ONE of the strengths of today’s Anglican Communion is its inter-nationality. Christians from different cultures, languages, and nations provide a glimpse of a heavenly Kingdom, not confined to one nationality or culture. But the fragile fabric of the Communion, lacking a cohesive means of resolving disputes, is often tearing apart. The international role of the Archbishop of Canterbury is under scrutiny.
So each new book that sheds light on Anglican views around the world is welcome. Edward Jarvis has done the Church a service in his deeply thoughtful, historically informed, and very readable book on Singaporean Anglicanism.
Singapore is one of the wealthiest countries in the world per head of population and has been vaunted in some quarters as a model for the post-Brexit UK. The Province of South East Asia has also grown in Anglican significance in recent decades, largely led by Singaporean archbishops.
Dr Jarvis begins his account by unpicking the problematic opportunities and limitations inherent in the Church’s colonial origins. In the view of Singapore’s colonial founder, Sir Stamford Raffles, the island was to be a microcosm of the British Establishment, complete with an Established Church. Jarvis shows Raffles’s motivation to be conventionally pragmatic more than pious.
The relationship between this expatriate Church, the colonial authorities, and immigrating settlers — principally from China, Malaya, and the South Asian subcontinent — was seldom straightforward. Anglican involvement in local schooling was significant (as was that of Episcopal Methodists, which Jarvis could have considered by comparison), but conversions were few. Non-white church participation in the Anglican Church was faithful but vanishingly small until the 1930s. The cataclysmic surrender of Singapore to the Japanese in 1943, followed by increasing momentum toward independence in 1965, left many to consider Anglicanism in Singapore merely a decorative relic of a bygone age.
But the internment of non-Asian clergy during the Second World War had led to mixed ethnic services (until then frowned upon by British clergy). Singaporean leadership after independence led the Anglican Church in an increasingly Pentecostal direction.
St Andrew’s Cathedral (1856-61), Singapore, seen against office blocks in the business district
The first Singaporean bishop, Joshua Chiu Ban It, began “speaking in tongues” and leading healing services at the cathedral in the late 1960s. There was a wide embrace (critics complained that it was the “imposition”) of Pentecostal-inspired worship under his successor, Archbishop Moses Tay Leng Kong. Congregation numbers soared. According to the evangelist Michael Green, the Anglican Charismatic movement “began in Singapore.”
The final chapters of the book examine Singapore’s part in a so-called “Anglican Realignment”, which Jarvis describes as the “internationalizing conservative opposition” to liberalising movements in the West. Successive Singaporean archbishops have pressed for an Anglican Communion that better reflects the values of Southern, post-colonial Churches. Western Churches, Jarvis argues, prefer instead a “loose association of churches celebrating a common heritage”. As this book shows, an Anglican heritage is as frequently contested as it is celebrated. Readers will be left wondering whether heritage alone will be up to the task of holding this Communion together.
The Revd Lawrence Braschi is Vicar of St Pancras’s, Plymouth, and formerly director of the China Desk at Churches Together in Britain and Ireland.
The Anglican Church in Singapore: Mission and multiculture, renewal and realignment
Edward Jarvis
Fortress Academic £81
(978-1-9787-1698-8)
Church Times Bookshop £72.90