Following three days of closed-door talks in London, the primates of Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, the Southern Cone, Tanzania, Uganda, and West Africa, along with the Archbishop of Sydney, have endorsed the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) as being “authentically Anglican.”
 
The eight members of the GAFCON primates council met with the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan, Bishop of the Diocese of Pittsburgh under the jurisdiction of the Southern Cone, and other ACNA leaders and said “careful consideration was given to the new ‘province in formation’ in North America.” Their April 16 communiqué endorsed the formation of the new province, saying “we celebrate the organization and official formation of ACNA,” and recognized it as “genuinely Anglican.”
 
The council said that recognition of the ACNA as a province will first come from the other provinces of the Communion, sidestepping the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC). They recommended that “Anglican provinces affirm full communion with the ACNA,” adding that they looked “forward in real hope to a positive response amongst the churches and diocese and provinces of the Communion.” By going first to the provinces for support, rather than approaching the ACC, the primates suggested a lasting structural and political base of support for the ACNA would be established that will end “cross-border incursions” and restore a “measure of peace” to the church.
 
The council’s statement comes as a challenge to Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who has sought to confine debate to the structures of the four “instruments of unity”: the ACC, the Primates Meeting, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lambeth Conference. These instruments were first articulated in 1997 by the Inter-Anglican Doctrinal and Theological Commission’s Virginia Report, but they have not yet gained official status. The ACC declined to endorse the report at its 1999 meeting, and individual provinces are bound by the report’s statements only to the extent that they adopt them within the terms of their constitutions and canons.
 
The primates’ council also gave a tepid response to the current draft of the proposed Anglican Covenant. While they supported the covenant concept in theory, they noted that the adequacy of the final document “depends on the willingness to address the crisis” dividing the Communion. They restated their commitment to the Communion, however, and to its reform, renewal and “to being a faithful and creative voice within it to recapture focus on mission.”
 
 (The Rev.) George Conger
 
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