Abstract
2020 had promised to be a significant year in the history of the Anglican Communion. Every meeting of the Lambeth Conference is something of a landmark, but there were especially potent hopes and fears in circulation. With endorsements on the cover from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chair of the Lambeth Conference Design Group and the Convenor of the St Augustine’s Seminar, which produced its key resource, it is difficult to imagine that this volume was not produced at least in part with an eye to shaping the climate in which the conference – now deferred – would take place.
Alongside the public travails of the Anglican Communion over the last 30 years, there has been a wealth of scholarly work that has deepened our understanding of Anglican history and challenged the assumptions of previously dominant accounts of Anglican identity. Both Heaney and Sachs are notable contributors to this, Sachs as a church historian and Heaney in his advocacy of postcolonial theology. In the central chapters of this book, they provide an engaging and highly accessible introduction to new perspectives that have been opening up. Central to this is their exploration of mission; as they state in the Introduction, ‘We will depict mission as a key to the nature of Anglicanism’s promise, though not simply as celebration of Anglican expanse’ (p. xiv). They recognize that the missionary endeavours leading ultimately to the formation of the Anglican Communion found motivation in visions for an ecclesial expansion that would correspond with the spread of Empire; as late as 1908, the Dean of Westminster was arguing that what united Anglicans was a belief in the ‘providential mission’ in world history of the Anglo-Saxon race (p. 59). Yet they also show how this came to be accompanied by the creative contextualization of mission activities, with those who had travelled to share the gospel being transformed in cross-cultural encounter as they ventured beyond their colonial congregations, Anglican missionaries planting churches well away from the shade of the British Empire, and local church leadership emerging, though tragically also sometimes opposed. Their approach here is summed up by their claiming of Anglicanism for the intercultural reality that grows from this continuing process of missional contextualization, contrasted with the ‘Anglianism’ that sees in the Anglican Communion the Church of England depicted on a greater canvas.
In the Conclusion and the two chapters that precede it, Heaney and Sachs seek to move from this rich description of history to some prescriptions for how Anglicanism ought to be understood and how it should respond to current issues. That shift is bound to be problematic: the claim that Anglican identity has always been contested is hard to refute, for instance, but it is not so difficult to take issue with the use of this claim to ‘argue that to search for consensus in, for example, a covenanting document or other confessional means in formal theological texts or in the strengthening of the existing Instruments of Communion is doomed to fail’ (p. 187). The lack of comparison with, say, accounts of Lutheranism, Methodism or even Catholicism further weakens the bridge between description and prescription; could it be that somewhere here there lingers a set of assumptions about Anglican exceptionalism that still wait to be interrogated?