ABSTRACT
Bishop Bengt Sundkler began his history of the road to church union in South India with the following statement: The clay when a church becomes a sending church, a missionary church, is among the most fateful in its history. When it moves across the seas to be transplanted in other soil, it does of necessity change, either by conscious and willing adaptation or else through its very resistance to change. In 1799, to be a member of the Anglican Church was thus to affirm one's identity by birth and baptism with the established religion of the English nation and its historic relationship to the English state. Two hundred years later, Englishness and Anglicanism are no longer identical or even contiguous. The growth in the 1950s and 1960s of independent provinces of the Anglican communion fostered the development of the concept of global partnership between autonomous churches in Christian mission.
