I’ve written two blog posts, providing the background and initial impressions around The Annual Mission Conference of the Companions in Mission Committee. In this post, I will share what I took away as the core ideas around the discussion about the upcoming ACC meeting in Lusaka.

Bishop Ian asked what the concerns of people were and work it into a short didactic around Anglican history and what it means to be part of the Anglican Communion.

What does it mean to be a member of the Anglican Communion? Bishop Ian asked the participants this question. It is a question we need to ask both individually and corporately. It is a question I struggle with as I seek discernment. Frequently the answers are around having common elements of worship, no matter where in the world you attend an Anglican service. Answers often tie back to the history of the Church and to England. Yet what I got from Bishop Ian’s talk that fits most closely for me is ‘Culturally Competent Catholicity”.

Just about every Sunday I say the Nicene Creed, including, “We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.” There is something special about the church universal, the fellowship of all believers, a commonality of those in loving relationship with God. What are the core elements of this? To me, the Trinitarian and Incarnational aspects of God. God, in relationship, and in mission.

As an aside, the idea of cultural competence is one that is important to me from its context in health care. To provide the best health care, one must be aware of the culture of one’s patients, and must be competent in providing care that fits with the culture of the patients. It seems like this idea of cultural competency is also important in sharing God’s love and healing broken souls.

An Anglican understanding of authority comes from Scripture, Reason, and Tradition, and it seems like this is where cultural competency comes in. Our traditions in the United States are different from the traditions in Uganda. They are different from the traditions of a century ago. Our reason is shaped by our cultural context.

Anglicanism is the catholic church, recognizing responding to the culture it is part of, starting from the days of St. Augustine, through the reformation, in the age of the British Empire, brought to America and responding to cultural changes with Bishop Seabury, spread around the world through colonialism, and continues to seek to be culturally competent in a post colonial world.

So this comes to the key question for the ACC meeting in Lusaka: How does the Anglican Communion remain both catholic and culturally competent in a post colonial world? What happens when one set of cultures has a set of beliefs about the appropriate way to treat a group of people and another set of cultures has a belief in opposition to that? How do we determine what is central to our catholic beliefs and what is culturally acceptable? How do we act when we go as missionaries from one culture to another and find another culture doing things we disagree with?

In all of this, we are called to walk together. We are called to recognize that as one body of Christ, yet different parts of that body. The sense I got from the meeting was of an optimism, an optimism that God abides, that through this, we will all be drawn closer to God.