GAFCON and Ephesians 4: The Call to Unity in Truth
Short answer: GAFCON, the Global Anglican Future Conference, exists because a number of Anglican leaders concluded that some provinces had departed from the faith once delivered, and they appealed to Ephesians 4:1-6 to argue that unity must be built on the apostolic gospel rather than maintained at the expense of it. The passage does command unity, but it grounds that unity in seven shared realities: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all. GAFCON leaders read this as a description of what Christians already share in Christ, and therefore as a summons to visible fellowship that is shaped by truth. Critics inside the Anglican Communion read the same text as a warning against schism. Both sides quote it. The question is whether Ephesians 4 tells believers to preserve an existing institutional unity or to restore a unity that has been broken by false teaching.
What GAFCON Is and Why It Arose
The Global Anglican Future Conference began as a gathering of Anglican bishops, clergy, and lay people who were convinced that the communion's instruments of unity were no longer willing or able to discipline provinces that had revised Christian teaching on sexuality and, in some cases, the authority of Scripture. The first conference met in Jerusalem in 2008, framed deliberately as a pilgrimage rather than a rival synod, and it produced a statement and a movement that has since continued meeting and expanding. Its participants did not describe themselves primarily as a new denomination but as a renewal movement within global Anglicanism, a network of those who consider themselves faithful to the historic Anglican formularies.
That framing matters for how the movement reads Ephesians 4. If GAFCON were simply a protest group organized around a grievance, the appeal to unity passages would be hollow. Its leaders have consistently argued the reverse: that they are the ones contending for the faith once delivered, and that the burden of division falls on those who have changed the doctrine. This is a familiar pattern in church history. Almost every significant separation in the church has been justified by one side claiming that the other had already broken fellowship by departing from the apostolic message, so that the visible rupture merely made public a division that already existed at the level of belief.
For readers who are not Anglican, the specific disputes may feel remote, but the underlying question is not remote at all. Every congregation and every denomination eventually faces the tension between keeping peace and keeping doctrine. The Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada moved toward blessing same-sex unions and ordaining clergy in such relationships; several African, Asian, and South American provinces declared themselves out of communion with those bodies. The instruments of communion, including the Archbishop of Canterbury and the various primates' meetings, did not resolve the impasse, and the distance only widened over subsequent years.
So GAFCON is best understood as a movement that answered one question decisively: when a province acts in ways another province judges to be a departure from Scripture, what is the faithful response? GAFCON's answer has been to gather, to confess, to plant and strengthen churches, and to recognize one another across national boundaries, while still describing itself as Anglican. Whether that answer is right is precisely the question Ephesians 4:1-6 is asked to settle, and it will not settle it without careful attention to what the text actually says and what it does not.
The Seven Ones and the Shape of Christian Unity
Ephesians 4 opens with an appeal rooted in Paul's imprisonment: he begs his readers to walk worthily of their calling. Then he lists the character of that walk — lowliness, gentleness, patience, forbearance in love — before naming the goal, which is to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. The order is important. The virtues come first because unity is not maintained by structures alone but by a particular kind of conduct. A conference, a statement, or a synod cannot manufacture the lowliness Paul requires. Only people transformed by the gospel can bear with one another patiently enough to hold fellowship together.
The passage then gives the foundation for that unity in a series of seven shared realities. Ephesians 4:4-6 says, "There is one body and one Spirit, even as you also were called in one hope of your calling, ather of all, who is over all, and through all, and in you all." The list is not a set of ideals to be achieved but a description of what is already true of everyone who belongs to Christ. Paul's logic runs from the indicative to the imperative: because these things are so, therefore live accordingly.
Notice what the seven ones include. They include one faith. That phrase matters enormously for the GAFCON debate, because it implies that unity is not contentless. There is a definite faith that was delivered, and to hold a different faith is not to hold a different opinion within the same unity but to step outside the common confession. The same letter that commands unity also insists on truth spoken in love and on the church no longer being tossed about by every wind of doctrine. Unity and doctrine are not rivals in Ephesians. They are woven together throughout the letter's argument.
At the same time, notice what the seven ones do not include. There is no one polity, no one liturgy, no one province, no one bishop, and no one human leader. Paul does not say there is one denomination or one institutional structure. This is a critical observation for both sides of the Anglican dispute. GAFCON's critics sometimes speak as though the Anglican Communion's structures carry the weight of the one body; GAFCON's defenders sometimes speak as though visible separation is a light matter. Ephesians locates unity in Christ and his Spirit, not in an apparatus, which means institutional arrangements are real but secondary goods.
A Prisoner Begging, Not a Magistrate Ruling
The tone of Ephesians 4:1 is easy to rush past. Paul does not command; he begs. He writes as a prisoner in the Lord, a man whose authority is authenticated by suffering rather than by office. That posture is instructive for anyone trying to adjudicate a dispute between Christian bodies. The appeal to unity in this passage comes from someone who had himself been beaten, imprisoned, and eventually executed, and who nevertheless refused to write off the churches that frustrated him. He had every reason to be severe with the Galatians and the Corinthians, and he could be severe, but here the register is pleading.
Consider how Paul handled an earlier and even sharper dispute. Galatians 2:11-14 says, "But when Peter came to Antioch, I resisted him to his face, because he stood condemned." Paul did not preserve appearances at the cost of the gospel. He confronted an apostle publicly because the truth of the gospel was at stake, and the issue was that Peter's behavior implied a false teaching about how Jews and Gentiles are made right with God. This is the clearest biblical precedent for public confrontation within the church when the gospel itself is compromised.
Yet the same Paul who confronted Peter also wrote Ephesians 4. He did not choose between courage and gentleness as though they were alternatives. He confronted when the gospel was at stake and he pleaded for forbearance when the issue was preference, culture, or personal friction. The discernment question is always which kind of issue is in front of you. Christians have a long and unhappy record of treating preferences as gospel issues and gospel issues as preferences, and the results in both directions have been damaging.
For the GAFCON debate, this means the argument cannot be settled by tone alone. A critic who says GAFCON is unloving because it confronted is making the same mistake as a defender who says any confrontation is automatically faithful. Paul did both. The real question is whether the disputed matters rise to the level of the one faith that Ephesians names, and reasonable, Bible-believing Anglicans have disagreed about that question. Honesty requires saying so rather than pretending the answer is obvious to everyone who reads the text.
Truth and Love Together, Never Separated
Ephesians 4 does not discuss unity in isolation. A few verses later the same chapter describes the purpose of Christ's gifts to the church: so that believers would no longer be infants, tossed back and forth and carried about by every wind of doctrine. Unity in Ephesians is not the unity of people who agree to stop talking about truth. It is the unity of people who are being built up together into maturity, which necessarily involves knowing and holding the apostolic teaching. A church that abandons doctrine for the sake of togetherness is not practicing Ephesians 4; it is practicing something the chapter warns against.
This is the strongest part of the GAFCON appeal. If a province blesses what Scripture calls sin and revises the church's teaching on marriage or the authority of the Bible, then the unity being requested is not the unity of Ephesians 4 at all, because the one faith is no longer shared. On that reading, the separation is a consequence of a prior departure, not the cause of it. Denominations do not divide because someone suddenly decided to be divisive; they divide because two groups no longer believe the same thing and one of them concludes the difference is not negotiable.
The difficulty is that this logic can be used to justify nearly any split, and church history is full of separations over matters far smaller than the gospel. So the discipline has to be applied carefully, not reflexively. The test is whether the disputed issue is taught plainly in Scripture, whether it concerns the heart of the gospel or a secondary matter, and whether patient correction has been attempted before fellowship is withdrawn. Paul spent years reasoning with the Galatians and the Corinthians before writing as he did, and even then he wrote to correct them rather than to leave them.
Scripture itself gives an example of the church working through a doctrinal dispute without dividing. Acts 15 records the council in Jerusalem, where some taught that Gentile converts had to be circumcised and keep the law of Moses to be saved. The apostles and elders gathered, debated, heard testimony, and reached a judgment that did not bind Gentile believers to the Mosaic law. The dispute was real and the stakes were the gospel itself, yet the process was corporate, patient, and aimed at preserving fellowship on the basis of truth. That is the model both sides of the Anglican argument claim to be following.
What the Anglican Dispute Actually Disputes
It helps to be concrete. The presenting issue between GAFCON and the provinces it separated from was the blessing of same-sex unions and the ordination of clergy in same-sex relationships, along with the wider question of how the church handles Scripture it finds inconvenient. GAFCON's position is that these developments are not matters of pastoral application but a different teaching about sin, repentance, and salvation. Their critics respond that the church has changed its mind before on slavery, on the role of women, and on the treatment of divorced people, and that a living tradition can develop. Each side reads the other's arguments as proof of its own case.
Behind the presenting issue lies a deeper disagreement about authority. Does Scripture norm the church's teaching, or does the church's ongoing experience norm its reading of Scripture? The two positions produce very different outcomes when they meet a text they find difficult. Ephesians 4 does not resolve this hermeneutical question directly, but it does assume that there is a given faith, a body of apostolic teaching that was received rather than invented. Whoever holds a different teaching is not simply offering a fresh perspective on the same faith; on Paul's terms, they have moved to something else.
There is also a demographic reality that cannot be ignored without distorting the picture. The provinces most aligned with GAFCON are largely in Africa, Asia, and South America, while the provinces it opposed are largely in North America and Western Europe. Western observers sometimes frame the conflict as conservative backlash; GAFCON participants frame it as the global church correcting a wealthy minority. Neither framing is neutral, and readers should be suspicious of tidy narratives that assign virtue to one hemisphere. The global church is genuinely global now, and its center of gravity has moved, which is itself part of what makes this dispute different from earlier ones.
Where faithful Christians differ, the honest thing is to say so. Some Anglicans believe GAFCON preserved the gospel and the communion both, at least in the provinces that joined it. Others believe it introduced a new division into the body of Christ for the sake of a contested reading. A reader can study the primary documents, the conference statements, and the responses from Canterbury and reach a reasoned conclusion, but that conclusion should be held with humility, because people who love Scripture and love Christ have landed on both sides.
Keeping the Unity of the Spirit in Real Congregations
Most Christians will never attend a global conference or vote in a synod, but the commands of Ephesians 4 land on them anyway. The unity of the Spirit is kept or broken in local churches, in families, and in friendships between believers who disagree. It is kept by lowliness, gentleness, patience, and forbearance in love, which are the specific virtues Paul names before he names the goal. That means the ordinary work of unity is unglamorous: listening before speaking, refusing to assume the worst about a brother's motives, and remaining in relationship with people whose convictions differ from yours.
It also means being willing to say hard things when the gospel is at stake, and to do it in the way Paul did with Peter. Confrontation in Scripture is not the opposite of love; sometimes it is love's most difficult form. But the goal of confrontation is restoration, not victory. Paul resisted Peter to his face because Peter stood condemned, and presumably he wanted Peter restored, not humiliated. The measure of whether a disagreement is handled well is whether the person across the table is treated as a brother to be won rather than an opponent to be defeated.
For those watching the Anglican conflict from outside, the most useful thing is not to pick a side quickly but to learn the pattern. Watch for the seven ones being invoked on both sides. Watch for whether the disputants are appealing to a shared confession or to institutional loyalty. Watch whether they are patient with individuals while firm on doctrine, or the reverse. And watch your own church, because the same pressures arrive everywhere, usually in smaller and more personal forms than a global communion. The question of what to do when a beloved church body teaches something you believe Scripture denies will find you eventually.
Paul's final ground for unity in this passage is not a strategy for managing conflict but a Person. The one God and Father is over all, through all, and in all. Unity is possible because believers are not being asked to create something from nothing; they are being asked to live out what God has already done. Whether GAFCON was right or wrong, and whether the Anglican Communion holds together or fragments further, this remains the church's calling: to walk worthily of the calling with which we were called, in humility and patience, keeping the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, because there is one body and one Lord.
Biblical fidelity check
What Ephesians 4:1-6 does establish is clear enough. It commands a worthy walk, names the virtues that maintain unity, and grounds unity in seven shared realities that belong to all who are in Christ. It assumes there is one faith and one Lord, which means unity has content; it does not teach that any group of people who use the name of Jesus can be united regardless of what they believe. It does not, however, prescribe a mechanism for resolving disputes, name a governing body, or tell individual believers how to decide when separation becomes necessary. It gives the goal and the character of the walk, not the procedural manual.
The passage also does not establish that institutional unity is always to be preserved at any cost. Paul himself publicly resisted Peter to his face, and the Jerusalem council settled a doctrinal dispute by debate and judgment rather than by indefinite postponement. Nor does it establish the opposite error, that any doctrinal disagreement justifies division. A common misreading runs in one of two directions: some treat the seven ones as a mandate to remain in visible fellowship with any body that claims the name Christian, which ignores the one faith the passage names; others treat every secondary difference as a false gospel, which turns the unity of the Spirit into a slogan for their own preferences. Both misreadings are wrong because both detach unity from the truth Paul assumes, or detach truth from the unity Paul commands.
Other passages that speak to Ephesians 4:1-6
Several related studies help fill out this passage. On the theme of unified speech and the end of divisions, see What Does 1 Corinthians 1:10 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application. For the foundation of that unity in God's own faithfulness, What Does 1 Corinthians 1:9 Mean? Context, Theology, and Application is useful, as is the wider survey 1 Corinthians 1: Called, United, and Boasting in the Lord. On how a church body handles its own failures and warnings while remaining one people, see 1 Corinthians 10: Warnings and Freedom.
Frequently asked questions
What does Ephesians 4:4-6 mean by the one faith?
The phrase sits inside a list of seven shared realities that belong to every believer: one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father. The one faith is the apostolic message that was delivered and received, not a private opinion or a developing consensus. That is why the same letter can command unity and also insist that believers stop being tossed about by every wind of doctrine. Unity in Ephesians has content. If the faith is redefined, the unity Paul describes is not being defended; it is being replaced with something else that borrows the vocabulary.
Does GAFCON's appeal to Ephesians 4 justify division in the Anglican Communion?
That is exactly the disputed question, and the text does not settle it by itself. GAFCON argues that the one faith was already broken by provinces that revised Christian teaching, so the visible separation only made public a division that existed at the level of belief. Its critics argue that separation fragments the one body and that the disputed matters do not rise to the level of the gospel. Both appeals are intelligible. Honest readers should note that the passage gives the goal of unity and the character that maintains it, but no procedure for deciding when a dispute has crossed the line.
How should ordinary Christians pursue unity when they disagree with their church?
Start with the virtues Paul lists before the goal: lowliness, gentleness, patience, and forbearance in love. In practice that means listening carefully, assuming the best about motives, praying for those you disagree with, and speaking plainly when the gospel is at stake. Scripture supports both patient endurance within a flawed body and public confrontation when the truth is compromised, as in Galatians 2:11-14. What it never supports is treating secondary preferences as gospel issues or treating the gospel as a preference. Seek counsel, read the primary texts, and hold your conclusion with humility, since faithful believers have reached different conclusions.
