By Jeffrey Walton, Juicy Ecumenism.
This week I’m outside of Asheville, North Carolina for a series of conferences centered around Anglican global missions. Anglicanism is the third largest Christian community globally, and Anglican Christians are now found in more than 42 national churches spread across 165 countries. While an admittedly small presence in the United States, Anglicans now count nearly 100 million adherents, more than doubling in the past 50 years, the vast majority of whom are in the global south.
New Wineskins for Global Mission is a national gathering of Anglicans sponsored by the New Wineskins Missionary Network (founded three decades ago as the Episcopal Church Missionary Community) that takes place every three years. Despite having no governance component (as a denominational convention would have) and no widely recognizable headline speakers, New Wineskins is among the more consequential gatherings that I cover for IRD. Why? One clergy friend jokingly termed it “Anglican fruit salad”: nearly everyone is here, including mission agencies, relief and development groups, seminaries, clergy and laity.
The conference is expected to draw more than 1,500 registrants to the mountains of western North Carolina, along with a parallel youth event and pre-conferences hosted by various Anglican ministry groups, including Anglican Frontier Missions (AFM), the sending agency that I serve on the board of. We’re hearing from Bishop Yassir Eric, the first bishop of EKKIOS, an Anglican diocese initiated by the Global Anglican Future Conference to reach and minister amongst Muslim-background believers.