Abstract
Mission may helpfully be described as “the church incorporating others beyond its current boundaries” (p. 2). In her excellent book, Mission, Race, and Empire, Jennifer Snow deploys this understanding to recast the history of the Episcopal Church from its earliest days in colonial North America to 2019. What emerges is a very different and highly significant picture of how the Episcopal Church has been shaped in its theology, ministry, and institutions by its involvement with indigenous, African/African American, Latinx, Asian/Asian American, and other groups. Snow discloses a history that all Episcopalians, especially leaders and scholars, need to be challenged and informed by.
Many histories of churches focus on the institutional structures and policies that arise from how the experience of persons, congregations, and organizations is connected to the church’s basic beliefs and practices. Focusing on the institution is necessary and understandable. After all, it is in institutions and policies that communal identity is formed and enacted. What is often lost or obscured, though, is the wide range of always complex and variable relationships among peoples and groups across lines of real difference. As Snow argues, boundaries are permeable. What comes into view in beginning from mission is the extent to which the “sending church” is transformed by those whom it engages, at least as much as are those on the other side of the boundary.
Mission, Race, and Empire explores three major theses, presented in the Introduction and revisited in the Conclusion. The first is the transformative effects of mission on the “sending church” through what is and is not learned from engaging with those cast as “other”—those at the margins of a church that has a particular cultural, racial, and theological identity (pp. 1–4). The second thesis is that Members of communities experiencing the effects of race and empire in the rise of colonialism could also use mission as a creative response to changes in cultural life, developing new religious and cultural worldviews that would in turn reshape the practice of Christianity. (p. 2)
Mission presents opportunities for adaptation and development, for creativity and innovation, and for reformation and renewal. Yet, opportunities can be explored only through trial and error, as the book shows again and again. And opportunities can be missed or disregarded, particularly when people and groups have little experience of imagining the practices of Christianity differently. Third, focusing on mission rather than institutions highlights the importance of relationships and brings those often considered marginal to the center of the story. “Relationships between people and groups, and how those relationships were shaped and perceived by those on all sides, are now the focus of the story rather than an aside” (p. 318).
In the chronologically arranged chapters that follow, Snow develops these theses by looking at key moments of opportunity, using concrete examples of particular relationships and practices to bring into view the Episcopal Church’s ongoing challenges and difficulties with its colonial history and missional practices, its troubles with race and ethnicity, and its complex entanglement with its always-changing contexts both in North America and elsewhere. In Part I, “Christianizing the Colony,” the church’s encounter with both indigenous and enslaved African peoples leads to particular cross-cultural struggles in which the church both adapts in some ways and strengthens its Anglo-European identity. The emphasis on Christianity as a “civilizing” force requires that those deemed uncivilized adapt to the dominant culture even while that culture’s church takes multiple informal and formal steps to keep them at the margins. The legacy of these early attitudes and actions surfaces again and again in Part II, “Church Planting, Civilizing, and Christianizing” (covering primarily the late eighteenth through early twentieth centuries), and Part III, Missio Dei (examining the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries). At each point, Snow looks at persons who were able to recognize and use opportunities to broaden the church’s mission in its multi-cultural context, and at persons who contributed to its maintaining its conventional racialized aspects even as it expanded into new, significantly different situations in North America and elsewhere.
As Snow presents it, the church’s history is always complex, and its practices always contested. The past has multiple legacies with which the church must cope at every stage. The future is unknown; and unpredictable and current practices and attitudes produce both foreseen and unforeseen consequences. Persons’ intentions are always mixed and fallible, and their actions both contribute to and limit the church’s ability to effectively engage in mission that is shaped and driven by its visions and aspirations.
One fairly familiar development must suffice as an example. Chapter 4 looks at the church’s struggles to move beyond its culturally established role on the East Coast, through mission with colonial settlers, indigenous peoples, and enslaved peoples. Internal conflicts stem from competing ideals and visions, but also lead to cooperation that produces innovation. High church and low church missional leaders develop and promote the idea of “an actively leading bishop”—a missionary bishop—sent to “organize and ordain whatever God provided” (p. 102). Thus, mission is placed in the center of the church’s self-understanding. At the same time, human and material resources significantly limited the ability of the church truly to become a “domestic and foreign mission society.”
As Snow says, “At each step, there were roads not taken” (p. 245). In part, this stems from uncertainty about how to respond to new and challenging situations. So many of the opportunities for crossing borders are greatly diminished and generally disregarded; they are lost. In a certain sense, lost opportunities are gone forever: actions have consequences and legacies; contexts change. Yet, the opportunities re-present themselves again and again. Snow’s hope, clearly, is that the church will continue to move beyond its current boundaries. Her approach to this very mixed history provides multiple examples that can inform and stimulate more creative involvement with mission today and in the future.
Mission, Race, and Empire is remarkable in its scope: nearly every opportunity for incorporating others across boundaries is explored through careful analysis and extensive documentation. What Snow accomplishes here is a useable history. It is extensive enough to show how current challenges and future possibilities have been shaped, expanded, and limited by past practices and beliefs. It is realistic enough to recognize the frailty, fallibility, and limitations of human actors and organizations, and to express regret. Yet it is hopeful in underscoring what has been done well, if only for a time, and what might be done more effectively and faithfully in the future. This possibility is advanced by Snow’s strategy of weaving chronological chapters into a larger narrative, while also shaping each chapter so it can be read independently and used, for example, in adult formation and formal theological education. The book is also highly suggestive and encouraging of further research that will deepen and broaden our understanding of the Episcopal Church and thus further shape its mission and ministry.
And this work is much needed. The Episcopal Church over time has attempted to remain conventional, at the center of the dominant culture, and to preserve its “inherited tradition and centers of authority” (p. 318). But, as Snow makes clear, these attempts have always been resisted and other possibilities developed and pursued. Meanwhile, the interdependence of every aspect of the current world and church is becoming ever more evident and unavoidable. How we understand ourselves and how we orient ourselves toward others must change in response, and change in ways that we do not necessarily see now.
The methodology of this book is to examine particular situations from as many perspectives as possible, to recognize conflict and contestation as generative, and to embrace the inevitable ambiguities of human life both individual and corporate. Everyone is flawed as well as gifted. Every approach to mission and ecclesial life is shaped and limited by its socio-cultural context, which the church also shapes. Every action has consequences, often unforeseen and unintended. All human beings are actors who contribute to the church’s mission. This is what the Episcopal Church has been, and acknowledging this can help all of us discern more fully and clearly what the Episcopal Church might be in the future.
The mission of the church in all its aspects is an ongoing and changing matter of trial and at error. But it is through this process that we discover not only our own limitations, but also the breadth and scope of the presence of God as a work of transformation and reconciliation. The church, for good and ill, participates in the missio dei. Mission, Race, and Empire shows how we can do so more effectively and more faithfully. Everyone should read this book, and the church and the world will benefit from our doing so.
