The twentieth century witnessed cataclysmic changes for the West, and enormous reversals of perspectives, roles and expectations. The devastations of two world wars and the long Cold War, along with the hovering cloud of nuclear extinction, ended much self-confident hubris and brought perpetual insecurity. Varieties of triumphalist Christendom and Christian faith in the West declined, and new forms of Christian faith dramatically expanded in continents of the South and East. In post-Enlightenment minds, dominated by the empire of materialism and banished disenchantment, regimes of spirit no longer reigned. The ‘theology of evil’ could no longer be grasped, and distinctions between matter and spirit faded. Followers of Christ rediscovered for themselves that on earth there is no permanent abiding place, no fixed abode for Christendom. No single sacred language or culture reigned. Rather, each tongue could hold the potential of becoming more or less sacred, more or less truly echoing ‘the voice of heaven’.

It is within such contexts that this fifth, and final, volume of the Oxford History of Anglicanism can be understood. Eighteen essays by distinguished and seasoned scholars are introduced by two essays. Following a short, albeit insightful piece by the series editor Rowan Strong, a larger, a more widely contextualised piece by William L. Sachs provides a road map and points out prominent features to be encountered. Sachs indicates that the diversification of Anglican identity accelerated as it expanded worldwide. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, numbers of Anglicans increased from scarcely half a million to nearly fifty million. In Asian lands, as also Latin America, remarkable increases occurred, but not so dramatic or massive. By the twenty-first century, two-thirds of all Anglicans lived outside Britain. The spread of Anglicanism from England to the rest of the world became more than that of a single religious institution, liturgy or tradition. Unexpected consequences of extensive growth and increasing faith became manifest; and new converts and congregations challenged what they had appropriated, sometimes in defiance of directives from prelates of the Church in England.

Contributors to this volume address a variety of disparate processes and structures within worldwide global institutions and movements. Each is a scholarly cleric or a distinguished professional scholar; and each makes a substantial, or even excellent, contribution to historical understanding. In such terms as ‘enculturation’ and ‘inculturation’, ‘contextualization’ and ‘indigenisation’ in relation to marks of Christian belief, polity and worship, each emphasises mutual relations, cultural adaptations and resulting elements of cultural hybridity. What is glimpsed in each case is some form of continuous and on-going effort to expand institutions of faith, learning, social service and spirituality – or to bring about, in the words of the editor, ‘extension, education, elaboration, and encounter’.

Yet, throughout all this history, and indeed, throughout all history of Anglicanism, there have been constant and continuous tensions between Christendom and Christianity, between the ‘kingdom on earth’ and the ‘kingdom of heaven’. Such tensions have never ceased to bedevil institutional relationships. They have remained unresolved within global Anglicanism. Persisting tensions between sacred and secular, conformity and non-conformity, central or colonial dominance and local or peripheral dissent and autonomy, between uniformity and diversity, are explored. Whether over liturgy or sexuality, or some other issue, rising waves of resistance have threatened Anglican harmony. Tensions over female ordination and ‘patriarchy’, for example, were followed by tensions over homosexuality. Lingering colonial and anti-colonial attitudes and contradictions have pitted Anglican and/or Episcopal institutions against each other. Anglicans of the West have found themselves virtually excommunicated by the Anglican world outside Europe and America. Resistances to homosexuality in Africa and Asia, linked to that of like-minded Anglicans in the West, have generated a strong critique of homosexuality's legitimation, and been seen as a surrender of the Church to depraved aspects of Western life. Resistance to domination seems to have undermined the Anglican ‘communion’, turning previous ecclesiastical structures upside down, and even reversing the flow of energy and authority. It is perhaps significant, in this connection, that only three or four out of eighteen scholars contributing to this volume are natives of Africa or Asia, and that these have voiced the strongest concerns. It is also hardly any wonder that, despite strenuous efforts to achieve diversity and flexibility resulting in multiform identities of Anglicanism around the world, global Anglicanism seems to be increasingly confronted by dangers of dissolution.

Thus, for all the elegant and deeply erudite scholarship of this comprehensive collection of essays, linking Anglicanism and the world, it is surprising that there has as yet been no systemic treatment of the dangerous threats of dissolution and the extinction of Anglicanism, not just in the outside world but also even within the land of its origin. That such contextualisation is hardly to be found, with the exception of brave hints by one or two of the African contributors, perhaps reflects a certain blindness – or refusal to face stark realities – to the rise of paganism in post-Christian Europe, insomuch that England itself has now become a ‘foreign’ mission field. It is to England that devout Anglican and non-Anglican missionaries from Africa and Asia are now coming in ever increasing numbers, devoting themselves to reconversion of a paganised ‘native’ population and bringing them to the faith in Christ that, for nearly a century, they have been steadily abandoning. Significantly, it is a scholar who is not a contributor to this volume who has had the courage to systematically address this most sensitive and tricky, if not toxic and vexing, issue. Kevin Ward's History of global Anglicanism (Cambridge 2006) does this. Ward's findings, as expressed in his chapter entitled ‘The Anglican communion: escaping the Anglo-Saxon captivity of the Church’, are echoed in a 2008 report by the Pew Research Center's Luis Lugo and Brian J. Grim on ‘Global Anglicanism at the crossroads’ (<http.www,pewforum.org.2008/06.19/global-anglicanism-at-crossroads>). That the danger of Anglican dissolution is not more clearly confronted may perhaps be indicative of a lack of concern among many in the West. Yet, hints are certainly evident within works by such authorities as Philip Jenkins, Lamin Sanneh and Andrew Walls.