When I was received into the Episcopal Church at Holy Apostles just shy of twenty years ago, I noticed that my understanding of what was happening was different from that of others in my group. Where others were thinking only of transfering their membership to the Episcopal Church, or even just this particularly parish, I was aware of - and pleased to be - joining a global church. Raised Catholic my sense of what a church needed to be was different from that of those coming from more locally focused churches like the Methodist. But while I liked the idea of the Anglican communion, I'm embarrassed by the Englishness of the tradition and in the intervening years became resentful of the burgeoning numbers in other former English colonies, and the Victorian morality they promote. As I became convinced that the Anthropocene is really the "Anglocene," the Anglican tradition seemed even more tarnished...
So this book came as a revelation! The Anglican communion, kick-started when the revolting American colonists broke free (with the help of the Church of Scotland) from the Church of England and its King, is now a decentered community of provinces across the globe, not just in areas that had been British colonies. But the shadow of the empire is long. The North Atlantic has influence disproportionate to our (rapidly!) dwindling numbers, both in nostalgic investment in English "traditions" throughout the communion and in influence - the provinces of the global majority remain financially dependent on the northern minority. And Anglicans everywhere sing hymns about a king-like God before whom every nation should kneel, and think about the history of missions as starting in England and moving outward to "regions beyond."
Or do they? The average Anglican today is a 30-year-old woman from sub-Saharan Africa, Kwok reminds us. What the majority of Anglicans like her thinks and does is barely known in the circles of Anglican power, since lay voices and women's leadership are poorly represented by bishop-heavy structures almost entirely composed of men. The "postcolonial" approach Kwok lays out calls out colonial holdovers in the church but doesn't just advocate turning the tables. Colonial structures and understandings of power persist in decolonized states. The imperative to attend to the marginalized - an imperative at once postcolonial and Christian - calls us to seek the voices of lay people, and of minority populations (most Anglican communities live as minorities themselves, but are also internally diverse.
The urgent question is how to construct identity in community so that the result will not be fragmentation, fundamentalism, or balkanization. The Anglican Communion can offer a unique prophetic model. On the one hand, it should encourage the experimentation of new cultural forms among member churches. On the other hand, the different cultural hybrids are in communion with one another, so that each can serve as a mirror for others, without absolutizing one's specific cultural form. [¶] To embrace this multicultural and plurivocal model of the Anglican Communion, we need to reconceive Anglican tradition and history not in a linear fashion or using a dispersal model, as if everything emanates from the center. (39)
In place of a "dispersal" model, Kwok introduces various newer understandings of the growth of Christianity. Perhaps it's best understood as missio dei - not churches but God moves in history, and has been active everywhere in different ways. Kwok quotes Indian Anglican theologian Christopher Duraisingh, who argues
that the church exists for the world and that Christian mssion is not to propagate a pre-packaged and context-free, universalized "gospel," but to discern and witness God's action in history. (192)
Does the Anglican tradition have elements which could make it especially receptive to a grace unfolding everywhere? I confess I'm not accustomed to thinking the Anglican tradition "prophetic" but maybe I should. How do I find this youthful multicultural church, so hard to imagine in the aging if progressive American Protestant mainline? I feel a new year's resolution forming.
