This article tells the story of initiatives of the Instruments of Communion to enhance the safety of all persons within the Anglican Communion over the past three decades. These Initiatives have taken place against the backdrop of the significant evidence that has come to light in recent years of abuse being perpetrated by clergy and lay leaders against children, young people and vulnerable adults in the provinces. It describes the actions of the Lambeth Conference, the Primates’ Meeting, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the work of the Anglican Communion Safe Church Commission.

The process of creating a Safe and Inclusive Church (SIC) Commission within the Anglican Church of the Province of SouthernAfrica (ACSA) is not unique in the Communion. This article seeks to explore ACSA’s specific journey to date, with a view to engaging the Communion in a learning partnership. While some of the process of establishing this ministry may be unique, there are places of commonality as we jointly grapple with the call of our Lord Jesus to continue to build the Kingdom of God in contemporary times. Most specifically, this process has highlighted a need for renewal of the Church in both our theological understanding and how we organize to best serve our call to preach the Good News. These theological and structural dimensions of ‘doing church’ speak deeply into our ‘being church’ and are at the heart of why dialogue is needed as a Communion. We offer this article as an invitation to continue discerning together how best to follow and serve our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by being His Body to a broken and wounded world.

Percy Dearmer’s time as a visiting lecturer at Berkeley Divinity School in Connecticut, USA, at the invitation of Dean William Palmer Ladd, from July 1918 to February 1919, marked a turning point in his life and career. As author of The Parson’s Handbook (1899) and Vicar of St Mary’s Primrose Hill (1901–1915), he was immersed in the Church of England. From 1919, when he left Berkeley Divinity School, with no offer of a clergy post until 1931, he worked on the margins of the church as a university lecturer, writer, and co-director of an experimental worshipping community. The experiences he had between 1915 and 1919 shaped this ‘second’ Dearmer: loss in the war; a second wife and new family; work with the YMCA in France and India; travels in the Anglican Communion and, not least, time at Berkeley where he consolidated these experiences, becoming attuned to those who wanted a spiritual life but were disillusioned by institutional religion, as expressed in The Art of Worship (1919).

This article examines the contribution of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse to the ecclesiology of the Anglican Church of Australia (ACA). The focus is on diocesanism – the strong form of diocesan autonomy that exists in the ACA. The article concludes that the Royal Commission identified diocesanism and the associated dispersion of ecclesial authority as key factors constraining the ACA’s responses to child sexual abuse, and actively sought to modify its impact. The article also points to the significance of the Royal Commission’s findings to ACA ecclesiological understandings and change.

The thought of Percy Dearmer was related to that of Augustus Pugin and Daniel Rock, Roman Catholics seeking to revive English medieval forms, and to his Anglican near-contemporaries Conrad Noel and William Palmer Ladd. In England, Noel was more ideologically committed than Dearmer and his imagined medieval society and the English Use were given applied expression at Thaxted. In the USA, William Palmer Ladd was a congenial colleague to Dearmer but his liturgical ideals were of the 1930s, and not an outcome of the nineteenth-century English ritual controversies. Dearmer, Ladd and Noel were all grounded in what has been called Sacramental Socialism, which saw a unity between the Eucharist, the corporate church, and its mission as part of the Kingdom of God.

This essay will examine the contribution of pastoral (professional) supervision in enabling and ensuring a safe church. Pastoral supervision is the brave, safe space where clergy (and ministry workers) reflect on their ministry practice in a regular, planned supervision session. The present article emerges from a decade of training pastoral supervisors and consultation across the national Anglican Church during 2019 based on recommendations made by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. It concludes that the properly Christian way for pastoral supervision to change the culture of the Church is christological: a rigorous grounding of its theory and practice in the story of Jesus Christ.

An extended homily or meditation that focuses on some aspects of the life and work of Percy Dearmer. Dearmer, in his pastoral attentiveness, irenic prophetic action, and practical Christianity, sought to continue a distinctive English Anglican tradition of faithfully fulfilling his vocation through a richly incarnational ministry.

While Percy Dearmer’s influence on Anglican liturgy through The Parson’s Handbook and The English Hymnal are well known, his lectures on The Art of Public Worship, given in 1919 when he was visiting professor at Berkeley Divinity School in Connecticut, USA, introduce a different phase of his liturgical thought. A new emphasis on modernizing language, brevity of form, and alternative forms of worship would later have expression in England via his association with the Guildhouse in London, and in the hymnal Songs of Praise. Comparing The Art of Public Worship with the later Prayer Book Interleaves by Berkeley Divinity School’s Dean William Palmer Ladd leads to the suggestion that this ‘second Dearmer’ also had an afterlife in the American liturgical movement.

This article concerns child sexual abuse in the Anglican Church of Australia and the Church of England and, in particular, an integrity system to combat this problem and the ethical problems it gives rise to. The article relies on the findings of various commissions of inquiry to determine the nature and extent of child sexual abuse in the Anglican Church. The two salient ethical problems identified are: (1) design of safety measures in the light of the statistical preponderance of male on male sexuality; (2) justice issues arising from redress schemes established or proposed to provide redress to victims.

This study considers John Habgood’s understanding of the relation of science and religion, particularly his core notion that an ‘undivided mind’ engages different aspects of reality using disciplines of study appropriate to their specific subject matter. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of those views during his time as a research scientist at Cambridge, their location within the Anglican tradition, their expression in Habgood’s 1992 debate with Richard Dawkins, and their impact on his public ministry as Bishop of Durham and Archbishop of York, especially in public debates concerning bioethics.

John Macquarrie’s contribution to Anglican systematic theology has been long acknowledged and his impact is still being felt both within and outside Anglicanism. His existentialist theology, with its roots in German philosophy, as well as Christian mysticism, can at times seem quite distant from ‘traditional’ Anglican theology, but when his way of engaging in theological reflection is examined closely, his epistemology does not appear to be as remote from the ‘traditional’ Anglican hermeneutic of Scripture, tradition reason as it might seem at first sight. This article will argue that Macquarrie’s epistemology is rooted in the Anglican three-fold hermeneutic inherited from Richard Hooker, albeit in a way that is adapted for the modern age. In some respects, Macquarrie’s hermeneutic is a development of Hooker’s ‘three-legged stool’, but a ‘stool’ that has been heavily renovated in light of, and in response to, the existentialist crisis seen in continental philosophy from Søren Kierkegaard onwards. Macquarrie offers a resolution to the tension between individual and corporate identities, and his epistemology may offer Anglican thought a means of negotiating some controversial contemporary theological issues.

This paper aims to expound Rowan Williams’s reading of Augustine and Hegel on the question of selfhood. Through an adoption of the tropes of ‘tragedy’ and ‘comedy’, the argument will be made that Williams’s interpretation of Augustine’s portrayal of the soul as wandering and homeless does not imply an unremitting vision of loss and fragmentation. For him, the distentio animi is always placed within a more expansive arc of desire in which the self is continually rediscovered in what is ‘other’. This means that my self is most primarily found in the unhanding of restrictive identities that hinder our spiritual growth towards union with God, and also in the discovery of my goods as being bound up with the goods of others. This reading is further expanded by relating Williams’s ‘Augustine’ to Gillian Rose’s ‘Hegel’, thereby showing the way that his reception of this has assisted him in explicating a greater ‘comic’ undercurrent in his retrieval of selfhood.