Search results
When members of that oft-maligned institution, the Anglican Church – the 'Tory Party at prayer' – encountered the far-flung settler empire, they found it a strange and intimidating place. Anglicanism's conservative credentials seemed to have little place in developing colonies; its established status, secure in England, would crumble in Ireland and was destined never to be adopted in the 'White Dominions'. By 1850, however, a global ‘Anglican Communion’ was taking shape. This book explains why Anglican clergymen started to feel at home in the empire. Between 1790 and 1860 the Church of England put in place structures that enabled it to sustain a common institutional structure and common set of beliefs across a rapidly-expanding ‘British world’. Though Church expansion was far from being a regulated and coordinated affair, the book argues that churchmen did find ways to accommodate Anglicans of different ethnic backgrounds and party attachments in a single broad-based ‘national’ colonial Church. The book details the array of institutions, voluntary societies and inter-colonial networks that furnished the men and money that facilitated Church expansion; it also sheds light on how this institutional context contributed to the formation of colonial Churches with distinctive features and identities. The colonial Church that is presented in this book will be of interest to more than just scholars and students of religious and Church history. The book shows how the colonial Church played a vital role in the formation of political publics and ethnic communities in a settler empire that was being remoulded by the advent of mass migration, democracy and the separation of Church and state.
Chapter one, which examines the recruitment of the foot-soldiers of the institutional Church, draws attention to the sheer variety of clergy who peopled the Church in the British world in the pre-1860 period. The chapter highlights common dynamics in the development of the colonial clerical profession in the three chosen case studies. We will see that the aims of churchmen from across the Church party spectrum were frustrated by a persistent set of recruitment problems back in Britain—the major problem being that was no centralised or coordinated system for recruiting clergy. The first part of the chapter surveys the range of government organisations, voluntary groups and private individuals that played a part in recruitment; the second half provides a detailed examination of the clergy themselves. A number of questions about the recruitment, training, education and social and ethnic backgrounds of the clergy are considered. The recruitment of clergy shows that power was far from being centralised in the colonial Church: this was an institution that was made up a variety of networks and connections; it was also one that allowed a range of actors to have a hand in finding the men who would staff and run the colonial Church.
broaden our understanding of how the institutional Church was transformed from a privileged establishment into what was ostensibly a great voluntary association. 12 While there is a growing literature on how the Church and individual clergymen negotiated this dramatic shift, 13 some of the implications of the change of status have not been fully examined. Here we will see how the
era of the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund. Anderson’s history was founded on the assumption that there was such a thing as a unified ‘colonial Church’. 1 The establishment of a coherent and unified institutional church was an enduring preoccupation of Anglican clergymen in the first half of the nineteenth century. Chapter Four showed that efforts to tie the disparate colonial Anglican establishments together
targeted. By presenting the Church as a central institution in the lives of English migrants, and by drawing a link between the institutional Church and the English national character, clergymen were essentially trying to realise three objectives: one was to identify and define an English national character; the second was to show that there was an essential connection between Englishness and Anglicanism
understanding of the term ‘mission’ as something tied fundamentally to conversion. 5 Though these works have made valuable contributions to our understanding of emigration’s place in nineteenth-century mission, a number of issues remain unaddressed. One is the nature of the connections between the expansion of the institutional Church overseas and the reform and revival of the Church in mainland Britain. We know
their own clergy. It also points to the nodal points on the periphery of empire that played a role in the expansion of the institutional Church. The Company officers who helped to build an evangelical presence at the Cape also reached out to Australia. Captain Frank Irvine – a former East India Company officer who settled with his family in New South Wales in 1820 – helped set up a corresponding