Focusing on the modern concept of spirituality, this article analyzes the various strategies available for giving power and potency to inherited forms of Christian language and practice. The first part of the paper discusses modern spirituality and shows how it appeals to an x outside of Christian language and practice to infuse it with spiritual potency. The second section investigates the motive for this modern strategy, illustrating the ways in which inherited forms of Christianity have become mute and ineffective. Anglo-Catholic and Evangelical alternatives are briefly canvased and set aside. With a discussion of Origen, the article ends by commending a spiritual practice that both takes seriously the weaknesses and impediments to faith and at the same time rejects the strategies of modern spirituality.

To answer the question of the title of this article, the words ‘community’, ‘postmodern’, ‘mission’ and ‘paradigm’ are examined in turn and defined. The central place of the ‘local church’ in contemporary missiology is discussed, and the need for a missional and communitarian ecclesiology is argued with positive but critical reference to the approach of the Gospel and Our Culture Network of North America. The article ends by suggesting that ‘community’ can indeed be seen as a mission paradigm for postmodernity, and by posing some key questions facing the local church if it is to become a missional community.

Initially the Church of England was the one recognized church in Australia. As other churches were established, it became the dominant church among a few others. Subsequently it became one Christian denomination among many. Now it finds itself, with other churches, among a plurality of other faiths. This evolution from singularity to plurality has raised such questions as whether truth is one or many, how unity relates to plurality and how a church conveys its message in a plural society. For Anglicans the intensity of these questions has been heightened by the plurality within Anglicanism itself. This article argues that plurality can contribute positively to a fuller perception of truth and that the pressure for unity continues in the face of pluralism, though it may be a unity obtained by excluding dissenting points of view or an inclusive unity which transcends plurality.

This article argues that the Church of England in Australia maintained for most of this period a culture of conservative political and social values. This conservative culture was a consequence of the Church of England being a subordinate partner in the hegemony of the ruling landed classes in England. In Australia, the Church of England, while never legally established, continued to act as though it was, and to strongly uphold conservative political and social values long after its monopolistic connection with the state had any practical reality. Consequently, the Church of England in Australia supported conventional values and solutions to social problems and marginalized Anglicans who challenged its prevailing conservatism. The catalysts for a change in this prevailing institutional culture were the First World War and the Great Depression. These challenges prompted the emergence within the institutional church of the beginnings of a more cautiously critical outlook towards the social status quo.

The paper introduces the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, popularly known as ‘the Circle’ begun in 1989, and the issues they raise for theological discussion. The Circle sets out to recreate and retrieve women's stories so that they become an integral part of the story of the Church and of Africa as a whole. The Circle and its methodology is set within the ecumenical and multi-faith context of its membership. The range of studies undertaken by its members is reviewed here. These come under four general headings: Biblical and Cultural Hermeneutics; Religion in Pluralistic Cultures; Theological and Ministerial Formation for Women; and Women in Religion, which focuses on the stories of women and religion in Africa.

For Hooker's opponents, sacraments could only be human actions designed to further the homogeneity of that community of uniform spiritual achievement which is the holy congregation. Hooker, on the other hand, affirms the possibility of uneven, confused faith, even the confused ecclesial loyalties of the ‘church papist’, as something acceptable within the reformed congregation. This is entirely of a piece with the defence of a liturgy that is more than verbal instruction. Hooker traces these two issues to a Christology which is centred upon divine gift and ontological transformation, and a consequent sacramental theology which affirms the hiddenness but effectiveness of divine presence and work in the forms of our ritual action.