ONE OF my predecessors as General Secretary of the (then) Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, Bishop Henry Montgomery, proudly wrote in 1902: “These are great times and one feels the stir of an Imperial Christianity. . . Clergy are officers in an imperial army . . . full of the Imperial spirit, not merely of the empire of England but of something still greater, the empire of Christ.”

Martyn Percy’s book is a largely justifiable attack on what he calls the “monarchical” values that underlay the spread of the Church of England around the world, on the shirt tails of the British Empire, and which he still sees in the Anglican Communion and its mother Church today. He rightly deplores how this had been rooted in the slave trade, in which SPG itself was shamefully complicit, but seems unaware of the Society’s now solid relationship with the Province of the West Indies, in which the plan for serious reparation includes neither tokenism nor self-flagellation.

This exemplifies the value of this book, the call for self-examination and a more honest reading of history, but also its need for more care in applying his template of imperial / monarchical / oppressive v. pragmatic / enlightened / democratic / post-colonial. It may be ironic that at a time when a new imperial court has been established in Washington, he categorises the United States as part of the New World which has rejected colonialism in favour of democratic liberalism.

He records that the Anglican Communion was slow to take off, and lacks the effectiveness of global Roman Catholicism, but that is due not to its colonial origins but to a deep suspicion of the more imperial papal model. It was faithful members of the Church in Zimbabwe, not meddling prelates in England, who pressed for Canterbury’s intervention to oust Mugabe-pleasing bishops. It is Anglicans in Sri Lanka, not Lambeth Palace, who want to keep their “Church of Ceylon” under Canterbury’s wing.

The latest proposals from IASCUFO (News, 3 January) for a more polycentric leadership are to be welcomed, but what if the result is a display of more monarchical power from those Primates who want to restrict progress on the very issues of inclusion, around gender and human sexuality, that Percy is (rightly) so keen to promote?

The deeper agenda of this book is the Church of England itself, whose undeniable faults are attributed to the exercise of “quasi regal” power by bishops and the lawyers and lay officers labelled as “episcocrats”.

The often compromised history of the C of E needs taking seriously — he is especially enlightening on how Britain is more than England, and on the inter-weaving national and ecclesiastical histories in Scotland and Ireland — but again the analysis should not go unquestioned. He attributes the over-long debates concerning the full inclusion of women in ordained ministry, and now over human sexuality, to the old order using their power to prevent progress. They can, however, equally be seen — frustrating though it may be to some of us — as the rejection of such power in the search for a more democratic and inclusive answer.

The book’s final questions are about how the Church of England can survive as an institution when its hierarchical exercise of power and influence have little traction with a society geared to democracy, ethical liberalism, and new information technology. He sees the future in terms of the local church returning to basic gospel principles. He doesn’t appear to see any role for episcopacy.

He leaves this reader grateful for being made to re-evaluate the history, but asking whether the death of the Anglican Communion and the Church of England may be over-exaggerated, and trusting in his own affirmation that where there is death God can always bring new life. 

The Rt Revd Michael Doe is a former General Secretary of USPG. He is the author of Saving Power: The mission of God and the Anglican Communion (SPCK, 2011).

The Crisis of Colonial Anglicanism: Empire, slavery and revolt in the Church of England
Martyn Percy
Hurst £25
(978-1-911723-58-5)
Church Times Bookshop £22.50