Remaining Faithful in the Ruins

There are seasons when the ground shifts beneath the Church. Old certainties crumble, alliances realign, and what once seemed unshakable begins to tremble. Around the Anglican Communion, a reordering is underway — GAFCON and others have sought to claim a clearer, purer centre of gravity, one that promises stability and doctrinal assurance in a time of confusion. Their zeal for truth and moral clarity cannot be dismissed; indeed, it calls us all to examine the faith we profess.

And yet, I cannot find peace in their path. For the work of God is rarely accomplished by those who stand apart from the pain of the body. The call of Christ has always been to remain — to abide in the tension, to stay within the flawed and fragile vessel through which grace still flows.

The Anglican Church in these islands of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia carries deep wounds. We have inherited both the gifts and the fractures of our history — the beauty of our three tikanga life and the ache of its unfinished reconciliation. We live with disappointments, with systems that creak under their own weight, with the weariness that comes from waiting for renewal that sometimes feels slow to dawn. Yet even here, the Eucharist is still offered; the Word still proclaimed; the Spirit still hovers over the waters of our confusion, whispering creation into being again.

To step away would be to abandon not only the structure, but the story — the story of a people learning, again and again, how to be one body in Christ. The saints and martyrs who have gone before us did not secure the faith by separating from the Church’s struggle, but by remaining faithful within it. They prayed through its darkness, reasoned through its errors, and, when called upon, suffered for its renewal. Their inheritance is now in our hands, not to be kept in purity, but to be guarded in perseverance.

To remain is not an act of resignation, but of resistance — resistance to cynicism, to factionalism, to the temptation of purity apart from love. Remaining is a prophetic act. It says: we will not surrender the household of God to despair or division. We will contend for its soul, not from the outside, but from within its heart.

And so we stay. Not because everything is well, but because the Gospel demands faithfulness in the ruins. We stay to tend the altar and the lamp, to keep the fire of prayer burning in the house of the Lord, that future generations may yet find light.

For the promise of Christ is not to the triumphant, but to those who endure.And perhaps — perhaps — faithfulness, not departure, will be the seed of the Church’s resurrection.