Pilgrimages high on the agenda for Gafcon Jerusalem meeting: CEN 5.23.08 p 7.

Participants at the Global Anglican Future Conference (Gafcon) in Jerusalem will divide their time between worship, pilgrimages around Jerusalem, workshops and plenary sessions on the future life and witness of the Anglican Communion, the tentative agenda for the July 22-29 conference reports.

Approximately 280 bishops and 600 lay and clergy delegates from 17 of the Anglican Communion’s will attend the gathering to be held at Jerusalem’s Renaissance Hotel. Details on the pre-conference meeting in Jordan, for Anglicans from Muslim majority countries unable to freely travel to Israel have not yet been published.

However, the Jerusalem portion of the meeting will “focus on the transforming love of Christ. We will be drawing from the scriptures of the Old and New Testament in our pilgrimage, and their relevance to the challenges facing the church globally today. These include secularism, other religions, poverty and HIV/AIDS as well as moral and theological issues,” Sydney Archbishop Peter Jensen said.

The conferees will visit the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, Bethlehem, Galilee and historic and biblical sites round Jerusalem.

Organizers of the meeting said meetings with local Christian leaders had been held to “brief them on the nature and purpose” of Gafcon, and to affirm the “continuing presence of the Church in the Holy Land.” However, a press spokesman for the meeting said he was not aware of plans to meet with Jewish leaders during the conference.

Expectations for the meeting differ widely. Some bishops and church leaders have criticized Gafcon as holding itself out to be an alternate Lambeth Conference. Some supporters of Gafcon, such as the Dean of Sydney, have lambasted those attending Lambeth saying that by associating with liberal US and Canadian bishops those attending the July 16-Aug 3 conference in Canterbury give succor to their theological innovations.

From among the 100 North American participants at Gafcon, chosen by the Bishop of Pittsburgh, the Rt. Rev. Robert Duncan, the majority of US Episcopal bishops will attend both Gafcon and Lambeth, arguing it is important to witness to the wider church the situation afflicting the American church.

The conference will open on Sunday June 22, with dinner and an evening plenary session. On Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday the conferees will take half day tours of the Holy Land sites, with the remaining working days of the conference divided into periods of worship, Bible study, workshops and plenary sessions.

Behind the scenes of the conference, however, attempts to forge a common front among the fissiparous elements of the Anglican right will take place. While united in their opposition to the innovations of doctrine and discipline on offer from the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church, questions of women’s ordination, rivalries and jealousies between different American factions, as well as the traditional doctrinal divides between Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics have yet to be fully resolved.

However, Dr. Jensen reports that from across the spectrum of traditional Anglicanism, those participating in Gafcon are united in seeking a “future in which the Gospel is uncompromised and Christ-centered mission a top priority.”