It is now accepted in geophysics that our continents have been formed over many millions of years through the very gradual but relentless movement of great tectonic plates. Though the movement is so slight, typically about an inch per year, it is part of a process that also gives us volcanoes and earthquakes as huge pressures and stresses build up in the earth’s crust.
This is a helpful metaphor for understanding what is happening in the worldwide Anglican Communion. Slogans like ‘walking together’ and ‘good disagreement’, so beloved by the Archbishop of Canterbury and revisionists anxious to retain his recognition, are desperately superficial. The deep reality is a tectonic movement which cannot be stopped by even the most resourceful ecclesiastical politics.
GAFCON and Brazil
As the GAFCON movement meets again in Jerusalem, the last ten years have demonstrated that its Jerusalem Statement and Declaration of 2008 was correct. It diagnosed the cause of the Communion’s ills to be the rise and toleration of a false gospel: is Christianity a revealed religion or is it merely some kind of quasi-mystical human exploration? It cannot be both and these profoundly different understandings of Christianity will inevitably move in different directions.
