Liturgies of Empire adopts a deliberately satirical, epistolary voice to examine the after-lives of Anglican imperialism as reconfigured in contemporary neocolonial activity. Some terms and turns of phrase assume an insider’s knowledge, and familiarity with socio-political definitions, the geographical regions and their specific religious registers and discourse would place the reader in a better position to appreciate the North/South epistemic critiques. Whilst the English narrator, recipient and institutional offices in the missive are entirely fictional, all events, statistics, and quotations are factual and have been verified against the sources cited. The memo casts an eye over three postcolonial Anglican dioceses as case studies to examine how the Anglican Realignment revives the spirit of empire through insistence on its monopoly of truth. It traces how conservative evangelical networks, under the banner of biblical warrant and “Global South” identity, reintensify imperial-era logics of propriety and paternalism. Attempting to supplant Canterbury’s more generous ecclesial disposition, these self-proclaimed guardians of truth are grounded in patriarchal authority, marked not by self-scrutiny but fixation on policing gender and sexuality. Theirs is an ecclesiology that cannot abide dissent, ambiguity, or difference, sanctifying conformity as faithfulness and exclusion as orthodoxy.

This is a response by Bishop Richard Condie, the Bishop of Tasmania and Chairman of Gafcon Australia, to the article by Bishop Keith Joseph (the Bishop of North Queensland, Australia) published in the Journal of Anglican Studies in May 2022. It engages with the nature and limits of unity in the Anglican Church before discussing the unique context of the Jerusalem Declaration and recent developments in the Anglican Church of Australia.

Since 2008 the Global Anglican Futures Conference (Gafcon) has emerged as a powerful force within the Anglican Communion. It had the potential to reform some of the issues facing the Anglican Communion. However, its Jerusalem Declaration has become a standard of Anglican orthodoxy to the exclusion of many orthodox Anglicans who cannot assent to its extra-doctrinal material. This lends Gafcon to schismatic ends.

This article reflects not only on the 2008 Lambeth Conference itself, but also on some of the deeper issues that were both revealed and concealed there and at the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) meeting that preceded it. I do this as the General Secretary of one of the Communion’s oldest mission agencies, finding common ground between the challenges we face and those that confront the Communion, in three respects. First, the need to move beyond the colonial inheritance to recognize both the independence of partners and the need for new patterns of inter-dependence. Secondly, the challenge to traditional understandings of belonging from a more self-select culture, most obvious in the consumerism of the North but also increasingly in global relationships. Thirdly, the danger of new colonialisms, in the kind of partnerships favoured by non-governmental organizations, from both conservatives and liberals in North America, but also emerging from some newly found powers in the South.