Anglicans: Empty Pews, Full Spirit

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∙ THE U.S. Oldest and richest of Anglican spiritual daughters, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the U.S.A. (3,344,000 members) still suffers from its public image as an "English church" for the well-to-do. Yet today, argues Father Bruce Ravenel of St. John's Church in Boulder, Colo., "the Episcopal Church is no more the society church than any other." Under its ailing Presiding Bishop, the Rt. Rev. Arthur Lichtenberger, 63, Episcopalians have one of the best civil rights records of the mainstream Protestant churches, and nearly every U.S. city can claim one or more alert and talented Episcopal slum priest (TIME, April 5). Less creditably, the Protestant Episcopal Church has produced only a handful of good theologians, and still has too many "doughnut-shaped" dioceses, with strength in the suburbs and a gaping hole in the city center. Warns the Rt. Rev. John Hines, Bishop of Texas: "The church's virtues tend to become its vices. It depends heavily on a well-educated clergy, who in turn require a high standard of living, and thus are fairly immobilized as to the areas they can serve."

∙ SOUTH AMERICA, writes the Rev. Howard Johnson in a new one-man survey of the Anglican Communion called Global Odyssey (Harper & Row; $5.95), "is the continent Anglicanism decided to skip." The stiffly Anglo-Catholic West Indian Province (980,000) has few priests but crowded churches, and the Episcopal mission in Haiti boasts a cathedral with walls that are a museum of dazzling folk-art murals. Elsewhere, Anglicanism suffers from the 19th century no-conversion agreements signed by the British government with Roman Catholic regimes. Today there are fewer than 300,000 Anglicans in all of Latin America, and only the feeble, understaffed Episcopal churches of Brazil and Mexico—supported largely by U.S. church funds—have done much in the way of missions.

∙AFRICA. Anglican hopes are brightest on the continent where the church's chances of survival might in theory seem slim. The five African provinces of the Anglican Communion coincide with the old limits of the Empire, and thus the church bears the stigma of having been the white man's religion. Nonetheless, the faith has deep roots. In West Africa, 90% of the province's priests are native. In Tanganyika and Uganda, missionary liturgists are experimentally incorporating syncopated native drumming and dance forms into the Sunday service of worship. Nowhere has Anglicanism more to boast about than in South Africa, where a generation of Christian statesmen—notably Cape Town's Archbishop Joost de Blank —has spoken out implacably against apartheid. About one-third of the province's communicants are black, and the church is steadily gaining Afrikaaner converts from disillusioned, liberal-minded members of the Reformed Churches.