When Churches Fight, the Outsider Is Forgotten
October 21, 2025
When Churches Fight, the Outsider Is Forgotten
A Xenotological Reflection on the Anglican Communion Split
The global Anglican Communion is splitting again. While headlines focus on sexuality, authority, and institutional loyalty, the deeper tragedy is missional. Whenever churches turn inward to protect their purity, the outsider disappears from view.
Across Africa, Asia, and the West, Anglican provinces are breaking fellowship over who may lead, bless, or belong. The Global South Fellowship of Anglicans, representing nearly three-quarters of the world’s Anglicans, has declared it no longer recognizes the Archbishop of Canterbury as “first among equals.” Western provinces see this as conscience and contextualization, the work of listening to their cultures. Both sides claim the gospel and both claim faithfulness. But while they fight, the missional horizon narrows, and the stranger at the gate is left waiting.
A Missiological Reversal
Historically, Anglican mission was defined by sending: from England to everywhere else. Cathedrals, schools, and hospitals followed the routes of empire. Over time, those mission fields became the places where Christianity flourished most vibrantly. Today, the demographic center of Anglicanism is no longer London or New York. It is Lagos, Kampala, Nairobi, and Singapore.
This is what Lamin Sanneh called the translation principle of mission: the gospel always takes root in local soil. Yet the present conflict shows how fragile that rootedness can be when unity depends on inherited power instead of shared purpose. The split is not only about ethics. It is also about whose culture defines orthodoxy, whose experience of God is authoritative, and who is considered inside or outside.
The Outsider’s View
From a xenotological perspective, a theology of the outsider, every ecclesial split is a test of compassion. Luke’s Gospel shows Jesus constantly crossing boundaries: touching lepers, defending women, eating with tax collectors, welcoming Gentiles. Whenever religious insiders guarded the gates, Jesus stepped outside them.
That same tension runs through mission history. When the church becomes obsessed with guarding the table instead of extending it, it forgets the very ones mission was meant to reach. Arguments over polity and purity may start as theological but often end as tribal. Each camp forms its own circle of insiders while those at the margins become collateral damage.
Forgotten Faces
Who gets forgotten when churches fight?
The widow in Nairobi who depends on Anglican relief programs now frozen by funding disputes.
The LGBTQ youth in London who hears that the church is divided over whether they are worthy of blessing.
The refugee mother in Sudan who once found sanctuary in Anglican hospitals but now struggles for resources.
The seminarian in Singapore whose scholarship depends on a diocese no longer recognized by Canterbury.
The veteran in Kentucky sleeping in his truck because bureaucracy moves slower than mercy.
The senior in a Colorado nursing home who built a sanctuary the church no longer visits.
For them, the question is not who is right. It is whether the church still remembers them at all.
The Cost of a Closed Table
David Bosch once warned that mission divorced from community becomes propaganda, and community without mission becomes a club. The Anglican crisis exposes both dangers. On one side, mission becomes a banner for ideology. On the other, community becomes self-protective. Neither posture reflects the missional heart of God—the God who, in Luke 15, leaves the ninety-nine for the one, and who in Acts 10 sends Peter to a Gentile’s house against his better judgment.
When a communion fractures, it is not only governance that breaks. It is witness. The outsider watches a divided church and concludes that Jesus is just another tribal deity.
The Domestic Mirror
The same pattern plays out closer to home. Churches split over politics, music styles, or generational change, and while leaders draft statements of faith, the outsider slips quietly out the back door.
There are veterans who cannot find belonging in congregations that once pledged to honor them. There are seniors sitting through Sunday livestreams alone, forgotten by the people they once discipled. There are working families for whom religion feels like another club they cannot afford to join.
The schism in the Anglican Communion is simply the global mirror of a local problem: the church’s instinct to fight for position instead of presence.
The Missional Opportunity
If the split teaches anything, it is that mission cannot depend on institutional unity. It depends on proximity to pain. Jesus’ ministry was never headquartered in the temple courts but in borderlands and borrowed rooms. The early church’s strength came not from agreement but from shared compassion: breaking bread, holding possessions in common, remembering the poor.
A xenotological missiology asks, Where are the outsiders now? Not just geographically, but emotionally, spiritually, and socially. Who feels outside the reach of grace because of the noise coming from inside our sanctuaries?
A Call to Recenter
A church that recenters the outsider finds its soul again.
That means listening more than arguing. Showing up in hospital rooms, nursing homes, and shelters. Training our eyes to see the one who is not in the room. Refusing to weaponize doctrine against the wounded. Remembering that in Luke’s Gospel, it was foreigners, women, and sinners who most often recognized the kingdom when it appeared.
The future of Anglican mission—and the mission of every church—will hinge not on who wins the argument, but on who keeps the table open while the argument continues.
The Last Word
Perhaps the outsider still holds the key to the church’s renewal. In Luke 24, it was two unnamed travelers, not the Twelve, who recognized the risen Christ when He broke bread. The future of the Anglican Communion, and indeed of all our fractured communions, may depend on whether we can still make space at the table for those who walk alongside us unknown.
When churches fight, the outsider is forgotten. But when the church remembers the outsider, it remembers the One who never forgot us.
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