The Anglican Split: A Woman at Canterbury, a Church Divided, and the Way Out

What Happened

On October 3, 2025, Dame Sarah Mullally, Bishop of London and a former Chief Nursing Officer for England, was announced as the 106th Archbishop of Canterbury — the first woman to hold the office in more than 1,400 years. She was installed at Canterbury Cathedral on March 25, 2026. As Bishop of London she had supported the Church of England’s Prayers of Love and Faith, the services of blessing for same-sex couples that the church began using in December 2023.

The response from the conservative wing of worldwide Anglicanism was swift. On October 16, 2025, Archbishop Laurent Mbanda of Rwanda, chairman of the Gafcon Primates’ Council, declared: “We have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion.” Gafcon cited Mullally’s appointment, her support for same-sex blessings, the earlier appointment of a woman in a same-sex partnership as Archbishop of Wales, and what it called the “continuing absence” of repentance, and it rejected the authority of all four “Instruments of Communion” — the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates’ Meeting.

In March 2026, 347 bishops and 121 clergy and lay leaders from 27 provinces gathered in Abuja, Nigeria. Many expected them to elect a rival to Canterbury. They did not. Instead they formed a Global Anglican Council chaired by Archbishop Mbanda and adopted the Abuja Affirmation, which says that Canterbury’s leaders “have failed to exercise discipline and maintain the biblical witness,” and that “a full and public disengagement from these structures is necessary.” Members may no longer attend the Lambeth Conference or the Primates’ Meeting.

Meanwhile, Archbishop Mullally has carried on as though little has changed. On September 25, 2026, on her first visit to the United States as archbishop, she told the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops in Texas that bishops must be “figures of unity” in a “polarized world.”

What the Bible Requires of a Minister

The immediate cause of the split was a question the Bible settles plainly: who may serve as a pastor, elder, or bishop? The Holy Ghost did not leave this to the changing opinions of synods. Paul wrote to Timothy:

The same requirements appear in Titus 1:5–9: an elder must be “the husband of one wife,” holding fast “the faithful word as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound doctrine both to exhort and to convince the gainsayers.” The office is for a man — a man of proven character, ruling his own household well, sound in doctrine, and able to refute error. And Paul gives the reason, rooted not in the customs of his day but in creation itself:

This is no slight upon women, who are fellow heirs of the grace of life (1 Peter 3:7) and whose faithful service fills the pages of the New Testament. It is simply God’s order for His church. A woman cannot be “the husband of one wife.” When a church places a woman over the whole communion as its chief bishop, it has not reinterpreted Scripture; it has set it aside.

The same is true of the blessing of same-sex unions. The Scripture calls such relations “vile affections” and “that which is against nature” (Romans 1:26–27), and warns that the unrighteous “shall not inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 6:9–10). Yet the very next verse holds out real hope: “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus” (1 Corinthians 6:11). To bless what God forbids is not kindness; it withholds from sinners the call to repentance through which God gives that washing.

Where Anglicanism Came From

To understand why even the conservatives cannot fully escape these troubles, one must remember how the Church of England began. It was not born of a revival or a recovery of the gospel among the people. It was born of a king’s marriage dispute. In 1521 Pope Leo X gave Henry VIII the title “Defender of the Faith” for a book he wrote against Martin Luther. A few years later, when the Pope would not annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Henry broke with Rome, and the Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared the king, not the Pope, the supreme head of the Church in England. Henry remained Roman in doctrine to his death; his Six Articles of 1539 upheld transubstantiation, private masses, and confession to a priest.

Under Edward VI and Elizabeth I, real Reformation truths were written into the Thirty-nine Articles. But the structure Rome built was kept intact: the diocesan bishops, the priests, the parish system, the liturgical calendar, the vestments, the sacramental rites, and the union of church and state. Article 37 simply moved the headship from Rome to the throne, placing the “chief government” of the church under the English monarch and declaring that “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this Realm of England.” Rome’s owner was changed; Rome’s house was kept.

Anglican Doctrine Measured Against the Word of God

In fairness, the Thirty-nine Articles contain a good deal of sound teaching. Article 11 states that “we are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings.” Article 28 rejects transubstantiation, and Article 22 rejects purgatory. Had the Church of England stood on these, much of its history would read differently. But its Prayer Book, its ordinal, and its daily practice teach another way of salvation that contradicts its own Articles, and that other way has largely prevailed.

Baptismal regeneration. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer — the very standard Gafcon calls essential — has the minister say over a sprinkled infant: “Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, that this Child is regenerate and grafted into the body of Christ’s Church, let us give thanks unto Almighty God for these benefits.” The congregation then prays: “We yield thee hearty thanks, most merciful Father, that it hath pleased thee to regenerate this Infant with thy Holy Spirit, to receive him for thine own Child by adoption, and to incorporate him into thy holy Church.” The closing rubric adds: “It is certain by God’s Word, that children which are baptized, dying before they commit actual sin, are undoubtedly saved.” The Catechism teaches every child to say that in baptism “I was made a member of Christ, the child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven.”

The priesthood. The Ordinal’s preface claims that “from the Apostles’ time there have been these Orders of Ministers in Christ’s Church; Bishops, Priests, and Deacons,” and at ordination the bishop says to each new priest: “Receive the Holy Ghost for the Office and Work of a Priest in the Church of God… Whose sins thou dost forgive, they are forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, they are retained.” But the New Testament never once calls a minister of the gospel a “priest.” The sacrificing priesthood ended at the cross, when the veil of the temple was rent in twain (Matthew 27:51). Christ alone now “hath an unchangeable priesthood” (Hebrews 7:24), and every believer, without exception, is part of “an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 2:5).

Infant Baptism: Salvation by a Work

Of all Anglicanism’s errors, infant baptism lies closest to the heart of the gospel, for it answers the question every soul must face: How is a sinner made a child of God? The Prayer Book answers: by water applied by a priest to an infant who neither knows nor believes anything, on the strength of promises made by others. The Catechism is candid about this. Asked why infants are baptized when repentance and faith are required, it answers: “Because they promise them both by their Sureties: which promise, when they come to age, themselves are bound to perform.”

Consider what this means. The child’s new birth is said to come through a ceremony performed by a man; the faith required is supplied by the vows of godparents; and the child is then bound, when grown, to perform those promises. Whatever name is given to it, this is salvation by a work — the work of the priest who administers the rite, the work of the sponsors who make the vows, and the life-long work of the child who must keep them. It places a human act where the Scripture places the sovereign, unseen work of the Holy Spirit.

No minister can command the wind. No font can produce a new heart. In the New Testament, baptism always follows faith; it never produces it. The Ethiopian eunuch asked, “What doth hinder me to be baptized?” and Philip answered, “If thou believest with all thine heart, thou mayest” (Acts 8:36–37). At Pentecost, “they that gladly received his word were baptized” (Acts 2:41). In Corinth, “many of the Corinthians hearing believed, and were baptized” (Acts 18:8). Baptism is the believer’s public testimony that he has already been raised with Christ (Romans 6:3–5); it is not the means by which he is raised.

The danger is not merely theoretical. Millions of baptized Anglicans have been taught from childhood that they were made children of God and inheritors of heaven at the font. Many live and die resting on a ceremony they cannot remember, without ever having been brought to see their sin and flee to Christ. That is why this error must be named plainly.

A Daughter of the Great Whore

In Revelation 17, the apostle John saw a woman, arrayed in purple and scarlet, drunk with the blood of the saints, and upon her forehead a name written:

A mother of harlots has daughters. Bible-believing Protestants have long identified this woman as the Church of Rome, sitting upon seven mountains (Revelation 17:9), and her daughters as the churches that came out of her body but never fully left her ways — churches that kept her bishops and priests, her sacramental salvation, her baptized infants, her union with the kings of the earth, and her calendar of saints’ days and feasts. The Church of England fits this description closely. It quarrelled with its mother over who should rule it, but it kept her features.

The resemblance has only grown. For more than fifty years, the Anglican–Roman Catholic International Commission has worked toward reunion, producing agreed statements on the Eucharist, ministry, authority, and even Mary. Each Archbishop of Canterbury of recent memory has made the pilgrimage to Rome. The daughter is drifting home to her mother.

This is why the Gafcon disengagement, sincere as many of its leaders are, does not go far enough. Gafcon objects to women bishops and same-sex blessings, and rightly so. But its Abuja Affirmation binds its churches to “the 1662 Book of Common Prayer including the Ordinal” — the very book that pronounces sprinkled infants regenerate and ordains priests to forgive sins. To leave Canterbury while keeping the Prayer Book is to step out of one room of the house while remaining under the same roof. The problem is not merely who is at the head; it is the foundation.

Come Out of Her, My People

The same chapters that describe Babylon contain a command from heaven:

“My people” — the Lord has His own even in Babylon. There are surely Anglicans, in Africa and in England and everywhere between, who love the Lord Jesus Christ and have trusted in Him alone, whatever their church teaches about the font. To them the call is clear: come out. Do not remain where the gospel is contradicted by your own church’s liturgy, where infants are told they are already saved, where women are set over the church, and where sin is blessed. “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers… Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord” (2 Corinthians 6:14, 17). “And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them” (Ephesians 5:11).

Coming out does not mean merely finding a more conservative bishop. It means returning to the simple pattern of the New Testament: a local church of baptized believers, governed by the Word of God, led by qualified men, and resting wholly on the finished work of Christ.

Christ Alone Saves

Above all, let it be said clearly: no church, no rite, no priest, and no promise made at a font can save a single soul. Salvation is the work of God from beginning to end.

The “washing of regeneration” here is the work of the Holy Ghost, not of water poured by a priest; Paul sets it directly against “works of righteousness which we have done.” Christ “by himself purged our sins” (Hebrews 1:3). “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). The sinner who looks to his baptism, his confirmation, his church membership, or his religious upbringing is looking in the wrong place. The sinner who looks to Christ alone, crucified and risen, will never be disappointed. “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:22).

Pray for Them

Finally, let Bible-believing Christians not read this news with pride or contempt. We were once as blind as anyone, and only the grace of God has opened our eyes. The proper response to a church in confusion is prayer. Paul, grieved over his own countrymen who were zealous for a false righteousness, wrote: “Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved” (Romans 10:1). We are commanded to pray “for all men” (1 Timothy 2:1), and the Lord’s servant must instruct “in meekness… those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth” (2 Timothy 2:25).

Pray for the Anglicans of Africa, Asia, and South America who have rightly resisted the errors of Canterbury, that the Lord would lead them all the way back to the Scriptures. Pray for ordinary churchgoers in England and America who have been told all their lives that they were made Christians at the font, that they would be truly born again. Pray for Archbishop Mullally and her fellow bishops, that God would grant them repentance. And pray that many would hear the voice from heaven and come out, finding in Christ alone the salvation no church can give.

Sources: Episcopal News Service (September 28, 2026); Christian Daily International and Gafcon’s statement of October 16, 2025; Anglican Ink and The Christian Century on the Abuja Affirmation (March 2026); Encyclopaedia Britannica and PinkNews on Archbishop Mullally’s background and record; the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (Publick Baptism of Infants, Catechism, Ordering of Priests) and the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. All Scripture quotations are from the King James Version.