African rebuke for Justin Welby: The Church of England Newspaper, July 14, 2013 p 6.

The Archbishop of Canterbury has let down the wider Anglican Communion through his half-hearted defense of marriage in the House of Lords debates on the government’s same-sex marriage bill, the leader of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA), the Most Rev. Eliud Wabukala Archbishop of Kenya, said last week.

Justin Welby’s perceived lack of confidence in the Bible and his failure so far to exercise leadership on the international Anglican scene prompted the public rebuke — the first formal statement by the leader of the global South coalition of churches.

In a letter released last week to supporters of the FCA, a global Anglican renewal movement, Archbishop Wabukala said Archbishop Welby and the Archbishop of York, the Most Rev. John Sentamu, appeared to have compromised the Christian faith in an attempt to curry favor with secular Britain and with the liberal Anglican Churches of North America.

“We are painfully aware that the Episcopal Church of the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada continue to promote a false gospel and yet both are still received as in good standing by the Archbishop of Canterbury,” Dr. Wabukala wrote.

“Furthermore, the Church of England itself, the historic mother church of the Communion, seems to be advancing along the same path. While defending marriage, both the Archbishops of York and Canterbury appeared at the same time to approve of same-sex Civil Partnerships during parliamentary debates on the UK’s ‘gay marriage’ legislation, in contradiction to the historic biblical teaching on human sexuality reaffirmed by the 1998 Lambeth Conference,” he said.

The Church of England and the North American churches have been in decline, with some branches of “the Church of Christ … being claimed by the world through compromise and false teaching.”

At the same time the evangelical Anglican churches in the developing world had seen explosive growth with millions converted to the Christian faith, even when “tested by violent persecution” from without and challenged internally by “nominalism and tribalism, he noted.

In 1970 the number of Anglicans in Africa stood at 7.7 million. African Anglican Church membership grew through conversions from Islam and indigenous faiths to 50.8 million in 2010 and is expected to reach 65 million by 2020, a report published last month by Gordon-Conwell Seminary in the U.S. predicted.

“In these circumstances, attempts to achieve unity” among Anglicans across the globe “based merely on common humanitarianism and dialogue, without repentance,” was doomed to fail as it sacrifice “the transforming power of the gospel.”

The “seeds of the East African revival transformed a cold were planted through years of faithful bible teaching and were brought to life by the Spirit of God, with deep conviction of sin and the irrepressible joy of sins forgiven,” the archbishop said.

“This is the core of the transforming power of the gospel and in this we delight.”