Welcome to All Saints Cathedral by the Archbishop of Kenya and Chairman of GAFCON, Archbishop Eliud Wabukala

Sunday 20th October 2013

I am very happy to welcome you to All Saints Cathedral this morning and I especially want to recognise His Grace, the Archbishop of Canterbury who will be our preacher this morning. This is the second visit to Kenya he has made this year so we are very privileged! It is a great joy that we are together in this service as we enjoy fellowship in Christ with our brother Primates.

But the word on everybody’s lips today is GAFCON. I am delighted that my fellow Primates who share with me in the leadership of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, are here to prepare for the second Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) which begins here at All Saints tomorrow. We are welcoming over 1,300 delegates from around the world, some of whom are already with us to share in our worship this morning. We are so happy you are here and we welcome you in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

It is very fitting that GAFCON 2013 should be held here in Nairobi because it was in a meeting here in 2007 that the GAFCON movement was born and it has now become a global movement which represents some 40 million Anglicans around the world. It is wonderful to see how the Lord is renewing and reforming our beloved Anglican Communion.

GAFCON came into being not only to proclaim and defend the gospel, but also to enable faithful Anglicans to remain within the Anglican Communion in places where a false gospel has gained the upper hand. In Psalm 147 we read that ‘The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel. He heals the broken hearted and binds up their wounds’ (vv2,3) and it is therefore a great joy for me to see God using the GAFCON movement to gather the faithful.

In particular, I am very pleased that Archbishop Robert Duncan, Primate of the Anglican Church in North America, Presiding Bishop Tito Zavala, Archbishop Daniel Deng Bul, Archbishop Nicholas Okoh and Archbishop Henri Isingoma will be participating in our worship this morning. We rejoice in the strength of the unity and fellowship we have as we stand side by side for the gospel.

So let the praises of God be in our hearts and on our lips this morning at the start of a new week and the start of a new stage of God’s gracious work in restoring his Church so that we may bear clear and certain witness to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.