GAFCON announces more than 1,000 to join Jerusalem pilgrimage
Episcopal News Service. May 16, 2008 [051608-02]
Matthew Davies
The Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), largely viewed as a rival to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, has announced that more than 1,000 conservative Church leaders from 17 Anglican provinces have registered for the Jerusalem pilgrimage.
While GAFCON reports that participants at the June 22-29 pilgrimage include 280 bishops, "final attendance figures will depend on smooth processing of requested visas, and other factors," a recent news release said. The conference is also expected to draw several former Episcopal priests, some of whom are currently engaged in litigation concerning Episcopal Church property.
"I wish to again stress that the Holy City is always an open city for all pilgrims coming to our diocese to join with us in our servanthood and witness," said Anglican Bishop in Jerusalem Suheil Dawani in a May 16 statement emailed to ENS. "Pilgrims are always warmly welcomed by our diocesan family when coming in a spirit of mutuality in devotion, reconciliation and goodwill that strengthens both the fabric of unity in the larger Church and the interreligious communal collegiality among the three Abrahamic faiths that make Jerusalem their spiritual home."
The conference has come under fire from local Church leaders including Dawani, who was concerned that GAFCON would "import inter-Anglican conflict" into his diocese and called for the conference to be moved.
After meeting with Dawani and hearing his concerns, GAFCON's organizers moved the consultation portion of the conference to Jordan June 18-22 to be followed by a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Jordan is part of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem.
GAFCON organizers have said the Jordan consultation "will include the conference leadership, theological resource group, those bishops serving in majority Islamic settings and other key leaders" whereas the Jerusalem pilgrimage "will focus on worship, prayer, discussions and Bible Study, shaped by the context of the Holy Land."
The Most Rev. Mouneer Hanna Anis, primate of the Province of Jerusalem and the Middle East, previously raised his concerns about the event and acknowledged that his advice to the organizers -- that this was neither the right time nor place for such a meeting -- had been ignored.
GAFCON is due to be held one month prior to the Lambeth Conference when more than 800 of the Anglican Communion's bishops will meet at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England, for more than two weeks of study, prayer, learning, sharing and discerning.
Archbishop Peter Jensen of Sydney, one of GAFCON's organizers, has said the pilgrimage is intended for those bishops who have decided they cannot attend the 2008 Lambeth Conference. However, it is understood that some of the bishops participating in GAFCON have also acknowledged they will be attending the Lambeth Conference.
Dawani met with Jensen in January and told him that he would "prefer that all Anglicans came together at [the] Lambeth Conference to discuss their concerns there together."
In his May 16 statement, Dawani said: "Christian compassion and personal integrity have always been the hallmarks of such pilgrimages that serve as bridge builders in faithfulness to the 'Good News' that we all are one in our witness and communal life, the richness of a 'rainbow' promise in the diversity that exists in our personal and corporal sense of the unity that we hold together. This is visibly expressive in the instruments of communion within the life and ministry of our own Anglican Communion family as we look once again to the Lambeth Conference of bishops and our common mutuality of purpose and witness to what God calls us at this time to a faithful servanthood."
GAFCON leaders said they have met with the leaders of Anglican, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Eastern Catholic churches and Palestinian Christians and Messianic Jews in Jerusalem to brief them on the nature and purpose of GAFCON.
Archbishop Peter Jensen of Sydney, chair of GAFCON's program committee, said that the conference "will focus on the transforming love of Christ. We will be drawing from the scriptures of the Old and New Testament in our pilgrimage, and their relevance to the challenges facing the church globally today. These include secularism, other religions, poverty and HIV/AIDS as well as moral and theological issues."
Pilgrims will visit traditional sites in Jerusalem, travel to Bethlehem and to Galilee.
GAFCON identifies its goals for the Jerusalem conference as providing "an opportunity for fellowship as well as to continue to experience and proclaim the transforming love of Christ"; developing "a renewed understanding of our identity as Anglican Christians"; and preparing "for an Anglican future in which the Gospel is uncompromised and Christ-centered mission a top priority."