Rowan Strong

In Anglicanism, Empire and Missions Rowan Strong offers fresh insights into Christian missions, illuminating both large-scale movements and smaller, local initiatives. Tracing the origins of Anglican missions back to the foundation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1701, the work explores their evolution—from a transatlantic context in the eighteenth century to a truly global presence within the expanding British Empire of the nineteenth century. Contemporary Anglophone mission historiography has often overlooked Anglican missionary endeavours during this period, instead privileging the activism of Evangelical missions. This volume redresses the balance, revealing the far-reaching influence of Anglican mission leaders and societies and restoring their rightful place in the broader history of Christian missions.

This is a big book, not just in its length but in its ambition and complexity. Professor Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Neibuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University. In this, his most recent book, he is writing for the first time as an Anglican about his own religious adherence. He seeks to delineate the history and enduring characteristics of Anglican theology from its beginnings in the sixteenth-century English Reformation to the 1980s, attentive to its “royal absolutism, racism, and imperialism” (xii). He finds its characteristics to be a particular emphasis on God’s Word (Logos) incarnate in Jesus Christ, an imperially based racist orientation to whiteness, and, at odds with that, an inherent “ecumenism.” Professor Dorrien does not seem to define what he means by using this anachronism of “ecumenism” for the earlier centuries of Anglicanism, but he does refer to tracking...

The Anglican Tradition from a Postcolonial Perspective, by Kwok Pui-Lan, seems to have been written for readers who are nonacademic and, presumably, mainly Anglican-Episcopalian. It offers an introduction to the theory of postcolonialism as it applies to the present global Anglican Communion and its history. This modern theory, influenced by Marxist antagonism to Western imperialism and capitalism, has enabled scholars to develop influential critiques of Western history and culture in the early modern to modern eras. Postcolonialism has focused on the oppressive dimensions of the West’s imperial engagement with other lands and peoples in its political, economic, and militaristic aspects. In addition, Western culture and Christianity are also viewed as part of the oppressive and exploitative dimensions of the imperialist colonizing of local peoples, who are viewed as subordinates, or “subalterns,” to dominant imperialist Westerners...

In the 1840s the Church of England, through the agency of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK), established an official chaplaincy to emigrants leaving from British ports. The chaplaincy lasted throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. It was revitalized in the 1880s under the direction of the SPCK in response to a surge in emigration from Britain to the colonies. This article examines the imperial attitudes of Anglicans involved in this chaplaincy network, focusing on those of the 1880s and 1890s, the period of high imperialism in Britain. It compares these late nineteenth-century outlooks with those of Anglicans in the emigrant chaplaincy of the 1840s, in order to discern changes and continuities in Anglican imperialism in nineteenth-century Britain. It finds that, in contrast to the imperialist attitudes prevalent in Britain during the late nineteenth century, Anglicans in this chaplaincy network focused more on the ecclesiastical and pastoral dimensions of their work. Indeed, pro-imperial attitudes, though present, were remarkably scarce. It was the Church much more than the empire which mattered to these Anglicans, notwithstanding their direct involvement with the British empire.

This volume looks at the religious dimensions of the nineteenth-century British and Irish emigration experience, examining the varieties of Christianity adhered to by most British and Irish emigrants in the nineteenth century and consequently taken to their new homes in British settler colonies. It examines a significant aspect of this emigration history that has been overlooked by scholars—the development of an international emigrants’ chaplaincy by the Church of England that ministered to Anglicans, Nonconformists, and others, including Scandinavians, Germans, Jews, and freethinkers. The volume uses the records of this emigrants’ chaplaincy, as well as the shipboard diaries kept by emigrants themselves to give them a voice in this history. Concentrating on the experiences of the emigrant voyages, an analysis is provided of the Christianity of these British and Irish emigrants as they travelled by ship to British colonies. Their ships were ‘floating villages’ that necessitated and facilitated religious encounters across denominational and even religious boundaries. The volume argues that the Church of England provided an emigrants’ ministry that had the greatest longevity, breadth, and international structure of any Church in the nineteenth century. It also explores the principal varieties of Christianity espoused by most British emigrants, and argues their religion was more central to their identity and, consequently, more significant in settler colonies than historians have hitherto accepted. In this way, emigrant Christianity and the Church of England’s emigrants’ chaplaincy made a major contribution to the development of a British world in settler colonies of the British Empire.

This paper investigates the origins of Anglican Anglo-Catholic missions, through the missionary theology and practice of the founder of the Society of St John the Evangelist, Fr Richard Benson, and an exploration of its initial missionary endeavours: the Twelve-Day Mission to London in 1869, and two missions in India from 1874. The Indian missions comprised an institutional mission at Bombay and Pune, and a unique ascetic enculturated mission at Indore by Fr Samuel Wilberforce O'Neill ssje. It is argued that Benson was a major figure in the inauguration of Anglo-Catholic missions; that his ritualist moderation was instrumental in the initial public success of Anglo-Catholic domestic mission; and that in overseas missions he had a clear theological preference for disconnecting evangelism from Europeanising. Benson's approach, more radical than was normal in the second half of the nineteenth century, was a consequence of envisaging mission's being undertaken by a religious order, an entirely new phenomenon for Anglican missions.