The Anglican Communion is roughly ninety to a hundred million people across some forty-odd autonomous provinces, and it is in the middle of the most serious division in its history.
The sequence is well documented. The ordination of women, to the priesthood from the 1970s and to the episcopate from 1989, was accepted by some provinces and refused by others, and the Communion held. Sexuality did not hold. The Lambeth Conference of 1998 passed a resolution declaring same-sex practice incompatible with Scripture; the Episcopal Church in the United States consecrated a bishop living in a same-sex relationship in 2003; and the Canadian and American churches subsequently authorised same-sex marriage rites.
The response was organisational. GAFCON, the Global Anglican Future Conference, first met in Jerusalem in 2008 and issued the Jerusalem Declaration; it recognised the breakaway Anglican Church in North America in 2009. In February 2023, after the Church of England's bishops proposed prayers of blessing for same-sex couples, ten primates of the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches declared themselves in impaired communion with Canterbury and announced they no longer recognised the Archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals. GAFCON's Kigali Commitment of April 2023 went further and called for a reset of the Communion's structures.
The claims about scale should be handled carefully. GAFCON-aligned bodies have claimed to represent the large majority of practising Anglicans; independent counts of the provinces involved have put the figure closer to half. What is not in dispute is that the demographic weight of the Communion is African, Nigeria and Uganda alone account for a very large share, and that the money and the historic offices are not.