Communion meeting faced challenges By Katharine Jefferts Schori

The Anglican Consultative Council met in Jamaica for two weeks in early May. Most of the Anglican Communion's 38 provinces were represented, as well as Cuba and Spain (dioceses not belonging to a province).
You will, by now, know of the headline-attracting decisions of this ACC meeting, but you will undoubtedly have heard much less about mission around the communion. I am convinced that the work of mission is where the Anglican Communion really "lives" – where it has its incarnate reality.

The various networks of the communion focus on mission work with youth, women, indigenous peoples, French speakers; in health care, education, environmental issues and the nascent Anglican development alliance. The Anglican Communion engages God's mission to heal this world in the incarnate realities of feeding, educating, housing and healing people, equipping them for ministry and pursuing reconciliation in contexts of war, division and discrimination. One Sunday, the members of the ACC dispersed for worship and conversation in parishes around Jamaica.

I visited a parish in Black River, about 100 miles west of Kingston. St. John's is one of the oldest congregations in Jamaica, dating from the mid-1600s. The town of Black River had electricity before New York! It is a sleepy old port, no longer used for cargo, but it still supports a local fishery. St. John's has been educating youngsters for centuries. There are two marble plaques at the front of the sanctuary that remember gifts of land to the parish in the early 1800s, to be used for the education of poor children. Two schools founded at that time continue to this day, and the parish began a major local high school in the early 1960s.

Excellent education for all is a pervasive mission of the Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Yet I also heard from parishioners and clergy that claiming their status as Anglicans often is difficult. Some don't want to be publicly identified with what is perceived as the rich, colonial church – which was also the church of many former slave owners. We talked about how the mission identity might be shifted, particularly through work with the poorest, perhaps in adult literacy endeavors.

The rest is here-

http://www.episcopal-life.org/80050_108013_ENG_HTM.htm