Recognizably Anglican

From The Living Church-

The 1963 Anglican Congress in Toronto came at the high-water mark of Anglican prestige in the Global North, and yet it held up a much wider and deeper vision of the nature of communion in a prescient way. The Congress gave us the banner “mutual responsibility and interdependence” in which mission priorities in a parish in Canada or the United States should take into account the needs of partners in Ghana or Burma. The vision assumed the Communion to be a family of churches throughout the world, and church leaders throughout North America applauded it — no one complained that this sense of accountability was somehow un-Anglican (though getting churches to fund it was another matter).

The delegates who crowded into Maple Leaf Gardens to listen to Michael Ramsey had a vision of the Communion quite consonant with the Covenant.

Mission has loaned to the whole Church talk about “context” and the local (not to mention the notion of the “missional” itself). But if we stop to think for a moment, we realize that legitimate mission thinking always balances considerations of the local and the “catholic” (or universal), of “incarnational” strategy and the “recognizability” of one church’s beliefs and practices by its siblings. We might object that mission would be most successful when it considers the needs and circumstances of its own situation, unconstrained by the reproof of more distant neighbors. This may well be true, if mission were only another word for marketing, and all we sought were the adaptation of the most saleable product.

More here-

http://www.livingchurch.org/news/news-updates/2011/5/20/recognizably-anglican