Trinity Wall Street has posted videos created by their Television and New Media Department depicting mission around the world undertaken by Anglicans. The videos remind us that the beating heart of Anglicanism is mission.
Jim Melchiorre describes the project on the Trinity Wall Street web site:
Google the words “Anglican Communion” and you’ll find plenty of news stories, usually centered on controversies about the gender or sexual orientation of a person in a leadership position.
As a journalist for much of my life, I understand why such controversies are reported and, in fact, must be reported.
But those are stories about Church as an institution.
There’s another kind of “church” story, about Church as a movement of spirit. And that’s what you’ll find with Trinity Wall Street’s Anglican Communion Stories.
The idea came here at Trinity Wall Street in the late summer of 2008, immediately following the Lambeth Conference. Lambeth brings together, every ten years, bishops from the Anglican Communion, that network of churches with a membership of eighty million people spread out over 160 countries, on every continent except, as far as I know, Antarctica.
People in the Anglican Communion don’t all look the same, they speak scores of different languages and dialects, and their religious traditions have been shaped by unique historical experiences including, in many cases, colonialism.
Yet, every day, in all those diverse places, folks are working hard at ministries designed to bring a message of Christian hope to the world.
Trinity Wall Street’s Television and New Media Department made a commitment to travel across the Anglican Communion — gradually — and use our video camera to introduce people, and tell their stories.
By the time you read this, my colleagues William Jarrett and Michael McGuinnes and I will have traveled more than forty-one thousand miles to accomplish that mission.
See the videos here. Some of the stories are produced locally.
Lionel Deimel comments:
What struck me about them, however, is that primates, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, are never mentioned. Neither is the Anglican Consultative Council nor the Lambeth Conference. These stories are about mission carried out mostly by individual Anglican churches, though sometimes with the help of other Anglican bodies. They represent the real work of the Gospel. The efforts they depict are unaffected by the so-called Instruments of Unity, which seem more about inhibiting mission than advancing it. The work is unlikely to be helped by adopting an Anglican covenant or, generally, by the creeping bureaucracy of the Anglican Communion.