The Anglican Communion must empower diverse cultures to express the faith in their own terms, balanced with the deeper truths that make the denomination unique, say two Canadian Anglicans who served as panelists at a November talk on the faith’s future. Archdeacon Rosalyn Elm, Indigenous ministries coordinator, and retired Archbishop Linda Nicholls, former primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, attended a symposium Nov. 7 titled “Living Postcolonial Anglicanism: Prospects for a Polycentric Anglican Communion” at New York’s Episcopal Divinity School. The event launched a book bearing the same title recently published by the school, and saw panelists, attendees and contributing authors to the book discuss their ideas for an international Anglican Communion that spreads authority and influence out among its provinces.
Elm, who contributed an essay of her own to the book, tells the Anglican Journal that should be a matter of de-emphasizing the historical model whereby theology, liturgy and aesthetic influences flowed outward from England to the rest of the communion. What’s needed now, she says, is a process of local theological synthesis. Peoples from the Maori to the Haudenosaunee must have the freedom to adapt the beliefs and traditions of Anglicanism into forms that make sense to them, she says.
The process she envisions is similar in some ways to how the Book of Alternative Services was written—analyzing the purposes of the Book of Common Prayer and writing new liturgies in modern language that serve the same purposes adapted to the idiom and emphasis that made sense to contemporary readers.
More than just translating words, Elm says, these cultures can find value in adapting the message of the Bible into the concepts found in their own systems of meaning. The concept of tapu, common to some South Pacific cultures, may be of use to those people in forming their own understanding of sin, she says as one example. And Jesus’ proclamation that the last shall be first and the first shall be last is analogous to the tendency of trickster figures in many First Nations’ traditions to turn social conventions on their heads in the pursuit of justice. There are also significant parallels between Jesus’ teaching and the story of the Great Peacemaker in her own Haudenosaunee tradition, she says. Drawing on these parallels can help create expressions of the faith that ring true to people from outside a European context, she says.
At the same time, she adds, there’s a certain baseline orthodoxy she takes for granted as people are forming these new interpretations. It’s important for them to be able to craft understandings, liturgies and modes of worship that make sense in their own cultures, she says, even if those differ from those of the colonial Europeans which brought Anglicanism to their lands. Still, she believes there are some facts in Scripture that need to remain true as they would have been understood by early Christians.
“I think there is something specific that we all believe as Christians in terms of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, of who Jesus is, divine and human … I think that, of course, the tomb was absolutely empty.”
Nicholls, meanwhile, says one question she heard repeated several times in the panels and discussion groups of the event was what it means to be Anglican. Attendees at the conference questioned whether churches now led by people who were once colonized must be tied to the liturgy, style and music of the Church of England, she says. As one panelist, Canon Stephanie Spellers of the Episcopal Church, put it with regard to her home church, “So much of the project is the project of decentring whiteness. How do you decentre whiteness when you’re in a white space? … If you removed whiteness from The Episcopal Church, I’m not sure what would be left.”
Nicholls believes the answer lies in a feature of Anglicanism that is deeper than the words and actions used in its services. It’s an approach to theology which recognizes God has given people the tools to wrestle with Scripture, tradition and reason, she says. How that wrestling is done may differ from one community to another, but the approach is part of the common spirit of Anglican churches, she says.
The reality is that in most of the world, liturgy and expression have already been diverging from the Church of England for years, she adds. In Canada, most parishes have left the Book of Common Prayer and moved on to the Book of Alternative Services, which is itself now 40 years old, she points out. Other former colonies are worshipping with liturgies translated into their own languages.
One problem, in her opinion, is that not everyone in the communion is aware of these changes taking place. Her experiences in England, for example, lead her to believe some Anglican leaders there are scarcely aware of the impact colonialism has had on colonized people, not to mention how the faith is changing as attitudes become less focused on the Church of England.
“They just assume the rest of the world is following along very nicely after Mother Church. And when you express a concern or say ‘no, that’s not how we do it in parts of Canada,’ they’re surprised and they’re taken aback,” she says.
Bringing Anglicans together at conferences like this one to share, discuss and work to ameliorate the effects of colonialism is one way to do the work of changing that awareness, she says.
