This single-volume account of the history of Anglican ministry provides a relatively comprehensive, though by no means exhaustive, discussion of key themes, movements, and personalities. It is also readable: the prose is clear, the narrative keeps moving, the tone is scholarly without ever becoming stodgy. In terms of readability, it stands up as a much-needed update on Stephen Neill's classic Anglicanism. Unlike Neill's book, however, this one is much more concerned with the inspired diversity of global Anglicanism. Kater has been lecturing those preparing for Anglican ministry at Ming Hua Theological College in Hong Kong since 2007, and it is refreshing to glimpse something of what the story of worldwide Anglicanism looks like from this context.
This is a book which provides a panoramic view of the tradition's adaptation and evolution in many different places, cultures, and nations. In thirteen chapters Kater moves quickly from Henry VIII (chapter 1), through the Elizabethan settlement (chapter 2), the post-Elizabethan context and the English civil war (chapters 3 and 4), to the Restoration of the monarchy and the 1662 Book of Common Prayer (chapter 4). After this the writer turns to the more substantive theme of the book, Anglicanism around the world. The beginnings of overseas Anglicanism and the seventeenth century are discussed in chapter 5. Chapters 6–12 all focus on the nineteenth century (it is noteworthy that the bulk of the book is concerned with this period). Kater covers developments in England and Ireland (chapter 6), North America, including African American ministry, Native Americans, and the First Nation peoples of Canada (chapter 7), early stages of missionary work in India, the South Pacific, Latin America, and China (chapter 8), the later Victorian English Anglicans (chapter 9), the British Empire, including West Africa, East Africa, South Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada (chapter 10), further missionary expansion, including in East Asia, China, Japan, Korea, Latin America, the American Empire, and Hawai'i (chapter 11), and the USA (chapter 12). A final chapter considers the future of mission and ministry in the Anglican tradition.
Some key themes run throughout Kater's discussion. On the first page the author begins to connect Anglican distinctiveness with the political dimension of the Church of England's formation as a national Church. Indeed, the idea of a national church is viewed as integral to Anglicanism (34). For the Elizabethans social order, religious unity, and national identity were interdependent (21), and in Kater's view early Anglicans such as Richard Hooker sought peace, order, harmony, and stability within the limits of lawful national structure (32–33). Later Anglicans were committed to a “reasoned order” (66); “a God-given social order” (71); a “harmonious social order” (74); and they came together for “ordered worship” (77). The recurrent invocation of Divine order and harmony betrays the challenging fact that Anglican experience has also often been complex, diverse, and rather messy. At an early stage of his argument Kater traces the diversity of Anglican ministry and structure back to Article 34 of the Thirty-nine Articles. Christians, comments Kater, “have always exhibited differences” (15). As they incarnated their religion within this-worldly political structures, or sought to bind together communities at local and national levels, Anglicans necessarily diversified in response to each new context in which they found themselves. When Anglicanism became a family of national churches, each church lived in creative tension with one another. Indeed, Kater remarks that “many of the bonds that held Anglicans together in past centuries remain intact today, none stronger than a common sense of responsibility for their community and its people and a shared belief that every Christian people has the right to practice its faith in ways rooted in the context in which they live” (287).
Kater makes recurrent reference to Henry Venn's concept of the self-supporting, self-governing, and self-extending “indigenous” or “Native” church (158–160, 199–200, 203–204, 207, 209, 233), a model of missionary expansion which he traces from its inception through to the Chinese “Three-Self Patriotic Movement” (284). This core theme helps ground Kater's general argument that Anglicanism tends to incarnate church practice within national boundaries (85). Many readers may want to know how such issues of nationhood are related to questions of race and empire. Crucially, Kater sets out the history of Anglican racism in diverse missionary contexts including, among others, the USA, New Zealand, and South Africa. Slavery (and its abolition) is given due prominence through much of the narrative. The destruction of Native cultures and the imposition of English “civilization” are discussed. This includes the removal of children from Native homes to be placed in residential homes in Canada (211). Kater draws a picture of global Anglicanism that was typically undergirded by colonial and imperial power (see, for example, 282).
I think it fair to say that this is often more a work of synthesis than original historical research. Many of the sources quoted in the endnotes will likely be well-known to those familiar with the study of Anglicanism. But if the task of the book is to introduce Anglicans training for ministry around the world to the global history of the tradition then it clearly fulfils this purpose. Kater's real strength is as a guide to the tradition, often intelligently selecting what to include (and exclude) within the limits he has set himself. This reviewer is nevertheless left with some questions. In particular, the decision to write a history of Anglicanism which closes with the year 1900 seems rather arbitrary. If the idea is to describe Anglicanism's adaptation to diverse contexts around the globe, why not choose the Edinburgh World Missionary Conference of 1910, the Lambeth Conference of 1920, or some other important Anglican event? It means that such vital themes as the decline of the British Empire, for example, or the rise of secularism in many Western societies since the 1960s, or the continued numerical expansion and progress of African Anglicanism, are left out of the picture.
Not all references are accurate. Where Kater quotes F. D. Maurice on p. 125 the source is listed as the first volume of The Life of Frederick Denison Maurice; in actual fact the quotation is from the second volume, p. 137. I also noticed one or two striking typographical errors (Hooker's great work is The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, not Policy, as on p. 32). But, overall, this book can be highly recommended for its compelling overview of the global history of self-supporting, self-governing, and self-extending Anglican national ministries.
