The Anglican Communion is in
crisis. The battle over homosexuality, with its intense media coverage,
threatens to rip the Church apart. The debates on women bishops in the Church
of England caused anger and frustrations among female clergy and their
supporters. Some conservative Anglican bishops and their followers have formed
a Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans, chastising the Church as having gone
astray from true biblical teaching. These controversies epitomize the challenges
facing the Communion and touch on fundamental issues such as the crisis of
Anglican identity, the nature of authority and provincial autonomy, contrasting
views on biblical interpretation, and ecumenical relations with other churches.
The tenor of the debates is also influenced by the shift of Christian
demographics from the global North to the global South. If the contentious
issue of women’s ordination did not break the Anglican Church apart in the
1970s, some are less optimistic that the Communion can weather the present
storm and find ways to remain together.
Yet even as gender and sexuality issues remain at the heart
of these debates, voices of women from the Communion have not been clearly
heard or appreciated. Media coverage and church pronouncements tend to focus on
the opinions of bishops, as if they could represent the range of diversity
within the member churches, or of spokespersons of various Anglican networks
and agencies, who are mostly male and clergy. The voices of lay people and women
are marginalized, even though women make up the majority of many churches. This
groundbreaking volume attempts to fill this gap by inviting female church
leaders, scholars, and theological educators from across the Communion to share
their reflections on the Anglican Church and its mission. An anthology such as
this makes a unique contribution because there are very few substantial works
by women from different parts of the Communion. It is even rarer for the
majority of the book’s authors to have grown up in the global South, bringing
with them the rich textures and multilayered experiences of the Anglican
Church.
The book originated at a conference for Anglican female
theological educators at Canterbury, United Kingdom, in the spring of 2009. The
women gathered became very conscious of the fact that we had few women leading
theological schools in the Anglican Communion. Although there are several books
on Anglican women’s history, mission, and struggles for leadership, they are
mostly limited to a single country and do not cover the Communion as a whole.
Judith A. Berling, Jenny Te Paa, and I decided to coedit this book to broaden
the conversation.
The book is divided into two parts. Part one provides
Anglican historical and theological perspective on the Church. Contributors
include Ellen K. Wondra, Jane Shaw, Wendy Fletcher, Jenny Te Paa, and I. We
discuss the transition from a colonial church to a global Communion, the
problems of authority, the debates on sexuality, women's struggle for ordination, and
women’s leadership development in the Communion.
Part two focuses on Anglican women and God’s mission. Gulner
E. Francis-Dehqani, Cordelia Moyse, Esther M. Mombo, Denise M. Ackermann, Clara
Luz Ajo Lázaro, and Judy Berinai are the contributors. The chapters discuss the
involvement of women in the Church Mission Society in Iran, the work of the
Mothers’ Union, the Church’s involvement in poverty alleviation in Africa, the
Church and the HIV and AIDS pandemic, cultural diversity and women’s
spirituality within the Communion, and women witnessing Christ in a Muslim
context.
We hope that this book will promote dialogue and scholarship
on women in the Communion. We are very grateful to those faithful Anglican
women who have gone before us, and we hope that women in the upcoming
generation will be given greater responsibilities and leadership opportunities
in the Church.
*Adapted from Anglican
Women on Church and Mission © 2013 the Church Publishing Inc. All rights
reserved. Used by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated, New York, NY.