Not your Queen’s church

From Yale-

During my childhood, I hated England. It’s a post-colonial thing. The Opium War left a bitter aftertaste in my cultural memory. If you grew up in America reading about the exploits of Paul Revere, you thought of the British as the redcoats. But since I grew up in China, I thought of them as top hat-wearing drug dealers who peddled yapian by the boatload.

In an ironic twist of fate, I became Episcopalian — just about as English as you could get in the U.S. (Reading Harry Potter and talking in a faux British accent doesn’t count!) I read from “The Book of Common Prayers”, sang hymns composed by Vaughan Williams and chanted liturgy penned by Thomas Cranmer. I even served a short stint in the choir until I realized I will never be as good as those prepubescent boy sopranos at Christ Church, Oxford.

In America, most people associate the Episcopal Church with white, middle-aged or elderly congregants. But actually, the community of Anglican churches worldwide, encompassing some 70 to 80 million people, is a lot more diverse. Many of these member churches are located in former British colonies, including Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. While member churches have their own leadership and differ somewhat in how they worship, they share a common investment in authorized prayer books. Meanwhile, the Church of England serves as a mother church, hosting an international conference of bishops every ten years. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is the symbolic head of the Anglican community.

As the British Empire dissolved gradually after WWII, the role of the Church of England evolved. Gone are the Victorian days when English missionaries became bishops in Uganda. Nowadays, locally elected bishops often hold positions contrary to that of the Church of England. Take for instance, the ordination of women. The first female priest in the Anglican community was Li Tim-Oi, who was ordained in 1944 in Hong Kong. It took fifty years for the Church of England to begin ordaining women, later than the Episcopal Church in America and the Anglican Church of Canada. At the same time, some member churches, such the Church of Nigeria, still do not allow female priests.

More here-

http://www.yaledailynews.com/scene/living/2010/04/23/not-your-queens-church/