Anglican Women on Church and Mission

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.

 

The Emergent Church Movement in the UK

The Rev. Ian Mobsby of the Moot Community is coming to my school to speak and preach this week. The Moot Community is a new monastic community in central London, which develops a rhythm of life combining worship, mission, and community.

Mobsby has over 20 years’ experience of working with various emerging and fresh expressions of church and lectures internationally on these topics. He serves on the core team of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Fresh Expressions team.

In his book Emerging and Fresh Expressions of the Church, Mobsby examines the postmodern and high tech consumerist culture and describes the development of a new mysticism as a form of spirituality for what he calls a “post-religion” culture.

Church membership and attendance in the Church of England have been falling sharply. Fifty years ago, over half of the population in England would go to church. A report on “Churchgoing in United Kingdom," published in 2007, shows that about 15% go to church at least once a month.

The search for new forms of church is urgent. Mobsby wants to move away from the established church model, or the church of the Christendom, to church models that emphasize the mystical and sacramental dimensions.

Mobsby and Steven Croft coedited the book Fresh Expressions in the Sacramental Tradition in the “Ancient Faith, Future Mission” Series. It includes an essay by Paige Blair, an alumna of the Episcopal Divinity School, on U2charist.

Mobsby contributes an essay on the new monasticism, which he describes as an outward facing, missional movement. It has the path of withdrawal, retreat, and sanctuary as well as a path of journey, presence, and engagement. This new monastic movement has the following characteristics:

· Simplicity in a context of complexity. People living in these communities keep minimal possessions and maintain a spiritual rhythm of life. Owning and spending less means they do less harm to the environment.

· Sacramental understanding of time. The binary division of the sacred and secular is challenged. There is a new appreciation of what Barry Taylor has called the sacralization of culture. The Moot Community develops a rhythm of life which consists of six elements: presence, acceptance, creativity, balance, accountability, and hospitality.

· Prayer. Contemplative prayers and daily prayers are seen as source and inspiration.

· Mission. Premodern friars provide care for the sick and the poor. Modern monastics engage in missions to serve the economic poor and spiritually impoverished.

· Love for the Earth. Monastics view all life as holy and live close to the earth.

Some people in the UK have criticized the emergent and new expressions movement. Some question whether the movement has sufficiently differentiated what is “in culture and not of culture.” Others are not sure how the new expressions are related to the old.

In the U.S. the emergent church is predominantly white. I am eager to learn more about this movement in the UK and to see how it has combined the missional and the spiritual to serve the poor and revitalize the old church.