Africa played a prominent role in the formation of earliest Christianity not least in the persons of Cyprian of Carthage and Augustine of Hippo. The Anglican heritage is considered through the experience of the Yoruba people in south-west Nigeria through whom christian faith came to the rest of Nigeria. The Anglicanism which came to the Yoruba was evangelical through the Church Missionary Society, though a key role was played by liberated slaves from Sierra Leone. Contexts in which the gospel is proclaimed and the way it is expressed may change, yet the contents of the gospel do not. A contextualized curriculum thus includes key courses such as biblical studies and systematic theology. It also includes contextual subjects such as African traditional religions and Islam and Christianity. The Church of Nigeria has thus undertaken a thorough review of the curriculum to adequately represent this kind of contextualized theology.

Since 1998 there has been a revived interest in theology among Anglicans around the world. Rowan Williams has encouraged this with the promotion of a Theological Education for the Anglican Communion Commission. The Global South primates have called for a rejection of the Western paradigm of Anglican theology in the context of the current debates about sexuality. The key Lambeth resolution on sexuality at the 1998 conference carries with it significant assumptions and challenges about theological method. There has been a renewed focus on context in doing theology. These changes can be seen in the case of Kenya where there has been a determined effort to re-cast the theological curriculum. Theology has also become more popular among lay people and theological work is expanding and flourishing.

The inconsistency between theological education and parish life is a sign of the breakdown of a theological paradigm for doing and communicating theology in Africa today. The role of Scripture within the framework of an Anglican tradition is now a matter of examination. There are biblical foundations for ministerial formation but they need to relate to the current situation of ministry. The only theological seminary in Ghana is St Nicholas, where the staff are indigenous but the programme offered is Western and imported. The result is that ministerial formation has failed to meet the needs of the people of Ghana. The way forward demands a thorough revision of the present course content and a focus on the needs of the particular time and place that is modern Ghana.

St John's College Auckland has served the New Zealand church for over 150 years. In 1992 the Anglican Church in New Zealand changed its constitution to give recognition to the Pakeha, Maori and Polynesian groups in the church. The Canon concerning St John's College was also changed to reflect the new Constitutional arrangements. From that time the college was committed to recognizing the two cultural traditions in its leadership and across all aspects of the college's activities and environment. This implied significant curriculum challenges. Some difficult choices have been faced as to the relationship with a secular university and its implications for the presence in the curriculum of Anglican studies. These have been resolved in a way which honours the contextual issues and the tradition of Anglican faith.

Theological education should take full account of the context in which it operates and authors share a commitment to a broadly defined liberation theology which takes the experience of the poor as its starting point. Focus is on the College of the Transfiguration in Grahamstown, a city with an unemployment rate of over 50 percent. The College supports not only theological education but also integrates ministerial and spiritual formation. The political context of South Africa has influenced the shape of theology even though students come from many other places. The contextualization thrust of the theology is shaped by a commitment to Outcomes Based Education. Anglican studies curriculum is shaped by this method and aims for a capacity to describe such things as Anglican identity, polity and beliefs. This is carried out in the absence of any sustained robust discourse on Anglican identity in the Anglican Communion.

Malaysia became an independent nation in 1957 and has grown dramatically in prosperity since that time. The main groups in this ethnically diverse nation are Malays (65 per cent) Chinese (26 per cent) and Indians (7.7 per cent). Sixty per cent of the population are Muslim which is the official religion of the nation. Christians represent about 9 per cent of the population and there are 80,000 Anglican members. There has been political pressure against Christians in recent years and there is growing concern about the position of minority religious groups. Anglicans came with the British, though indigenous mission was the work of Indian and Chinese Christians. Theological education is mainly focused on the Seminari Theoloji Malaysia where a holistic curriculum has been developed. A sense of Anglican identity is developing in relation to the context in Malaysia but this has hindered clarity on the nature of the Anglican heritage. The challenges facing the Anglican Church in Malaysia are identified.

Building on Rowan Williams's claims about William Tyndale's importance for English Reformation theology, this paper outlines a theological matrix within which we can situate and interpret Tyndale's translation work. Focusing on Tyndale's translation of the fourth Gospel in his 1534 New Testament, the central claim is that in light of more recent developments in biblical interpretation, the very style of Tyndale's translation has evident theological implications with compelling resonances for contemporary Anglicanism. This analysis of the theology of Tyndale's literary style also attempts to contribute to the ongoing reassessment of Tyndale's reputation. Tyndale's biographer, David Daniell, has lamented that ‘Tyndale as theologian… has been at best neglected and at worst twisted out of shape’, while ‘Tyndale as conscious [literary] craftsman has been… denied’. As a close reading of Tyndale's Gospel of John shows, Tyndale the theologian and Tyndale the craftsman can and should be approached as one and the same.

The essay is a manifesto for keeping faith with the Christian vocation of reconciliation in the face of painful conflicts within the Anglican Communion. Its fundamental conviction is that, theologically speaking, reconciliation lies at the heart of Christian identity. The first part of the article concentrates on the key questions of the meaning and process of reconciliation, defined as ‘making space for what is other’, historically, psychologically and spiritually. The second part of the article focuses on the specifically Christian characteristics of reconciliation in terms of two theological themes, the catholicity of God (and its corollary the catholicity of the Church) and hospitality and in terms of spirituality related to insights from the Rule of St Benedict, Anglican sources and the practice of the Eucharist. The article concludes with brief reflections on the importance of applying wisdom from the Christian tradition of discernment to the current situation in the Communion.