Seeds Scattered and Sown: Studies in the History of Canadian Anglicanism.

A.J. Pell is editor of the Canadian Evangelical Review and an instructor
of Liturgy, Anglican Studies Program, Regent College, Vancouver.

As Norman Knowles acknowledges in his editor’s introduction to this volume, there has been no general history of Anglicanism in Canada since Archbishop Philip Carrington’s The Anglican Church in Canada came out in 1963. This new book, while not a comprehensive chronological history, may be as close as the church will come for some time to come—and that is a great loss for the average Anglican in a local church pew.

This is close to, but not, a comprehensive history for two reasons. On the one hand, it does cover the history of Anglicanism in the country. It is divided into three sections: “Foundations: Colonial Anglicanism,” “Building a National Church, 1867–1945,” and “Canadian Anglicanism since 1945.” On the other hand, it is not written with a single voice, but as a set of essays, three in each section and each by a different author. These essays, while giving some chronology, are more concerned with issues and themes than with strictly factual accounts. The result is a book that will appeal to, and be meaningful for, readers with a good general sense of Anglican history, but may well leave many a general reader disoriented at times.

The essays vary greatly, from Mary Ellen Reisner’s more historical approach to the 1816–1867 period to Wendy Fletcher’s more sociological approach to the changing roles of women—clergy, clergy wives, laity—in the church. Knowles’s essay on the place of mission work and social service endeavours in the growing church up to 1945 gives an insight into how the interaction between evangelism and the social gospel has shaped the church. Perhaps the most valuable essay for cradle Anglicans is Paul Friesen’s tracing how concerns about worship, mission, and citizenship in nation, empire, and church shaped what many assume to be “real Anglicanism,” even though that is now romanticized into a pleasant fiction by many elderly Anglicans. This work will be profitably consulted by seminary students and clergy, but most laity will have to wait for a new Carrington.