Over many years, the Chesters worked to renew the land and make it capable of sustaining life. They planted a variety of fruit trees, not just one kind. They contoured the land to preserve the rainwater. They let ground cover grow in their orchards to protect and nurture the soil. They planted flowers and other plants to attract pollinators, which ensures the tree blossoms turn into fruit. They brought in animals — chickens, sheep, and a notably charismatic pig — and allowed them to help renew the earth through their manure and rooting. All this change brought back wildlife, though the animals were not always welcome. Snails and starlings attacked the fruit. Coyotes ate the chickens. Voles tunnelled under the trees. The solution was more diversity and more life. Ducks ate the snails. Owls saw off the starling. The owls and coyotes feasted on voles.

What the Chesters did was not radical. It was what advocates of organic agriculture have urged for generations. Biggest Little Farm just happens to depict this transformation in a particularly winsome (and, yes, somewhat self-congratulatory) fashion. Where there was once a dying, conventional monoculture farm that was no longer economically viable, Apricot Lanes Farms is now a flourishing ecosystem and economically sustainable farm that contributes to the health of the soil and the natural world.

***

You don’t have to go far in the church these days to hear one question again and again: How are we to adapt the model of church that has developed in recent generations to the new reality we face today? In Canada, a new commission is studying how the national church should be organized in the face of diminishing resources. Dioceses are considering — or already have — merged. Theological colleges (including the one I serve) are embarking on new forms of partnership and integration. The Presiding Bishop-elect, Sean Rowe, has wrestled with these questions throughout his episcopate in northwestern Pennsylvania and western New York and made clear that they will be at the forefront of his primacy. Transformative structural change is inescapable.

I welcome these conversations and this holy time of change. But I have also struggled to find a good metaphor to describe what we are aiming for in this time of transformation. It’s clear why we need to change — to make the best possible use of our resources to proclaim the gospel and be God’s people — but it’s not always clear where that transformation is heading. This is a challenge familiar from Scripture: when you’re setting out on the journey God has set before you, you can’t always see the destination. Still, it helps to have some sense of what we might be looking for as we change. As I have thought about where the church is heading, and in conversation with friends and colleagues, I find myself thinking about Biggest Little Farm.

Let’s imagine this: the church is (like) a farm, or, if you prefer a biblical metaphor, a garden. The model of church we’ve inherited was like the conventional monoculture that the Chesters took over. There was a single model of doing things: a paid, professional cleric looked after a congregation that occupied a building it owned, often close to the center of town. The congregants came to church on Sunday to consume religious services, paying for this consumption in the form of the annual stewardship campaign and their volunteer service. When time and money permitted, they engaged in outreach and service to those around them, though when they couldn’t do that, writing a check was fine too. This is the model of church in which I was raised, and there are many parts of this model I cherish.

While this model was never as universal as we sometimes think, it exercised a grip on our collective ecclesial imagination. But it is also inescapable that in many parts of North America this model of church is playing itself out, like a worn-out monoculture farm. There are fewer people willing to be professional clergy and fewer congregations capable of paying them or sustaining their buildings. We’re also coming to realize that the kind of congregations this model attracted weren’t always so welcoming to people who weren’t heterosexual, white, in families, or otherwise outside what was considered the “norm.” There could be, at times, too much emphasis on making other people more like us rather than traveling together toward new maturity in the body of Christ.

This model may be reaching the end of its life. But the world still needs to hear the good news of Jesus Christ, in just the same way that people in Moorpark still need food produced by that land the Chesters own. It’s the model of producing that food — of sharing that good news — that needs to change.

For the Chesters, the answer began in the health of their soil. They needed to renew its life so it could sustain all other life. In my garden, I tend to the health of the soil through compost, taking the refuse and detritus of life and letting it slowly decompose to release its valuable nutrients. If we look at the church in this way, we might be prompted to ask ourselves what it is in the dying models we now inhabit that needs to be allowed to lie still and decompose so something new can emerge. Compost material often needs to be brought in from elsewhere, like leaves from nearby trees or grass clippings from the lawn. What resources — however insignificant and worthless they may seem to the world around us — need to be brought into our churches to enrich and renew our soil?

Gardens and farms depend on pollination. That’s why gardeners plant flowers and why agribusiness trucks bees around the country to pollinate their blossoms. The Chesters paid careful attention to pollination as well, and it paid off in the vitality of their farm. What would it mean for churches to think of themselves as in need of pollination? Mainline Protestants tend to be pretty good about sharing ideas among ourselves. The Liturgical Movement, which resulted in a profound reshaping of Anglican worship in the mid-20th century, was not a top-down movement. Instead, it was a kind of pollination, of spreading ideas around and seeing what blossomed. More recently, the rapid and hopeful emergence of church garden ministries are examples of how we can spread ideas and see them take root in different contexts.

But the best kind of pollination comes when you have not just one kind of pollinator, but many, not just honeybees but bumblebees, squash bees, mason bees, hover flies, bee flies, and a few butterflies and moths thrown in for good measure. But what gardeners also know is that we have no control over pollination. All we can do is create the right conditions and see who might stop by to brush through our flowers and leave a little pollen behind. For the church to be open to pollination means to be looking for what is flying around us, what external actors might have a crucial bit of nutrient for us. We need a spirituality that helps us create the conditions necessary to be pollinated, and often by unexpected actors.

The Chesters constantly talk about diversity. There’s a reason for this: monocropping just doesn’t work. It robs from the health of the earth for short-term gain and has no sustainable future. Diversity answers a lot of problems (the owls see off the starlings, the ducks see off the snails) but it also leads to unexpected consequences — did I mention the charismatic pig? Diversity is not something that can be managed or controlled. All the Chesters can hope to do is create the conditions for as much diversity as possible and trust that the results will enrich life.

In my context, the great transition that is taking place is the welcome of new immigrants. Canada’s population is now growing by an astonishing three percent per year, as compared to about one percent for most recent decades, fueled almost entirely by immigration. Many of these newcomers are Christian and many are joining our churches. The Diocese of Montreal once imported clergy from England and Ireland, but we now have clergy from Costa Rica, Haiti, Congo, and elsewhere. This diversity is a great blessing to our churches, not only in numbers but also in the gifts these newcomers bring with them for Christian witness. But we will miss the opportunity of this moment if we simply think that these newcomers are here to buttress our existing models of church.

Instead, the opportunity of this moment is to see what new and unexpected things will result from bringing together the diversity of the body of Christ in one place. Many of my students come from places where paid, professional clergy are not the norm or where it is unusual for a congregation to own — or even worship in — a church building. The challenge of this diversity is the new questions and new relationships it offers us to help us evolve into the body of Christ that God calls us to be in this moment. I cannot foresee what the outcome of that will be. But I do know a diverse church is much more likely to thrive and give life than a monocropping church.

***

The garden/farm is just one model, and perhaps the questions it raises are not helpful in all contexts. Nonetheless, I am convinced that as we discern our future, we need to move beyond questions of resources (and resource constraint) and instead ask questions of what could be and what might be. To do so, we need a model or metaphor. I offer the garden — messy, diverse, flourishing — as one point of departure for that conversation.

It is encouraging that as we seek new models for church, many congregations have engaged in gardening, farming, and other food ministries. The true value of these ministries may lie less in their produce — however bountiful that may be — but in the way that linking garden and church, the natural world and the body of Christ, helps move us toward a deeper understanding of how God is calling the church to be in this time. A flourishing garden is not just a model of the destination toward which we are called, but — in its commitment to healthy soil, pollination, and diverse forms of life — also a guide for the journey we are on.

Golden Anniversary of the Anglican Congress, Toronto

The second post-war Anglican Congress convened in August 1963 in Toronto. It was a gathering designed to allow Anglicans of all orders to reflect on what the future held for them. The Congress came at a time of rapid social change. An empire on which the sun never set had been rapidly dismantled. New communications technologies were bringing people around the world closer together. These changes and others prompted Anglicans who gathered in Toronto to ask new questions about what makes for Anglicanism and what it means to be a worldwide church. Their response, in part, was “Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ” (MRI), a manifesto issued at the congress that called for a new way of being Anglican. Now, 50 years later, as Anglicans continue to struggle with what it means to be a worldwide church, MRI offers an unmet vision for authentic global communion.

MRI originated in pre-Congress meetings of mission executives and Communion primates in southwestern Ontario in the summer of 1963. As they gathered, they sensed that not all was well with their Communion. The end of the British Empire meant that it was no longer clear what held Anglicans together. The growing significance of the church in sub-Saharan Africa, parts of Asia, and elsewhere forced them to recognize that Anglicanism was no longer an exclusively Western church. Many saw this as an exciting new development, but there was concern that the church was unable to move beyond old patterns of relationship. “Mission” was still seen as “older” churches in Europe and North America sending money and the occasional person to “younger” churches in other parts of the world. It more often seemed motivated by charity and pity than any sense of genuine fellow feeling and common purpose.

Through late nights of meetings and drafting sessions, the pre-Congress meetings produced MRI, which declared: “It is now irrelevant to talk of ‘giving’ and ‘receiving’ churches. The keynotes of our time are equality, interdependence, [and] mutual responsibility.” MRI was a vision of a mission-oriented collection of churches, bound together by their common membership in the body of Christ. The Pauline undergirding of MRI is self-evident. In the same way that St. Paul had seen that individual Christians in Corinth or Rome were members of the same body, the constituent members of the Anglican Communion were also joined together. One church could not say to another, “I have no need of you,” because, as MRI recognized, each member church brought unique gifts and talents that others needed to receive. St. Paul had not written, “You should be members of the body of Christ,” but “You are members of the body of Christ.” The challenge for Anglicans, MRI saw, was to recognize these relationships that already knit them together around the world — and then live fully into them.

The New York Times reported that MRI “electrified” delegates at Toronto, and it was widely hailed for the way it showed Anglicans honestly grappling with their future. But the vision set forth in the document languished in the years after the congress.

More recently, Anglicans have shifted their thinking about unity and now root their ecclesiology in the Trinity. The Virginia Report (1997) set forth this view: “the unity of the Anglican Communion derives from the unity given it in the Triune God, whose inner personal nature and relational nature is communion” (1.11). Subsequent documents, including The Windsor Report and the Anglican Communion Covenant, reflect this emphasis, as each discusses the Trinity far more than the body of Christ as organizing imagery for thinking about unity. There may be good reasons to link unity and the Trinity — Jesus’ prayer for unity among his followers in John 17 does this — but by emphasizing the Trinity, Anglicans have lost the insights that the body of Christ might bring to us, insights highlighted in MRI.

“Mutual responsibility” appears, at first glance, to be uncontroversial. But the challenge of putting this into practice reveals some of its hard truth. One of the reasons MRI foundered in the years after the Toronto Congress is that churches interpreted its call for greater relationship as a call for financial transfers. But money has a way of undermining mutuality, particularly when some parts of the world have so much of it and others so little. Money, moreover, undermines responsibility — both for oneself and for others. If funding for projects in a diocese comes from elsewhere, church leaders have little incentive to take responsibility for them. If a church feels it can buy its way out of true relationship by writing a check, it has lost any sense of responsibility to its sisters and brothers. Mature relations in the body of Christ depend on individuals and congregations that can take responsibility for their obligation to honestly engage others in the body.

“Interdependence” seems equally anodyne. But it is loaded with meaning. In the last decade, many Anglican leaders have announced, effectively, “I have no need of you.” Yet the body cannot function as it was meant to without all its members, a fact St. Paul made the basis of his theology. It is a fact that is equally true of a worldwide Communion of churches. “It takes the whole world to know the whole Gospel,” said Max Warren, former general secretary of the Church Missionary Society and a key figure at the Toronto Congress. In spite of the ways in which it can sometimes be challenging to see what others have to offer, the central insight of the body of Christ remains correct. Each Christian sees through a glass darkly. As unlikely as it may seem at times, we need those with whom we are joined in baptism to help us see fully.

The Anglican Communion is again in a challenging position, one in which it is unclear how this worldwide collection of churches is to stay together. But the significance of the Toronto Congress should not be ignored. MRI reminds Anglicans that the body of Christ brings important insights to our search for unity, a unity that can only be revealed through the hard work of true mutuality and interdependence. In a near-exclusive emphasis on the Trinity, Anglicans have neglected the vision set forth by the body of Christ. Our life together has been impoverished.

It is no mistake that Paul moves from his most extended discussion of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12 to his famous passage about agape in chapter 13. Agape is the ethic of the body of Christ, the actual, concrete life of those who are united by baptism with Christ and one another. Fifty years after MRI, returning to the body might remind us that what Anglicans need more than anything else in their relationships with one another is a little more agape.

Image: More than 17,000 people jammed Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, for the opening service of the Anglican Congress on August 13, 1963. Canadian Churchman photo from the Archives of the Episcopal Church

“Mankind must be led to the Christian faith not as a panacea of progress,” wrote Michael Ramsey in The Glory of God, “nor as an otherworldly solution unrelated to history, but as a Gospel of Transfiguration. Such a Gospel both transcends the world and speaks to the immediate here-and-now.”

This is the point of departure for The Transfiguration of Christ and Creation. Seeking to understand the implications of such a “Gospel of Transfiguration,” John Gatta traces the ways in which the event has been interpreted, depicted, and understood through 2,000 years of Christian history. He ranges widely, from a mosaic at St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai to music of Olivier Messiaen, poems of T.S. Eliot and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to writers ranging from patristic theologians to more recent figures like J.R.R. Tolkien, Annie Dillard, and Wendell Berry. Gatta, dean of college and professor of English at the University of the South, is erudite and assured in his treatment of these sources. Frequently returning to Teilhard, the Jesuit priest-scientist whose work was restricted by the church during his lifetime, he finds in him a “mystically integrative vision of spirituality and science [that] is sorely needed by a post-industrial society that yearns to recover contact with the living soul” (p. 36).

As the diversity of these sources indicates, it is the theme of Transfiguration, rather than the biblical accounts directly, that is at the heart of the book. Gatta sees Transfiguration’s importance as it teaches us something new about Jesus and his glory, involves human beings in the process of transfiguration, and encourages us to “consider how a cosmic Christ also illuminates the nonhuman, material order of being” (p. xx), that is, all of creation.

This last area is the richest vein for Gatta. Noting that August 6 is both the traditional commemoration of the Transfiguration as well as the date of its “heartrending parody” in the bombing of Hiroshima, he argues that the Transfiguration provides the surest footing for the Church’s environmental activism. While he is concerned about environmental degradation, he fears the Church’s current activity on this issue is in danger of reducing it to “little more than a technically incompetent adjunct of the Sierra Club” (p. 73). By rooting its environmental theology in the Transfiguration, the Church could move beyond a well-meaning but limited focus on “stewardship” and respond to looming environmental catastrophe in “more integrally liturgical, contemplative, and doxological terms, befitting her authentic charism as the Church” (p. 73). August 6, he argues persuasively, should be seen as a Christian counterpart to Earth Day.

The Transfiguration cannot be the preserve of mystics alone, but rather has profound consequences for life once we descend from the mountain. Gatta considers Desmond Tutu’s antiapartheid activism and self-described “spirituality of transformation.” It was Tutu’s conviction — formed in prayer and contemplation — that with God no situation is “untransfigurable” that provided the grounding for his prophetic work. Our apprehension of the glory of God leads us into action in God’s world.

Gatta, it is clear, is transfixed by the Transfiguration. A concluding chapter includes sample materials for devotional reflections linked to the theme.

But if Transfiguration is as all-encompassing a concept as Gatta claims, one is left wondering just what is not included. Where do its implications end? But that must be the point: by pointing repeatedly to the ways in which Transfiguration has been a theme of Christian art, theology, and spirituality throughout the history of the Church, Gatta reminds us of the transformation and conversion that is at the heart of what it means to be a follower of Christ. The Christian faith cannot be reduced merely to mental assent or a prescription for individual rules and particular courses of action. Rather, it is a transforming process that is at once mystical and profound in the way it brings us face to face with the beauty, majesty, and glory of God in Christ.

These pages have of late been filled with debate about the departure of the Diocese of South Carolina from the Episcopal Church. The questions are complex. Can a diocese disaffiliate from the larger church? If so, what governs that departure? To an observer with a non-expert knowledge of the canons, it has been quickly confusing.

What is clear is that there are now two dioceses: one led by Mark Lawrence — no longer regarded as a bishop by the Episcopal Church — known as the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of South Carolina, and a rump Episcopal diocese in the process of reorganization. Lawrence’s diocese has said it may in time affiliate with a different Anglican entity. For now, it has declared itself an extra-provincial diocese in the Anglican Communion and has justified this decision on theological, canonical, and ecclesiological grounds.

On the surface, the argument appears to have merit. Anglicans claim in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral that the core of the faith is found in Scripture, the dominical sacraments, the creeds, and the historic episcopate. Each of these elements is present in a diocese. This seems to be the basis for the hope of some Episcopal bishops that individual dioceses might be permitted to sign onto the Anglican Covenant even if the Episcopal Church as a whole did not. No less an authority than Rowan Williams appeared willing to countenance the idea.

Yet a Lawrence-led diocese cannot remain an independent ecclesial entity indefinitely, for reasons that are central to what it means to be Anglican. For what happens when Mark Lawrence is no longer able to be bishop? How will he be replaced?

Surely a core justification for the creation of provinces in the Anglican Communion is that they allow the episcopacy to be perpetuated. It takes three bishops to ordain a new bishop. One function of provinces is that each has established internal processes that govern when three bishops are able to do this. That four dioceses are required for a province to be formed seems confirmation of this fact: a vacancy in any one see could not be filled without recourse to an external authority. This is part of what it means to say that provinces of the Communion are autonomous.

On that day when, for whatever reason, Lawrence is no longer able to serve as bishop of his independent diocese, his faithful will have no protocol to replace him. An ad-hoc arrangement is, of course, possible: the diocese has plenty of support from Anglicans in other provinces, not to mention Anglicans not in full communion with Canterbury. But such an arrangement would demonstrate that remaining an independent Anglican diocese is not a sustainable course.

Extra-provincial dioceses as are currently recognized in the Anglican Communion — Bermuda, two in Sri Lanka, and a handful of others — mostly fall under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Canterbury. This group of dioceses, which is the closest parallel to South Carolina’s current arrangement, enjoys primatial oversight in part, no doubt, to ensure that the episcopacy is perpetuated. Extra-provincial status is often seen as temporary. In the 1970s, the Diocese of Sudan was removed from the province in the Middle East and became an extra-provincial diocese under Canterbury, but this was a step on the way to the diocese being divided into four and the creation of the Episcopal Church of Sudan in 1976. Sometimes the “temporary” period has stretched into a generation or more, as in the case of the two dioceses in Sri Lanka, which wait for a united church to emerge on the island.

The South Carolina diocese’s history is instructive in this regard as well. The diocese was organized in 1785, before the creation of the Episcopal Church. This sequence is the ground for the right claimed by the diocese to withdraw its membership at any time, a right it exercised late last year. But little mention has been made of the history of South Carolina’s episcopate. The diocese’s first bishop, Robert Smith, was not consecrated until 1795. In the early 19th century, there were lengthy periods when the see was left vacant. This approach to the episcopacy calls into question the early diocese’s status as a true part of the church, at least as measured by the later standard of the Quadrilateral, the standard upheld by Lawrence. Moreover, three Episcopal bishops consecrated Smith, at a General Convention: yet another indication of the fundamental significance of wider, formal links that sustain the church. Rather than proving the case for withdrawal, the history of the episcopate in South Carolina demonstrates that claiming to be a free-floating ecclesial entity is impossible to sustain in Anglican polity, precisely because of the nature of episcopacy, a charism at the heart of what it means to be Anglican.

Hierarchy in the church is a bedeviling issue. The Episcopal Church itself has not provided persuasive reasons why hierarchy is necessary on a provincial level but unnecessary on a Communion-wide level. Surely for a church that defines its existence in terms of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, hierarchy cannot stop at the water’s edge?

As in Scripture, so also in ecclesiology: the pernicious hermeneutic of self-justification remains a constant temptation. This is regrettable. Ecclesiology is not a minor administrative matter that can be casually tossed aside. It is part of the core good news Christians have to proclaim. In a globalizing world that is dominated by discord and fracture, the Church makes the counter-cultural claim that in baptism we come to belong to the body of Christ. No other entity is shaped by a common willingness to die daily with Christ and be raised with him who is the author of true and abundant life. We believe we belong, and that this is good news. Anglicans work out the implications of this radical claim in the constellation of parishes, dioceses, provinces, networks, and institutions that comprise our global Communion.

The dispute in South Carolina could provide an opportunity — yet unrealized — to think seriously about the ecclesiological and theological convictions underlying Anglican churches. On that note, we might welcome the recent call in these pages for a retreat on the topic, organized by seminary deans. Prayerfully and reverently, one hopes, Anglicans may yet learn together to honor our theological convictions in our ecclesiological structures.

Andrew Goddard does not cite this passage in his evaluation of Williams’s term in office but he could have: it functions almost as a programmatic statement for his rocky tenure as primate of All England and titular leader of the Anglican Communion. Williams’s ten years in Canterbury were a constant struggle to hold together a national church and a global communion with “honesty and attentiveness” to those he encountered. Coming to grips with that tenure and offering tentative judgments on the legacy of Williams’s leadership is the task of Goddard’s book.

Goddard arranges his book topically. There are individual chapters about the effort to permit women to be ordained as bishops in the Church of England, the crisis sparked by the appointment and resignation of Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading, and Williams’s work to hold together a fractious Communion in the Windsor process and a redesigned Lambeth Conference. These are the high-profile moments of his tenure and the ones that will be long remembered.

Goddard repeatedly stresses the ways in which Williams distinguished between his personal theological views and his responsibility to the church as a bishop. “Although many criticized this as hypocrisy, that is unfair,” Goddard writes. “It is simply a very countercultural expression of living under authority and his commitment to the unity of the body of Christ” (p. 110).

Goddard provides useful context for this. As a bishop in Wales in the 1990s, Williams declined invitations to preach at services in England at which women were to be ordained. Williams supported the ordination of women but the Church in Wales had not yet approved such a move. This sense of responsibility is, again, an example of the “honesty and attentiveness” to the Church that Williams highlighted prior to his time in Canterbury.

But Goddard also acknowledges that Williams’s efforts did not resolve tensions in the Communion: “His successor arrives … with the fuse much shorter and few processes in place to … prevent what appears to be a rapidly approaching and damaging explosion” (p. 112). Williams leaves behind a compelling model of church leadership on the one hand and unresolved tensions on the other.

A particular strength of this book is its sheer breadth and the attention it pays to issues that never seized the public spotlight but which nonetheless were a significant portion of Williams’s archiepiscopal ministry. Goddard devotes chapters to his promotion of Fresh Expressions in the Church of England, his low-profile but deeply significant work with people of other faiths (beyond the controversial and misunderstood 2008 lecture about Shariah), his outspokenness as a public intellectual on political matters, and his constant effort to, as he said in his first press conference, have Christianity “capture the imagination of our culture” (p. 76). Goddard notes, without citation, that Williams spent 20 percent of his time on Communion-related concerns, a helpful reminder that no matter how often Anglicans around the world turn to Canterbury, pressing Communion needs are only part of a whole raft of initiatives and interactions that occupy the archbishop’s time.

Goddard had fewer than four months to research and write the book and acknowledges that his conclusions and judgments are “initial [and] tentative” (p. 8). Each chapter provides a summary of Williams’s speeches, interviews, and sermons relevant to the topic at hand, along with commentary from Goddard and a handful of other individuals whom he interviewed. At times, the chapters feel like little more than lengthy quotations from Williams’s own writing. This is no bad thing, however. To read Williams’s original words in the context in which they were first delivered is refreshing. In any event, their complexity and depth defy easy summation. (At least two other books on Williams, Rupert Shortt’s Rowan’s Rule and Mike Higton’s Difficult Gospel, similarly rely on lengthy quotations.)

Goddard’s tight writing schedule presents other problems, as it causes him occasionally to pass over significant moments too briefly. For instance, he mentions Williams’s “historic meeting with [Zimbabwean President Robert] Mugabe” (p. 144) but provides no additional information on what made it historic or why it was significant to Williams’s ministry. These are judgments that a tight publishing deadline likely cannot accommodate.

A larger disappointment is that the people Goddard interviewed to inform his judgments seem a limited lot. They are overwhelmingly male and from the Euro-Atlantic world. One wishes, for instance, to hear more from Anglicans from the Global South. Other important voices are silent as well. This is most notable in the chapter on the Reading appointment, in which it appears neither Jeffrey John nor Richard Harries, Bishop of Oxford, were interviewed. Goddard may have tried and failed to interview these people but as the book lacks any methodological summary, their voices are conspicuous by their absence.

A standard American judgment of Williams’s tenure appears to be: “He didn’t do what I wanted.” Many liberal Episcopalians condemn him for not doing enough to promote the cause of gay and lesbian Christians, while many conservative Anglicans lament his failure to resist that cause. When Williams announced his resignation, the loudest voices on all sides seemed to say, “Good riddance.” In this context, Goddard’s largely sympathetic tone is refreshing. By patiently wading through Williams’s speeches, sermons, letters, and other public writings, he has established the ground on which Williams’s legacy will be debated. That ground, it is clear, is expansive.

It is impossible to discuss Williams without reflecting on the deep personal holiness he brought to the position. This was manifest in a kenotic leadership that, as Goddard acknowledges, suggests “that part of his legacy should be a questioning of the whole concern to identify anyone’s legacy” (p. 313). Williams may have acted in ways that failed to please various factions in the church, but his personal conduct continually modeled what it means to live a life shaped by the good news of Jesus Christ.

This, Goddard concludes, may be Williams’s most lasting accomplishment: “what marked out Rowan’s time as archbishop is that he embodied and sought to nurture what needs to be widespread … seeing what is authentic, genuine, and good and true in others’ point of view” (p. 302). In other words, Williams’s tenure was marked by an inability to say “I have no need of you” — even and especially when so many others were demanding that he do precisely that. This deeply biblical position is surely at the root of any legacy Williams leaves and is, moreover, the place to begin building a church that is “more truly itself.”