THE ANGLICAN IDENTITY AND WAY
How does our understanding of Anglican identity hold out in the face of the trauma of these present global pandemic times? A response in such times as these is not, for me, calling forth a need to re-examine the Anglican sort of Reformed Christian thinking, question the Anglican church order grounded in the historic ministry of bishops, priests, deacons and laity, nor re-evaluate the classic early formulations of doctrine about God, Jesus Christ, the Spirit as held in the Creeds. This time does not call into question the historic and authoritative foundations of the Anglican Way in the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and the governing structures. In such times as these, the connections, echoes and witness of the Anglican Way of being the church has everything to do with being the change wherever and whatever the moment.
Experience around the Anglican Communion has tilted my view of Anglican identity towards a common journey reflected in the incarnational life of the Trinity. The diversity of expression and dynamic forms of the Anglican Way offer a com-plicated (with folds) identity formed by context and history, but wrapped in the “bonds of affection” of communion. A document from the Anglican Communion Office and Theological Education around the Anglican Communion (TEAC) emerged in 2007, The Anglican Way: Signposts on a Common Journey. It was the outcome of a process which drew together church leaders, theologians and educators around the globe, and attempts to succinctly set out an understanding of Anglican identity as a step towards teaching and equipping Anglicans in their service to God’s mission to the world:
The Anglican Way is a particular expression of the Christian Way of being the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ. It is formed by and rooted in Scripture, shaped by its worship of the living God, ordered for communion, and directed in faithfulness to God’s mission in the world. In diverse global situations Anglican life and ministry witnesses to the incarnate, crucified and risen Lord, and is empowered by the Holy Spirit. Together with all Christians, Anglicans hope, pray and work for the coming reign of God.
I cherish the gift that is this Anglican Way. Woven into my life story are memories of a childhood congregational life in a New Town suburb in Hertfordshire, England, in the 1960s and the welcome to renewed faith within a market-place church in a university town in northern England. Moving onward in the 1990s, it was deeply formational for me to discover that the Anglican Way offered an inner creativity and familial community in times of trauma, whether in under-resourced urban Wales or in an underdeveloped southern African landscape. And then there was the transformational experience of the Anglican Diocese of Niassa of northern Mozambique in the 2000’s, where identity was com-plicated by inheritance of the Anglo-Catholic Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), and a more recent development of African evangelical and social justice church leadership. The UMCA had laid the foundations of the Anglican church way, aware of continuities and discontinuities with traditional religion: church leadership during violence, war and increasing poverty drew on the incarnational flavor of the Anglican way to encourage mission-based health and education, human agency and local development, church growth and political leadership. That foundation in mission remains. When the then Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams visited Malawi in 2011 to celebrate 150 years of Anglican church presence in that region, he named the incarnational work of the church amongst and for the marginalized and poorest as “being Eucharist.” A Mothers’ Union member, telling the story of her church’s post-war community-growing work in Niassa in 1996, said it even more simply: “this is what we do.” And now, with the Episcopal Church in the USA, that same focus on social engagement for change remains. It seems that Anglican identity is missional at its core.
My Welsh bishop’s charge at my ordination as a deacon was to remember that God is in mission to the world as well as to me, to each one of us. I have been formed as an ordained woman by the angle of vision lived out with the Diocese of Niassa. There, it seems that the Anglican missional experience has informed expectation, vision and ways of being the change. When generations have been sent out “to love and serve the Lord” or “go forth in the name of Christ” (depending on the local and vernacular translation of the Book of Common Prayer), those words become formative of identity. When generations have gathered around the altar for the Eucharist, the remembrance and hope of Christ’s resurrection has produced life-affirming expectation.
A destitute woman, whose small Anglican church had been destroyed in a storm, was asked by a visiting reporter, “what does God mean to you?” She answered, “You are here.” God’s hope was in that moment’s visit. When government leaders kneel at the altar rail with orphan children, faithfulness is held in the grace and hospitality of every one of us before God. When the rhythm of prayer awakens us to the rhythm of life’s seasons, love is known in God’s creative presence always with us. When suffering communities were offered dignity and reassurance in the liturgy for the burial of the dead, God’s comfort was experienced, and the church grew.
Diocesan and government census records show that the Diocese of Niassa grew above the curve of the recorded people movement of returnees after the war ended in 1992. Continued and extensive church planting growth across northern Mozambique is documented as doubling to 440 congregations, 65,000 members and sixty clergy from 2004-14. New ways of training priests for these communities were developed with local leaders identified as Spirit-led by their communities and mentored locally. The Mothers’ Union membership, envisioned and encouraged through small group Bible study and prayer, and forming women for pastoral ministry, grew from around 900 to 3700 in that same time. Volunteer young adult and youth groups in more than two hundred Anglican churches took responsibility for their village and urban communities in areas of health and development. These self-named Equipas da Vida (Teams of Life) are involved in integral mission: they reach the sick and offer basic health education, train in new agricultural ways, teach about clean water, understanding themselves as agents of change and group leaders as adeptos (cheerleaders). Adeptos were amongst the first responders to community disaster in the flooding of 2019 in northern Mozambique.
Laity planted church communities seemingly at the end of every goat track, in the remote rural places that other churches had not yet gone after the war years. When a government official with the Education Department was given a motorbike, he spent his weekends visiting his home area and planted eight churches. When a young man decided to gather groups together for our discipleship formation course, alongside playing football, nineteen Christian communities began to meet. Parish areas grew (several to include 25–50 congregations) as local leaders planted village churches that they then invited the local priest to lead. It seemed like wildly chaotic times of running after the Spirit, which one friend described as “affecting the fabric of society.” There, in a place of post-war trauma and poverty, I learnt Anglican identity holds a missional impulse defined simply as “this is what we do.”
To be formed as a priest in such a place and time has left an indelible mark within me that resonates with the potential of what I hear now within the Episcopal Church’s commitment to healing, reconciliation and justice as the Beloved Community. When our Anglican identity, liturgical celebration and God’s mission to the world and each one of us are held together, we are envisioned to be missional agents of change and engage in repairing, renewing, rebuilding foundations and restoring the broken hearted where we and our neighbors are. As Rowan Williams has noted in Anglican Identities (2004), “there is in the Anglican identity a strong element of awareness of the tragic, of the dark night and the frustration of theory and order by the strangeness of God’s work.” It would seem that the Anglican identity is clarified in places of trauma (the “suffering that will not go away” as Shelly Rambo writes in Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (2010). Could it be that we might more clearly discern a way forward in our present time alongside those who have known lifelong poverty and trauma in other contexts? With those who know that patience and trust in the always remaining Spirit raises expectations for joy-giving resurrection life? Can we find the energy in these present times of trauma, alongside all those who understand that the Anglican way forms us eucharistically in compassion and service, to live more faithfully and freely into our Anglican Way of being the change our world needs?
