What Portion of the Anglican Communion does GAFCON and the GSFA Represent?

(The American Anglican Council commends with gratitude the following analysis put together by the Rev. Ben Jeffries for us on the state of the Anglican Communion.We wanted to add a note that here we are only citing provinces that are on the existing "ACC Schedule C" list of Anglican churches, so we are not counting either ACNA (with an ASA of about 120k) or the Anglican Church of Brazil. In addition, since Australia includes Sydney (about 50k members), we must subtract that from the total Canterbury-led Communion and shift those numbers over to the GAFCON/GSFA group. This would increase the number of conservative churches and the figures cited for them in this analysis. -Canon Phil Ashey, AAC President & Chief Executive Officer)

The Kigali Commitment (2023) asserts that the primates who align with the statement “represent the overwhelming majority (estimated at 85%) of Anglicans worldwide.” The accuracy of this number has been publicly challenged, and so an explanation is in order.

The “85%” number is based on estimates of Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) across the Anglican Communion. That is, if you were to tabulate all the Anglicans worshiping in Anglican Churches on any given Sunday, roughly 85% of them would be under Bishops whose primate is a part of either GSFA or GAFCON.

If we conceive of two different “Communions”—one aligned with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the other aligned with the Kigali Commitment, it is true that, at the level of official membership, these each represent about 50% of the Anglican Communion. (The Wikipedia page ‘Anglican Communion’ has a robust compilation of well-documented official membership data.)

Read the entire article from the AAC here.