Anglicanism: A Global Communion / Michael Lapsley, Priest and Partisan: A South African Journey

Anglicanism: A Global Communion. Edited by Andrew Wingate, Kevin Ward, Carrie Pemberton, and Wilson Sitshebo. New York: Church Publishing, 1998. xx + 416 pp. $27.50 (paper).

Michael Lapsley, Priest and Partisan: A South African Journey. By Michael Worsnip. Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press/New York: Talman, 1996. 167 pp. illus. $14.95 (paper),

As a community of the incarnation, the Christian Church is always called to be grounded in the sociopolitical and cultural contexts in which the body of Christ exists. The Church, and the Anglican Communion in particular, thus cannot escape the forces of globalization that affect all of life today. Globalization's shrinking of time and space simultaneously drives us Anglicans into a greater sense of a common world fellowship while exacerbating the points of tension and division that alienate us one from another. The recent irregular consecrations of two American "missionary bishops" to the United States by Archbishops Moses Tay of East Asia and Emanuel Kolini of Rwanda highlight the possibilities and tensions inherent in a globalized Church. A task before Anglicans today is to discover new ways of being the Church that will foster deeper unity and wholeness in the body of Christ rather than exacerbate the divisions and enmities that exist among us. Two recent books focusing on the life of Anglicans in very different sociopolitical and cultural contexts from the West provide important tools for this critical work.

Anglicanism: A Global Communion is a collection of over seventy short essays from theologians and church leaders around the world. Each represents a voice from a different cultural and geographic context wrestling with what it means to be an Anglican Christian in this increasingly diverse and postcolonial family of churches. The incredibly rich collection of essays, including contributions by over thirty women, is loosely organized around five major themes: worship, spirituality and theology; the life of the church; the church in society; the mission of the church; and the church and the future. The many voices speak with authority from out of their own contexts. Examples include a Chinese feminist theologian from Hong Kong, Kwok Pui Lan, who links the development of the Book of Common Prayer with the advance of the British colonial empire and asks how Anglican worship can be free to embrace new cultural and political realities. Riah Abu El-Assal, Bishop of Jerusalem, emphasizes that peace in the Middle East is possible only if there is justice and "the recovery of the dignity of the downtrodden Palestinians," many of who are Anglican Christians. Esther Mombo and Edith Njoki Njiiri, both from the Anglican Church of Kenya, challenge their church to be more responsive to the plight of women who suffer at the hands of both inherited ecclesiastical structures and traditional cultural values. The strained relationships between Christians and people of other faiths as well as the possibilities for interreligious dialogue are examined in articles by Mano Ramalshah from Pakistan and Jayasiri Peiris from Sri Lanka. Archbishop of Southern Africa Njongonkulu Ndugane's plea for the Church to stand in solidarity with the poor sets the stage for the Anglican Communion's leadership in international debt forgiveness discussions.

The editors, whose own contributions introduce the book, are to be applauded for such an ambitions collection of voices in one volume. Andrew Wingate and his colleagues, Kevin Ward, Carrie Pemberton and Wilson Sitshebo are associated with The Centre for Anglican Communion Studies (CEFACS) in Birmingham, England. CEFACS brings together educational resources of two historic missionary training colleges, the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel's College of the Ascension, of which Wingate is the Principal, and the Church Mission Society's Crowther Hall. Wingate and his co-editors designed Anglicanism: A Global Communion, originally published by Mowbray-Cassell of London, to be a major resource for the 1998 Lambeth Conference. Church Publishing, Inc. of New York has entered into a unique joint effort with Mowbray-Cassell to publish this important volume in the United States. American Episcopalians should be thankful to Church Publishing for making this rich resource easily available for an American readership.

Anglicanism: A Global Communion is an unequaled "must-read" for any Episcopalian seeking to discover some of the realities of the contemporary Anglican Communion. Any one of the many short articles, often no more than five pages in length, can be read in a brief sitting. Individuals looking for a neatly-defined or doctrinally determined definition of what it means to be an Anglican today will not find it in this book. Neither will they find a clear, well-structured, and tightly woven presentation of a common theme or unified hermeneutic as the basis for Anglican identity today. This seeming limitation is perhaps the book's greatest strength, for it lets the various voices speak with their own authority free from Anglo-American categories and definitions. The editors are to be commended for having the foresight and trust to present a somewhat messy but honest view of this increasingly postcolonial and postmodern communion of churches. Far surpassing earlier travel narratives of the Anglican Communion from Western clerics, such as Howard A. Johnson's 1963 classic, Global Odyssey: An Episcopalian's Encounter with the Anglican Communion in Eighty Countries (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), Anglicanism: A Global Communion is instead a collection of incarnational snapshots of a genuinely multicultural family of churches.