resilience of an Anglican Communion underpinned by biblical theology. It has received strong endorsement from Reform and Latimer Trust as well as the FCA (UK & Ireland) and others. To find out more about supporting the work, please contact me on charles.raven@christchurchwyreforest.org.uk.

Charles Raven
Rector, Christ Church Wyre Forest and a member of Reform

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