All Things Anglican

Who we are and what we believe

Marcus Throup

• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781786220677
• eBook ISBN: 9781786220691
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

All Things Anglican offers a lively and accessible introduction to Anglicanism for anyone wanting to know what makes it distinctive. Whether you are training for Anglican orders, are curious about another denomination or would like to join an Anglican Church, this guide will introduce you to the basics of Anglican identity and the ways of the Church of England.

Part 1: Questions and Answers

1. What do we mean by ‘Anglicanism’?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘Anglicanism’ as ‘the faith and practices of the Anglican Christian Churches’.1 What the dictionary doesn’t tell us is that there are something in the region of 85 million Anglicans dotted around the planet whose ‘practices’ and understanding of ‘the faith’ vary considerably. In reality, ‘Anglicanism’ is a slippery word, difficult to pin down in so far as it means different things to different people.2 It doesn’t help that there has been disagreement among leading Anglican thinkers as to whether the very term ‘Anglicanism’ should be used at all.3 Throw in contemporary hot-potatoes such as the Church and sexuality – where opposing voices claim to be the true voice of Anglicanism – and we begin to get a feel for just how confusing all things Anglican can be.

How, then, do we even begin to talk about Anglicanism? Where should we start? One possibility would be to dip into the troubled waters of history, working forwards from King Henry VIII and his sixteenth-century version of Brexit. It was Henry’s Act of Supremacy (1534) that gave the English Church its independence from Rome, paving the way for what came to be known as the Church of England. So, we could begin our Anglican studies in the 1500s, but that would inevitably narrow our focus on England when there is so much more to Anglicanism than the Church of England.

Instead of getting bogged down with history, a more cutting-edge approach might be via the Christian blogosphere and social media. If we want to get a grip on Anglicanism today, surely we just whip out our smartphones and listen in on the latest internet conversations about Anglican identity? Maybe, but those virtual arenas are not always forums for healthy and fair exchanges. For every helpful webpage there are half a dozen others filled with ‘fake news’ and the grumblings of axe-grinding pundits. What, then, should be our approach?

To try and get a balance, we’ll gauge where we are today while keeping an eye on our roots, tracking the ways in which the past has shaped our Anglican present. Rather than charging into current debates where ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ theologians square up to one another, we’ll begin not with the experts, nor with complicated ideas, but with the ordinary extraordinary Christian men, women and children in the Church itself.

By this I’m not pretending we can sidestep hard questions or give contentious issues the slip, but I am suggesting that any conversation about Anglicanism needs to begin and end with Anglican people – their voices need to be heard and their views need to be respected. When we’re thrashing out our theology we need to be careful that it’s our ideas and ideals we’re thrashing. Beating people around the head with a Bible is unlikely to solve our problems in a hurry.

Let’s begin, then, with Anglican people in the twenty-first century. Who are they? First, Anglicans are Christians who belong within the One Church of Christ which is both catholic, i.e. universal, and apostolic, i.e. it traces its spiritual DNA to the apostles, and ultimately to Jesus himself. Its historical roots are British and can be traced to the late period of the Roman Empire when Christianity travelled west.4 A monumental turning point was Henry VIII’s spat with the Pope and his exit from Europe’s Roman Catholic landmass. In more recent times, though, the Anglican Church has grown outwards from its English centre, forming an interconnected international entity with impressive reach and flexibility.

The Anglican Church is a family present in 165 countries, whose members number millions upon millions of people. What this underlines is that, today, Anglicanism is a truly global and richly diverse expression of the Christian Church. To really appreciate just what this means, we might draw a mental picture of our average Anglican churchgoer. Who comes to mind, I wonder? For those of us living in the UK, Europe, North America or Australasia, it might come as a bit of a wake-up call to learn that the average Anglican today is a young, poor, black woman living in sub-Saharan Africa.5 Let’s picture her for a second: she expresses her faith in indigenous songs of praise, and her outlook on life is framed by hope in Jesus. It’s very likely that she is a member of the Mothers’ Union – a movement that began in a sleepy English village, but today is a vibrant force all over Africa. While she has one eye on heaven above, her lively spirituality is grounded in a day-to-day routine of early rising and hard work, a routine that ensures the survival of her young family.

This snapshot of our average twenty-first-century Anglican points to an arresting reality: geographically, numerically and culturally the centre of gravity of the Anglican Church has shifted from the northern to the southern hemisphere. For those who are fond of statistics, researchers estimate that in 1972, 62% of all Anglicans were based in Europe and that by 2010 this figure had halved to 31%. Conversely, in 1972, African Anglicans made up 16% of all Anglicans worldwide, but this had increased to 58% in 2010.6

It is in the so-called Global South – which is Africa, South East Asia and Latin America – where Christianity is growing at a phenomenal rate. Whereas the UK has become a case study in ‘dechristianization’, with the Church of England and other denominations battling declining membership, it is estimated that there are now over 20 million Anglicans in Nigeria alone.7 A Nigerian bishop is rumoured to have commented that church planting is occurring at such a rate in his country that people have been known to say, ‘Bishop, please come to our region: you’re not aware of this, but we’ve just planted two hundred churches and we’re ready to become a new diocese!’

That impressive growth pattern isn’t restricted to English-speaking countries and former British colonies. Before the early 1970s there was virtually no Anglican presence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but in 2015 the Congolese Anglicans could boast over 500 clergy and a membership of 237,000.8 Next door in the former Portuguese colony of Angola, there are around 100,000 Anglicans – not bad considering the devastating civil war that raged there from 1975 to 2002.9

The change in Anglican demographics with this massive shift to the southern hemisphere coincides with what Andrew Walls calls ‘the Great Reverse Migration’ – that is, the mass movement of mainly African and Asian people to Europe and North America.10 One important implication of this is that whereas the Church of England has long been a missional, sending Church, it must again learn to receive. The same could be said of the English-speaking Anglican/Episcopal Churches in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. So just as missionaries from the East brought the gospel of Jesus Christ to the British Isles in the first couple of centuries CE, two thousand years on, African, Asian and Latino Christians are arriving in the ‘mission field’ that is the so-called developed West.

From the perspective of western churches some might view this missional shift as a kind of role-reversal, but God calls people when he likes, from where he likes, and however he likes. More positively than ‘role-reversal’ the current trend should be about the positive recognition – explicit in Anglican mission societies such as Church Mission Society (CMS) – that mission must be from anywhere to everywhere. To its credit, the Church of England now recognizes and values the contribution that immigrants and migrant Christian communities are making to life in the UK. One of its immediate aims is to increase the number of BAME (Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic) leaders, and the more successful it is in realizing this objective, the more spiritually enriched our English churches will become.

Globally, the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual family of Anglicans is known as the Anglican Communion – essentially, a worldwide community. The basic building blocks of the Communion are the ‘Provinces’ which, for convenience, may be thought of as geographical areas, but are really about peoples rather than places. In total there are 39 Provinces, though the Church of England consists of just two – the historic ‘Sees’ of Canterbury and York. The Scottish Episcopal Church and the Church in Wales have historical links with the Church of England, but they are independent Provinces, as is the Church of Ireland.

In some world regions a Province might be made up of multiple nations or territories – for example, the Church of the Province of the Southern Cone, encompassing several South American countries; the Church of the Province of South East Asia, covering Singapore and West Malaysia; the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, and the Church of the Province of Central Africa, covering Botswana, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.11 Such arrangements mean that the ethnic make-up of several Provinces is massively diverse, and this is something that brings richness and challenges – be these logistical, cultural and/or theological.

In the Anglican world, Provinces are broken down into smaller geographical units called dioceses. These in turn are made up of parishes, and sometimes ‘mission plants’ or similar terminology. Just as each Province or large region is overseen by an archbishop, each diocese is overseen by a diocesan bishop, and every parish is overseen by a parish priest or other clergy leader. New mission plants are sometimes pioneered by clergy, but more often the initiative and day-to-day running is in the hands of lay leaders. Whereas mission strategies in the past have sometimes depended too much on clergy input and presence, creating an unhealthy ‘paternalistic’ model that stands or falls with one influential individual, more recently ‘every-member ministry’ has proven effective overseas. For example, the Anglican Church in Mozambique makes effective use of catechists (teachers who talk people through, and provide instruction on, the basics of the faith) to disciple people and sow the seeds of new churches. In Latin America, fledgling mission plants often begin in people’s homes.

Within the Anglican Communion there is an impress...

Table of contents

• Copyright information
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Part 1: Questions and Answers
• 1. What do we mean by ‘Anglicanism’?
• 2. Why does the parish down the road do things differently?
• 3. What’s the point of liturgy?
• 4. What are the essentials of Anglican theology?
• 5. What happens when Anglicans disagree?
• 6. How do Anglicans understand vocation and calling?
• 7. How do Anglicans do mission?
• 8. How does the worldwide Anglican Communion work?
• Part 2: Essential Sources
• The Apostles’ Creed
• The Nicene Creed
• The 39 Articles of Religion
• Glossary of Anglican terms
• Bibliography