ANGLICANS (See Cover)
Outward, for centuries, flowed the tide of British Empire; back, in hurried decades, it ebbed. On every foreign strand that it touched, the receding tide has left a church uniquely English, yet catholic enough to survive in any climate. It is grand and symbolic that as a typical consequence, there should be in the South Pacific a bishop who follows the ancient Church of England custom by styling himself Norman New Zealand. Empire is gone; the church remains.
This week and next, more than 1,300 bishops, priests, deacons and laymen of the Anglican Communion are gathering in Toronto to measure and discuss the health of their church. They find it in an ironically precarious state: it is prospering almost everywhere except in England.
In worship at St. James' Cathedral and in discussion at the Royal York Hotel and the Maple Leaf Gardens, a primacy of honor during Toronto's Second Anglican Congress* will be accorded to the purple-cassocked archbishops of Canterbury and York. But delegates from English dioceses will be lost in a sea of faces from Nigeria, Tanganyika, Japan, the U.S. and elsewhere. Today the 18 branches of the Anglican Communion exist in 80 countries—a greater geographical span than that of any major church but Rome's. The world's 42 million Anglicans worship God in 170 languages, from Swahili to Cantonese to Japanese.
"A Godly Sermon." Yet the Anglican Communion is more a byproduct of history than a purposeful propagation. Unlike Methodists or Roman Catholics, the clergy of England's post-Reformation church at first followed the empire around the world not primarily to win the heathen for Christ but to provide spiritual solace for the colonial conquerors. One of the earliest recorded appearances of English ways of worship overseas, in August 1578, was on solitary Baffin Island, where one Master Wolfall "preached a godly sermon, which being ended, he celebrated also a Communion upon the land" for the sole benefit of Explorer Martin Frobisher and his crew. The Anglican chaplains of the East India Company were interested in ministering only to Englishmen abroad; in the 17th century, apparently, just one Hindu was baptized.
By 1700 a wider outlook began to prevail. The church's first official missionary branch, the Society for Propagating the Gospel, was chartered in 1701. In the 19th century, Anglican evangelizing got valuable assistance from the U.S. Protestant Episcopal Church. At the first Lambeth conference of Anglican Bishops, in 1867, there were 68 prelates from outside England and Wales. At the next Lambeth conference, in 1968, more than two-thirds of the 350 bishops will represent countries where English is not the mother tongue.
"The church's mission to the world" is the misleadingly bland theme of the Toronto Congress. Evangelism—on the religious, political and cultural frontiers of the world—will not be the delegates' only concern; they will be deeply involved with inner searching and selfcriticism. "This is a desperately difficult time for Anglicanism," warns the Rev. Roger Lloyd, a canon of Winchester Cathedral. "The historic definition of Anglicanism needs renewing."