Pacific Basin Anglicans Review Missionary Ethlogies
Episcopal News Service. July 14, 1983 [83132]
HONOLULU, (DPS, July 14) -- Anglicans ranging from Maoris of New Zealand to the Nishga Indians of Canada met here for a historic conference to explore and promote the Church's indigenous missionary philosophy.
Participating delegations to the June 19-26 Pacific Basin Conference represented 41 dioceses or provinces that touch the Pacific Ocean -- from Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific, East Asia, Burma, Japan, Canada, Brazil, South America, Central America, and nine dioceses of the Episcopal Church. Each delegation included at least one lay person and one cleric, a bishop, priest or deacon.
The gathering was largely the results of one man's dream. Nevada Bishop Wesley Frensdorff conceived the idea in 1978 and has pursued it tirelessly ever since. Planning and support eventually involved a broad range of Church Center offices, the Anglican Consultative Council and the Living Church.
The aim of the conference was to look at the life and ministry of the church in the Pacific Basin in the light of the teachings of the Rev. Roland Allen (1868-1947), an Anglican missionary and theologian whose perceptive thoughts on indigenous ministry have been influential.
A former missionary of the Church of England in Asia, Africa and Western Canada, Allen studied the Anglican communion's missionary approach and observed that "we constantly hear men use" the terms "self-support, self-extension, and self-government as if they were distinct and separate things. They cannot be rightly so treated," he concluded. "Self-extension is bound up with self-support and self-government. The three are intimately united."
Allen cited the example of St. Paul who gave local leaders the opportunity to charge and forced the church to realize it could not depend on him but must depend on its own resources.
Although Allen died long before his ideas on indigenous ministry and Christian community became accepted by the mainstream of the church, he was very much alive in conference lectures, meditations, discussions and regional workshops here.
The Rev. Canon David Paton of the Canterbury Cathedral in England delivered the opening lecture on Allen's "vision and legacy." Dr. Ross Kinsler of the World Council of Churches gave the closing talk, stressing the need for an informed and equipped laity who will take "primary responsibility for renewal, unity, and mission, not just for the life of the Church but for the life of the world."
Among other speakers were the Catholic theologian Dr. Bernard Cooke of Holy Cross College, Worcester, Mass., who spoke on the development of Christian community; the Rev. Jaci Maraschin, a priest of the Igreja Episcopal de Brazil, who spoke of the need of the church to become involved in the political world; and Dr. Maai Solato, a lay canon of Holy Trinity Cathedral, Suva, Fiji, who spoke on poverty and demoralization in Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia.
A joint presentation on "The Ministry Today: Theology, Issues and Models" was made by Prof. Patricia Page, Church Divinity School of the Pacific, and Episcopal Bishop George Harris of Alaska.
The week-long conference covered the concerns of native people, the nuclear arms race, women's issues, communism and Christianity, how the Bible can be communicated, and how change is effected at the basic level of the Anglican communion.
Each conference afternoon was spent in regional workshop groups, which planned for six months after the conference, to begin implementing some of the concepts gained from the conference. The groups established a reporting-back method by which the participating dioceses and provinces might measure the overall effect of the conference at the parish level.