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∙ MIDDLE EAST. The Cambridge-taught Archbishop in Jerusalem, the Most Rev. Angus Campbell Maclnnes, governs a 3,500,000-sq.-mi. archdiocese of 150,000 Christian Jordanese, Lebanese, Turks, Iranians, Egyptians, Sudanese and Greeks, and operates one of two seminaries which expressly seek to serve all branches of the communion—St. George's College in Arab Jerusalem. Maclnnes' church is in communion with one branch of Christianity involved in an unedifying project: the zenophobic Arab Evangelical Episcopal Church, which plans to drop 50 psalms from its revised Prayer Book because they mention Israel.
∙ ASIA. In the days of the British raj, Anglicanism made most of its Indian converts from the untouchables, eager to escape the horrors of the Hindu caste system. The church now has extensively Indianized its services—psalms are sung not in modes but in droning Indian ragas—but survives largely because of its excellent schools. In Hong Kong, the only free diocese of the captive Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui (Holy Catholic Church in China) is a classic missionary model of how to do much with little. Sprightly Bishop Ronald Owen Hall has only 55 priests and 25,000 members, but his schools educate 50,000 Hong Kong Chinese, and other churches admit that his relief and welfare services are the colony's most efficient and imaginative. Anglicanism in Japan has a flock of 44,000, and one of the world's best universities to come out of modern missionary work: St. Paul's, in Tokyo. Its mission roots first established by U.S. Episcopalians in 1859, the church has had only a tiny impact on the country—in large measure because Japanese cannot comprehend such Western theological notions as sin. "A sea of good material," mourns one priest, "and yet we can scoop up so little."
∙ DOWN UNDER. Healthy in New Zealand, Anglicanism in Australia is a faith gone limp and slack with too much success. In New Zealand it is by far the nation's largest church, and in Australia it can claim a healthy 33% of a growing population. Yet Australia still looks back to England for its archbishops, and has been sluggish in ministering to postwar waves of non-British immigrants. Now Anglican hegemony is threatened by immigration-fed Roman Catholicism. Admits one Aussie priest: "We've been lazy, resting on our oars. But the nasty things that will be said about us at Toronto will undoubtedly give us impetus to do more."
River to the Sea. Some doomsayers argue that the Anglican Communion is dying. In a sense, nothing would please its leaders more. For by virtue of its doctrinal comprehensiveness, Anglicanism has also been traditionally an exceedingly ecumenical faith—even willing to surrender its own independence for the sake of God's "Coming Great Church." In the pursuit of spiritual brotherhood, many Anglican churches have ironed out some form of intercommunion with a faith outside the fellowship of Canterbury—the Church of England with the Church of Sweden, for example, and U.S. Episcopalians with the Philippine Independent Church.