Anglican Studies Seminar: Session 1

Following our discussion of a provocative set of papers in Year 1 that focused on the historical legacies shaping Anglican ecclesiologies in various contexts and, in Year 2, a set that investigated their theological factors, in Year 3 of this five-year initiative, we are engaging papers that surface missiological currents within Anglicanism, past and present, that contribute to the development of processes of Anglican identity formation and the ecclesiologies that arise alongside those identities. The complicated and fraught history of missionizing goes far beyond the typical account of how the non-European “peripheries” have been the recipient of colonializing mission work from the imperial “center” in England. This is only a part of a much larger story that extends through Anglican history to the present in a more complicated manner, one that finds, for example, various African churches with active, ongoing mission to churches in the industrialized world, which are perceived to have strayed from the truths that the earlier missionaries from those regions brought to them through the work of several Anglican missionary societies based in the United Kingdom, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This complex tangle of forces demands nuanced scholarly treatment with special attention paid to how it impacts Anglican self-understanding and practice in different ways throughout the Communion. These papers emphasize de- and postcolonial dynamics at work in forming and maintaining Anglican “operative ecclesiologies."

The three papers the seminar will explore together will not be presented at the meeting. Rather, the papers are provided for reading in advance so that our time together can be spent discussing them, both separately and by putting them into conversation.

A second session of the seminar will follow this one after a 30-minute break. That session, also focused on missiological energies within the Anglican Communion, is described separately.