Michael Jensen: It’s not cricket: an Anglican Theology of Mission

Cricket can solve its own problems, and it is not my task to offer the International Cricket Council advice. But what of the C of E – that Church which one wag has suggested has been ‘loving Jesus with a slight air of superiority since A.D. 597’? What does mission for our Church look like in the world in which the idea of an institutionalised Christianity has all but faded away? Even today, if we are to be honest, we sit together munching on the fruits of the Empire period, gathering on now-priceless parcels of land meted out by the government in the nineteenth century – in vineyards that we did not plant, harvesting grain that we did not sow. So we need to ask: given the historical association of Anglican mission with Empire, is there a place for an Anglican theology of mission in the post-colonial world?

It’s a good question to ask, because Anglicans have always been the church of the establishment, whether formally or informally. But we should avoid passing over the really impressive story of mission that has gone on under the banner of the Church of England for the last two centuries or more. It’s a story of real courage, creativity and sacrifice. The missionaries of the last two centuries frequently found themselves at odds with the secular authorities, and not infrequently with ecclesiastical authorities. Governor Arthur Phillip imagined that his chaplain would play his role in instilling in the convicts a moral sense; but Richard Johnson was seeking to change hearts for Christ, not simply to keep the peace. The extraordinary mission strategist Henry Venn, one of the first to use the expression ‘indigenous church’, fought nobly against the West African slave trade. He envisaged what he called the ‘euthanasia of missions’: meaning that mission agencies should see themselves as aiming to hand over responsibility to local, indigenous leadership. The reality is that while the Church of England was the church of the establishment, its faith was never simply the civic religion of Englishness. The best missionaries of this church always knew that simple institutionalism was not enough for the church to be truly a church of Jesus Christ. They welcomed interdenominational co-operation for the cause of Christ – in the case of Johnson and those that followed him, with Methodists like Samuel Leigh.

An Anglican theology of mission, therefore is in the strange position of having to reckon with the way in which Anglicanism at its best has risked its own established position and its own monopoly on Christ. Such an account would have recognise that deep in the DNA of Anglicanism is the understanding that the Anglican Church exists for the sake of the good news of Jesus Christ and his kingdom, and not the other way around. Read more