Lambeth: In the Background

"The average Anglican in our world today is black, female and in her late teens or early twenties."

So notes Cathy Ross, an Oxford missiologist, in an essay that helps set the scene for the G.A.S. Most of what she says will be familiar to anybody who studied world missions in seminary, or has bothered to read much of anything by Philip Jenkins. But it is still worth a look.

Here's the core, which we in the secularized West forget only at our peril: "The heartlands of the Christian Church are no longer in the West, but in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia."