From Inheritance to Ownership

What happened when the conversation about African Anglicanism went deeper

The question that opened the African Anglicanism Conference — What is African Anglicanism? — did not have a simple answer.

Perhaps that was part of the point.

Over several days at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, the conversation moved beyond definitions and into history, theology, worship, identity, conflict, formation, suffering, leadership and the practical realities of sustaining the Church.

The papers did not all arrive at the same conclusions. Nor were they trying to.

Instead, they approached African Anglicanism from different places and experiences, asking what happens when a Christian tradition with deep historical roots meets the cultures, histories, questions and realities of the people who have inherited it.

And again and again, one movement emerged: from inheritance towards ownership.

AN INHERITANCE WITH AFRICAN ROOTS

The conversation began by challenging a simple understanding of where Anglican theology comes from.

Revd Dr Justyn Terry's exploration of African roots of Anglican theology pointed participants further back — to African Christian thinkers whose theological work helped shape the wider Christian tradition.

The point was not simply historical.

If African Christianity has been contributing to Christian thought since the early Church, then African Anglicanism cannot be understood only through the story of European missionaries bringing Christianity to Africa.

Africa was not simply a place where theology was received. It has also been a place where theology was made, debated and transmitted.

That question of inheritance became more complicated in Revd Steve Muneza's exploration of Bishop Alfred Robert Tucker and the shaping of an African Anglican Church.

Tucker's story sits within the complicated history of missionary Christianity and empire. His legacy cannot be reduced either to uncomplicated celebration or to dismissal.

Muneza's presentation instead invited a more discerning memory: to recognise what was faithful, to acknowledge what was problematic, and to ask what African Christians themselves did with what they received.

African Christians were not simply waiting for missionaries to build the Church for them. They translated, evangelised, taught, led and carried the faith into new communities.

That pattern of active reception appeared again in Rt Revd Dr Emily Awino Onyango's account of the East African Revival and Kenyan Anglicanism.

The Revival was not simply something that happened to African Christians. It was deeply shaped by African lay people and communities.

Conversion, repentance, confession, restitution, fellowship, evangelism and holiness became part of the lived identity of many East African Christians.

The history therefore raises an important question: What happens when people receive a tradition and then begin to make it their own?

What does it mean to become African without becoming less Anglican?

That question became more explicit as the conference turned towards the meaning of Anglican identity itself.

Revd Simion Kinono's paper on African Anglicanism, the lost vision and cross-cultural context brought together the East African Revival, mission, discipleship, contextual theology and the challenge of reconciliation in communities marked by ethnic division.

The issue was not whether African Christianity should simply reproduce what came before.

Nor was contextualisation presented as permission to accept every cultural practice without question.

The challenge was more demanding: how can the Church take its context seriously while remaining faithful to the Christian faith?

Revd Dr Victor Atta-Baffoe approached that question through a postcolonial theological and pastoral lens.

His argument was not that African Anglicans need to abandon Anglicanism in order to become authentically African. Rather, he asked what it means to inhabit Anglicanism faithfully without assuming that European cultural forms are the permanent measure of Anglican faithfulness.

One of the most memorable formulations from his paper captured the tension:

“Africans need not become more English to be properly Anglican nor less Anglican to be properly African.”

That tension surfaced repeatedly throughout the conference.

What belongs to the heart of Anglican faith?

What belongs to a particular historical or cultural expression of it?

And who gets to make that distinction?

Most Revd Dr Miguel Uchôa's work on indigenising Anglicanism, drawing on the Brazilian ecclesial experience, offered another way into the question.

His argument distinguished between what is constitutive of Anglican identity and what is culturally contingent.

In other words, Anglicanism can have a recognisable theological and sacramental identity without requiring every Anglican church to look, sound or worship in exactly the same way.

The Brazilian experience became one example of a wider possibility: Anglican identity can travel without requiring every culture to become English.

WHEN CULTURE ENTERS THE SANCTUARY

The question became particularly tangible when the conversation moved into worship.

Revd Canon Hilda Kabia's paper on the power of culture in worship explored the experience of the Diocese of Central Tanganyika.

Language, music, movement, instruments, communal participation and local understandings of life all shape the way people worship.

But the discussion was not simply an argument for making Anglican worship more culturally colourful.

It was more difficult than that.

Where is the line between inculturation and syncretism?

Who decides?

How do Christians discern which cultural forms can carry the gospel, which need to be transformed, and which cannot be incorporated?

Revd Canon Abishai Auta Gaiya brought those questions into the context of Northern Nigeria.

His study of indigenous theological expressions and the inculturation of Anglican worship traced a movement from missionary inheritance towards local ownership.

Hausa, Ngas and Mwaghavul languages, indigenous music, local instruments, proverbs and culturally intelligible practices all become part of the question of how Christian worship speaks within a particular community.

But Gaiya's argument was not that anything local is automatically Christian.

THE GOSPEL REMAINS THE MEASURE.

Inculturation therefore involves an encounter between the gospel and culture in which culture provides forms through which people can understand and express faith, while the gospel also judges, redirects or rejects aspects of culture.

That same conversation could be seen in Rt Revd Dr Graham Kings' presentation on Kamba carvings and the creation of community in Kenya.

Here, art became a theological language.

Biblical stories, African artistic expression, architecture, poetry and community came together to demonstrate that theology does not only happen in books or lecture rooms.

It can also be carved into wood, built into spaces and carried through images.

Identity is not only inherited. It is lived.

If the conversation about culture asked how Anglicanism takes root in a place, Joshua Nurcombe-Pike's presentation on African Anglican identity in the making: identity formation and conflict in Jos, Nigeria brought the question closer to the individual and the community.

Rather than simply asking What is African Anglicanism? Nurcombe-Pike asked a more fundamental question: Who is an African Anglican, and what makes that person who they are?

His approach treated identity as something formed through Scripture, liturgy, teaching, institutions, relationships and communal memory — but also something people continually interpret and negotiate.

People carry several identities at once: religious, ethnic, national, familial and others. The significance of each can change according to circumstances.

Jos provided a particularly difficult context in which to examine this.

In a setting marked by recurrent conflict, violence and displacement, identities can become more sharply contested. The question is not only what people believe, but which identities become most significant when communities are under pressure.

Nurcombe-Pike's framework described this through construction, contestation and negotiation.

Anglican identity is constructed through the ordinary life of the Church — through catechesis, worship, leadership, mission and community.

Conflict can then contest that identity, disrupting relationships and places of belonging and changing the boundaries through which people understand who belongs, whom they trust and how they respond to threat.

AND THEN COMES NEGOTIATION.

How does an Anglican community respond to bereavement, displacement, injustice, violence, forgiveness, healing and reconciliation?

Those responses do not simply address a crisis. Over time, they can become part of what Anglican identity means in that community.

The discussion raised questions that extended well beyond Jos.

What happens to a priest when a parish has been lost?

What theology is being produced in refugee camps?

How does displacement affect cultural identity across generations?

Can Christian or Anglican identity overcome ethnic divisions?

And can theories developed largely in Western contexts adequately explain African experiences of identity?

That last question was particularly important.

The conversation was not simply asking researchers to study African Anglicanism more carefully. It was also asking whether African experiences can generate theory themselves — whether African scholars can move beyond providing evidence for frameworks developed elsewhere and contribute concepts that help the wider Church understand itself.

In that sense, Nurcombe-Pike's paper brought the question of ownership into another realm:

Not only who owns the Church, but who gets to produce the knowledge through which the Church understands itself.

FORMATION MATTERS AS MUCH AS GROWTH

The question of identity naturally led to another concern: what is forming African Christians?

Dr Esayas Ersabo's paper on liturgical formation and missional discipleship challenged the separation between worship and mission.

African Anglicanism may be growing in size and influence, but numerical growth alone does not necessarily produce mature disciples.

Ersabo argued for a stronger connection between Scripture, worship, sacrament, discipleship and mission.

The language of roots, routes and rites brought together the biblical foundation of the Church, the historical journey through which Anglicanism was received and interpreted in Africa, and the practices through which Christians are formed and sent.

The Church gathers in worship — but it also gathers in order to be sent.

That concern about formation appeared in a different way in Revd Berthier Lainirina's presentation on training congregational leaders in biblical theology.

In Madagascar, the growth of the Church has created an urgent need for theological formation that is both rigorous and accessible.

Lainirina's proposal challenged the assumption that theological education must reproduce a classroom model built around written academic material.

Story, song, proverb, participation, memory, performance and communal learning can also carry serious theological content.

The question is not whether theological education should be rigorous.

It is how rigorous theology can be communicated in ways that people can actually inhabit.

That concern became particularly urgent in the presentations from contexts shaped by war.

THEOLOGY IN PLACES OF SUFFERING

Right Revd Elsir Hassan Kuku spoke about theological education in Sudan during the war, focusing on the Korkel and Shokai theological colleges in the Nuba Mountains.

Here, theological education is not an abstract academic exercise.

It forms pastors and lay leaders who must serve communities experiencing displacement, violence and profound uncertainty.

The very continuation of theological education becomes a form of witness: a declaration that the Church's work of formation, pastoral care, reconciliation and hope does not simply stop when circumstances become difficult.

Revd Francis Philip Lado brought a related perspective from South Sudan.

His presentation on the future of the Church there traced a movement from missionary beginnings towards South Sudanese leadership and ownership.

But the future of the Church cannot be separated from the country's experience of war and displacement. Congregations and clergy have been scattered. Yet worship, pastoral care, education and peacebuilding have continued.

Lado identified spiritual formation, theological education, missional discipleship and partnerships that strengthen local mission as priorities for the future.

Together, these presentations complicated any easy distinction between “theology” and “real life”.

For churches living through war, displacement and poverty, theology is not something that happens somewhere else. It is part of how people understand suffering, sustain hope, lead communities and imagine a future.

WHAT DOES THE CHURCH OWE THE POOR?

That question became explicit in Revd Dr Mansita Sangi's presentation on poverty and Anglican mission in Africa, drawing particularly on Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Sangi connected poverty with theology, governance, financial dependence and the Church's public witness.

The issue was not simply that churches need more money. It was about what financial arrangements do to ownership, accountability and mission.

Where churches become permanently dependent on external funding, the relationship can unintentionally weaken local initiative and responsibility. At the same time, the answer is not to reject partnership altogether.

The deeper question is what responsible partnership looks like.

Can external support strengthen local capacity rather than create permanent dependence?

Can churches develop sustainable local resources?

And can financial integrity become part of the Church's witness rather than an administrative afterthought?

Ade Mary Samuel's presentation on stewardship and financial sustainability in the Episcopal Church of South Sudan widened the definition of stewardship.

Stewardship is not only about money. It includes people, land, buildings, time, skills, relationships and the resources already present within a community.

That reframes the question from simply: “What does the Church need from outside?”

To: “What has God already placed in the Church's hands, and how can it be stewarded faithfully?”

The goal is not isolation.

It is a healthier form of interdependence, where partners contribute different resources while local churches retain responsibility and agency.

WOMEN, MEMORY AND WHO GETS REMEMBERED

Another question running through the conference was one of visibility.

Who gets remembered as a theologian?

Who gets recognised as a missionary?

Whose contribution becomes part of the official history of the Church?

Michaela Copsey's historical and theological exploration of women in and around the Church of Uganda brought this into focus.

Women were not simply supporting actors in the development of Ugandan Anglicanism. They studied Scripture, evangelised, taught, formed networks, established schools and participated in movements such as the East African Revival and the Mothers' Union.

Yet historical memory can make such contributions less visible than those of formally ordained or institutionally prominent men.

Recovering these histories is therefore more than adding women's names to an existing story.

It changes the story itself. It asks what we might understand differently if we paid closer attention to the people whose theological work happened outside the most visible institutional structures.

A CONVERSATION RATHER THAN A VERDICT

Taken together, the papers did not produce one definition of African Anglicanism.

Nor should they have.

They revealed something more interesting: African Anglicanism is being lived, interpreted and debated in many different contexts.

In Kenya, the East African Revival raises questions about conversion, holiness, lay agency and the formation of Anglican identity.

In Nigeria, questions of worship, culture, conflict and identity reveal the complexity of contextualisation.

In Brazil, indigenisation challenges assumptions about the cultural forms Anglicanism must take.

In Uganda, women's histories complicate the way the Church remembers its own development.

In Sudan and South Sudan, theological education, suffering, resilience and reconciliation become inseparable.

In Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, poverty and financial dependence raise questions about stewardship, governance and prophetic freedom.

And across these different contexts, another question keeps returning:

What does it mean for African Christians not simply to receive a tradition, but to take responsibility for interpreting, forming, sustaining and carrying it forward?

That does not mean rejecting everything that came before.

It does not mean treating African culture as automatically good or European culture as automatically bad.

It means becoming capable of discerning what has been received, asking why it looks the way it does, deciding what should be retained, what should be adapted, what should be challenged and what new things may need to emerge.

The conference therefore became less about finding a single definition of African Anglicanism and more about creating room for African Christians to examine their inheritance honestly.

And that requires intellectual humility from everyone entering the conversation.

The invitation is not to agree with every argument presented at the conference. It is to become curious enough to investigate.

To read the history.

To listen to voices we may not have encountered before.

To test assumptions.

To distinguish what we know from what we think we know.

To unlearn where necessary, learn where necessary, and remain willing to ask better questions where the answers are not yet clear.

Because sometimes the most valuable thing a conversation can give us is not an answer.

It is a better question. And perhaps that is where the conference's conversation becomes most important. Because once people begin asking better questions about identity, theology, culture, leadership, formation, suffering and ownership, the question is no longer simply what was discussed in Oxford. It becomes:

What will we do with what we have learned?

That is where the conversation continues.

Kelly Mutizira