Basin Conference Seeks Mission Focus
Episcopal News Service. May 5, 1983 [83079]
RENO, Nev. (DPS, May 5) - An international conference being held in Hawaii next month fulfills a dream of Nevada Episcopal Bishop Wesley Frensdorff, a dream born on the last day of the Lambeth Conference in August 1978.
The Pacific Basin Conference will bring together Anglicans from all over the world to explore mission strategies, especially those propounded by the Rev. Roland Allan, of self-determination and self reliance. Church strategists and scholars are hopeful that the unique conference can bolster and spread ideas that many feel are honored more in the breach than the practice.
Frensdorff, whose diocese has been a leader in developing such concepts domestically, reflects in his latest diocesan newspaper column on some of the origins of the conference and his hopes for it and the Church.
Over the last decade, his diocese has developed a Total Ministry Program which has, the bishop noted "sought to engage every member of the Church in ministry, enable every congregation to become more fully a ministering community and raise up Priests and Deacons in every congregation for Sacramental enrichment and diaconal mission. As a result, most of our congregations are indeed more self-reliant. The diocese had become financially self-supporting, and we have among us significant new stirrings for servanthood mission."
Frensdorff went on to note that "some of the basic 'inspiration' behind these directions and developments came from an English priest, Roland Allen, who wrote in the mid-twenties. After serving in China from 1895-1910, Allen studied the Anglican Communion's missionary approach. He concluded that its models and methods prevented, rather than enabled the Church in any place to become rooted (indigenous), self-reliant, and sacramentally complete. As a result, he felt, the Church -- whether in Africa, Asia or Great Britain -- was limited in being truly missionary.
Frensdorff makes the point that Allan based his thoughts on the missionary work of St. Paul and the Apostolic church, from which the English priest drew his conclusions.
"We constantly hear men use these three terms -- self-support, self-extension, self-government -- as if they were distinct and separate things,"Allan wrote, adding," they cannot be rightly so treated. We can only with definite and painful effort think of self-support in any other terms than that of money... it would not be self-supporting unless it supplied its own clergy as well as its own church buildings. Thus self-support and self-government are closely knit. As for self-extension, it is surely plain that a church which could neither support itself nor govern itself could not multiply itself. Thus self-extension is bound up with self-support and self-government: the three are intimately united."
Frensdorff concedes that not much attention was paid to Allen in his time, but in "the post-war world, with trumpets of self-determination sounding throughout the world, he was rediscovered though not first by Anglicans. In the sixties some of his books began to be republished. In the late sixties the diocese of Alaska began some experimentation which Bishop William Gordon shared with us and on the basis of which we began our explorations. Reading Roland Allen in 1973 was extremely significant in the development of my own thinking."
"So at the Lambeth Conference, I kept trying to find others from various parts of the world who had similar interests or were engaged in similar exploration; but I was able to find only a few and there were really no opportunities for such discussion. But on the last evening a few of us were gathered and I found several bishops whose dioceses were also building on Allen's thought. Out of that evening was born the dream to gather others and share both explorations and ideas on how these principles can empower the Church for mission today wherever it exists.
"The Pacific Basin Conference, a symposium on the vision and legacy of Roland Allen, will gather teams of three -- bishop, clergy and lay leader -- from about 40 dioceses from the western United States, Canada, Central and South America, Asia, the South Pacific, Australia and New Zealand. In effect we will have significant representation from half the Anglican world -- geographically, not numerically," he said.
The purposes of this conference on ministry enrichment are: to review the life and teaching of Allen as regards the New Testament foundations for building an indigenous Church; to examine existing patterns and the economic, political, and cultural contexts; to explore the biblical, historical, and theological foundations for revision and renewal of ministry; to share experiences on alternate possibilities; and to do regional, practical planning and strategy development.
Speakers and leaders include Bishop Stephen Neill, Archbishop Paul Reeves of New Zealand, Kosuke Koyama of Japan, Jacin Maraschin of Brazil, Maku Solato of Fiji, Ross Kinsler, Presbyterian presently with the World Council, Bernard Cooke, Roman Catholic theologian, Patricia Page of the Church Divinity School, and Bishop George Harris of Alaska. Neill, now in his eighties, is the recognized Anglican authority on the history of Christian mission and a long term ecumenical leader.