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On Friday 18th July, the GSFA Chairman, Archbishop Justin Badi, together with Deputy Chairman Archbishop Samy Shehata and Hon Secretary Archbishop Titus Chung, had a series of meetings with Church of England leaders, culminating in a special evening reception for over three hundred clergy and leading laity at which they were the guests of honour.
They were invited by the Alliance, a broadly based movement of orthodox Anglicans which seeks to combat the move to overturn two millennia of Christian teaching on marriage and human sexuality being driven by the Church of England’s bishops in General Synod.
The Primates, representative of the vast majority of global Anglicans, came with powerful messages of encouragement. Interviewed by Alpha Pioneer, the Revd Nicky Gumbel, Archbishop Justin Badi of the Province of South Sudan remarked that the ‘grandfathers’ of those present made huge sacrifices to bring the gospel to the nations the GSFA represents and now it is the turn of the Global South to stand by the ‘grandchildren’ in their time of need. This was not, he said, the time to leave the Church of England, but to stand together and recover it for the gospel and mission. Archbishop Titus Chung from the Province of South East Asia reinforced this message with a strong call to maintain the unity of orthodox Anglicans and Archbishop Samy Shehata from the Province of Alexandria emphasised that faithfulness can be costly, recalling the witness of the twenty-one Coptic Christians martyred on a beach in Libya in 2015.
The following Sunday, Archbishop Justin was warmly welcomed to one of London’s largest Anglican churches, All Soul’s Langham Place by the Rector, the Revd Charlie Skrine. Preaching the first sermon in a new series to mark the 1,700 anniversary of the Nicene Creed, Archbishop Justin spoke of the need to ’examine ourselves’ (2 Corinthians 13:5) and rekindle the fire of apostolic faith within Church and nation. He noted that in comparison to the wealth of London, many of his people still live in grass huts, known as tukuls and when a snake gets into the tukul, they do not abandon it, but get rid of the snake. Likewise, we need to reclaim the Church of England and seek its restoration.
Never before have we seen such unity amongst the orthodox in the Church of England and now a quite new and historically unprecedented partnership is being forged with the Global South, no longer based on neo-colonial assumptions of dependence, but marked by humility and a deep determination to make common cause for the gospel.
