A History of Global Anglicanism

Ecclesia Anglicana was, of course, originally a term of geographical rather than theological or denominational import. The title of this book would have made no sense at all before the late nineteenth century; and, even then, the modern idea of ‘Anglicanism’ as a way of being Christian defined by being in full communion with the see of Canterbury was struggling to establish itself in competition with older senses of the word as meaning either ‘Englishness’ or, in Tractarian parlance, the particular ecclesiastical tradition of Hooker and the Caroline divines. Today, of course, the Church of England finds itself as a small and in some ways unrepresentative member of the global Anglican communion which it brought into being. Summative accounts by professional historians of how this process of global transformation and diversification took place are few, and Ward's book is to be warmly welcomed on that account. A book of this kind must range very widely and rely on access to current secondary scholarship for its authority. The author, who is primarily a historian of East African Christianity, has extended his reach with considerable skill and general success. He has adopted a geographical principle of organisation, which was a logical decision, though it inevitably tends to give rather more prominence to regions where Anglicans are few in number, such as Latin America and the Middle East, than their religious significance in these regions strictly warrants. It has also presented the author with the occasional hard choice: he has chosen, for example, to place Sudanese Anglicanism, with its constituency of some 5 million adherents, in the chapter on the Middle East, alongside the much smaller Anglican churches of Palestine, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. The Sudanese Anglican Church originated from Egypt, and its horizons are shaped by the enveloping sea of Islam, as Ward points out in defence of his decision. What is lost by the removal of Sudan from the chapter on Africa is, however, the potential illumination of a comparison with the Anglican church in the middle belt of Nigeria, which faces similar issues arising from the proximity and claims to political predominance of Islam

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