If denominational history has experienced something of a recession in recent years, Jennifer Snow’s recent foray into the antecedents of the Episcopal Church makes clear that it is far from moribund. In her search for an overarching paradigm of what it has meant to be an Anglican in the United States across four centuries, Snow re-tells a familiar account of ecclesiological development through the lens of patterns of cultural and racial inclusion (and exclusion) embraced by Episcopalians, and argues that scholars should incorporate the missiological discourse of contextualisation, in which ‘sending’ Churches can be as much transformed by missionary activity as ‘receiving’ ones. Early colonial encounters with – amongst others – African American slaves and Mohawk Indian converts, she argues, offered the potential for an ‘all-encompassing Christian community’ (p. 35), but Anglican colonists ultimately succumbed to a preoccupation with hierarchy and social order, pointedly expressed in the fusion of ecclesiastical and political power that was the vestry system of the Colony of Virginia. A similar triumph of ecclesiastical pragmatism during the nineteenth century ensured that many Episcopalians held aloof from ‘political’ controversy (most notably the question of slavery) and instead sought to appropriate the mantle of the conscience of the nation (an ‘establishmentarianism’ that offered no challenge to economic and social injustice). In so doing, the Episcopal Church perpetuated an ecclesiological model derived from the colonial era that privileged its bishops, favoured clerical over lay leadership and offered little resistance to the prevailing racial and cultural order. Only on the periphery of American imperial power was there much evidence of Episcopal mission as a two-way process (the ecumenical pioneer Charles Brent was profoundly affected by his service as missionary bishop of the Philippine Islands). The fundamental turning-point for the Episcopal Church, argues Snow, was its post-WWII abandonment of establishmentarianism and embrace of the Missio Dei theology formulated by the International Missionary Conference at Willingen in 1952, with its implicit rejection of racially hierarchical missionary narratives. From this beginning would flow a new emphasis on social justice that would underpin not only the struggle for black civil rights but also the ordination of women and the inclusion of sexual minorities. While Snow is to be commended for providing readers with a missiological interpretation of the Episcopal Church’s development, the breadth of her narrative inevitably requires some sacrifice in depth. There is, for example, surprisingly little discussion of how the Episcopal pioneers of the Social Gospel contributed (or not) to her ecclesiological paradigm. Perhaps more disappointing is that her account of the schism of the early 2000s (a turning point for the Episcopal Church and for the Anglican Communion) lacks the nuance of either Miranda Hassett’s Anglican communion in crisis (Princeton 2007), which is cited in the footnotes, or Chris Brittain’s A plague on both their houses (London 2015), which is not. Snow’s apparent assumption that a Missio Dei perspective was lacking on the part of the departing conservatives, whom she may well feel embody the failings of the pre-Willingen Episcopal Church requires more evidence than is presented here. Radical inclusion and an abhorrence of superfluous ecclesiastical structures are both very much in the eye of the beholder.