12 August 2026

The Jerusalem Statement

In June 2008, some eleven hundred Anglicans — among them nearly three hundred bishops — gathered in Jerusalem for the first Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). The document they issued, the Jerusalem Statement, with its fourteen-point Jerusalem Declaration at its heart, has become one of the defining texts of contemporary Anglicanism.

Opening Prayer

Psalm 133. Ecce, quam bonum!

Behold, how good and joyful a thing it is, * for brethren to dwell together in unity!

It is like the precious oil upon the head, that ran down unto the beard, * even unto Aaron's beard, and went down to the skirts of his clothing.

Like as the dew of Hermon, * which fell upon the hill of Sion.

For there the Lord promised his blessing, * and life for evermore.¹

An old problem of Truth and Peace

"Thus saith the Lord; I am returned unto Zion, and will dwell in the midst of Jerusalem: and Jerusalem shall be called a city of truth . . . These are the things that ye shall do; Speak ye every man the truth to his neighbour; execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates: And let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour; and love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith the Lord. . . .therefore love the truth and peace."[^Zecharia]

"The prophet Zecharia, when he exhorts us to 'love truth and peace," gives pride of place to the Truth, as she is leader and mistress; and he rightly grants the next place to Peace, as she is her attendant. For by its very nature the Truth is always fair and just, acceptable to God, and salutary to all who profess her. But Peace, if she should deviate from the pathway of Truth, would become unfair, offensive to God, and destructive to eveyone who walks in her ways. Hence when the apostle Paul exhorts each and every Christian to dwell in peace with all fellow-humans, he makes only two restrictions: 'as much as it lies within you' and 'if it is possible' [Rom 12:18]--that is, on the condition that the truth be professed."²

As martyrs from John and Stephen to our brothers and sisters who will not submit to Islam today demonstrate, dealing with with a false call to false unity is nothing new. Scripture and history inform us of the proper response. The Lord told Zecharaia to build on a foundation of truth, Christ, truth incarnate who suffered and died for the love of his neighbor, summarized the law as first loving God (truth) and and second loving your neighbor (peace), and how our only comfort in life and death relies on the fact they can not be separated. The theologians of Leiden, dealing with theology they found repugnant, and recovering from repression, defended the unity of their faith by defending their beliefs as outlined in the Three Forms of Unity. Their call was simple, truth and peace.

The Anglican branch of Christ's church is at a similar junction, and the faithful are responding similarly, with truth and peace. The Jerusalem Statement is central to that response.

Why Jerusalem, and why 2008

Trouble had been brewing for decades, showing up changes to liturgy and theology around the world, but it came to a head at the turn of the 21st century.

The gathering was born of crisis. The 1998 Lambeth Conference had affirmed, in Resolution I.10, the historic Christian teaching on marriage and sexual ethics; the consecration of a bishop in a same-sex partnership in the American Episcopal Church in 2003 made plain that parts of the Communion did not consider that teaching binding. Years of communiqués, commissions, and unheeded calls for restraint followed. By 2008 many primates — particularly of the Global South provinces, where most of the world's Anglicans now live — concluded that the Communion's instruments could not, or would not, guard its faith. Many of the bishops at Jerusalem declined that summer's Lambeth Conference; GAFCON met the month before it.

What the Declaration says

The Jerusalem Declaration is brief — fourteen numbered tenets — and deliberately unoriginal, in the best sense: it stakes its claim on the classical formularies rather than on novelties of its own. It confesses the gospel of God's grace and the Lordship of Christ; the authority and sufficiency of the Scriptures as God's Word written, to be read in their plain and canonical sense; the four ecumenical councils and the three catholic creeds; the Thirty-Nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church; the Book of Common Prayer of 1662 as a true and authoritative standard of worship and prayer; and the historic ordinal. It upholds marriage as the lifelong union of one man and one woman, presses the priority of the Great Commission, and — the point on which the controversy turned — rejects the authority of churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith in word or deed, while praying for their repentance and return.

Notably, the Statement insisted that those gathered were not leaving Anglicanism but contending for it: the movement styled itself a fellowship of confessing Anglicans within the one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

What has come of it

The most visible fruit on this continent was the Anglican Church in North America, formed in 2009 and recognized by the GAFCON primates, which gathered many of the clergy and congregations that had left or been forced from the Episcopal Church. Subsequent conferences — Nairobi in 2013, Jerusalem again in 2018, Kigali in 2023 — have reaffirmed and sharpened the Declaration's claims, the Kigali Commitment going so far as to declare the Communion's historic instruments of unity no longer fit to guard its doctrine.

Why it matters here

Whatever one makes of the ecclesiastical politics, the Jerusalem Declaration is striking for where it points: backward, to the Bible in the common tongue, the creeds, the Articles, and the Book of Common Prayer. Those are precisely the texts this family of sites exists to serve — the Daily Office prayed from the classical Prayer Book, and the Scriptures read whole and in parallel. The Declaration wagers that Anglicanism's future runs through its formularies. On that point, at least, this commonplace book is happy to agree.

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