ABSTRACT

The decline of Christianity in Britain, and in the European heartland of Christianity more generally, took place at the same time as a rapid growth of Christianity in other parts of the world, including Britain’s former colonies. Some of the fastest growing non-western churches were originally associated with the British missionary movement, and maintain close ties with British churches. By the early twenty-first century, Anglican bishops in Nigeria exerted sufficient power, in a dispute over the status of gays and lesbians in the church, to insist on the exclusion of the Episcopal Church of the USA, and the Anglican Church of Canada, from the counsels of the worldwide Anglican communion. Victorian missionaries set out to create independent, selfgoverning churches in Britain’s African colonial possessions, but they no doubt failed to anticipate the ways in which Britain’s ecclesiastical empire would strike back at its metropolitan center.