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Singapore Mission Consultation Celebrates Anglican Church Planting

A cross-section of American, British, and Australian Anglican groups met face-to-face across four days this month with partners ministering within Southeast Asia, including clergy and deans from a half-dozen countries with budding Anglican churches.

“Planting Future Dioceses,” the Diocese of Singapore’s October 22-25 Missions Consultation Roundtable, met in Bangkok to coordinate support for Anglican ministries in a region with a historically sparse but steadily growing Anglican presence. Churches that were previously expatriate chaplaincies or only recently came into existence are now chiefly ministering through local people.

Among the most geographically expansive churches in the Anglican Communion, the Province of South East Asia stretches from Nepal to Indonesia and ministers amid a population of nearly 497 million. It includes four dioceses located in Malaysia and Singapore, alongside ministry in six mission deaneries overseen by the Diocese of Singapore, including Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, Thailand, and Vietnam. A seventh deanery in Timor-Leste will be admitted to the diocese in November.

While only Nepal is a large deanery, the deaneries have 167 different local churches and 16,899 baptized members, and are located in places outside of the British Commonwealth. Nepal had no local Anglicans until 1999.

Groups present at the conference included the Church Mission Society, Anglican Frontier Missions, New Wineskins Missionary Network, Crosslinks, Anglican Aid, Relay Trust, the Society of Anglican Missionaries and Senders, and the Intercontinental Church Society. Parishes of the Anglican Church in North America and Anglican Church of Canada were also represented.

Hubs of Ministry

Alongside presentations by each mission deanery, participants made a field visit to Lat Krabang Anglican Church, a Thai language congregation inaugurated in 2013 that has its own building and has nearly tripled its Sunday attendance from 40 to 110 since 2022. It was launched by a group of 10 people from Bangkok’s historic Christ Church.

Lat Krabang Church was strategically planted near a metro station along the corridor between highly congested downtown Bangkok and Suvarnabhumi Airport, completed in 2006 and now among the largest air-traffic hubs in Southeast Asia. The congregation’s first permanent building was constructed in 2016, and plans are underway for a kindergarten, an Anglican Church in Thailand office building with guest housing, and a 300-seat church building that is envisioned to one day serve as a diocesan cathedral. Lat Krabang Church has seen strong growth with 16 baptisms year-to-date in a country where less than 1 percent of the population claims Christian faith.

The diocese acknowledges that its church planting methodology isn’t for everyone: gradual and deliberate, it can try the patience of entrepreneurial church planters.

“We don’t just plant churches, we plant a national diocese,” said the Rev. Canon Yee Ching Wah, Dean of Thailand. “It’s not just about buildings, it’s about life passing on life.”

The act of constructing lasting institutions is a slow one, but the prospect is for a future that could outlast individuals.

The model is seen in Thailand, where “hub” cities are identified for their church-planting potential, weighing factors like an airport (if more than a three-hour drive from Bangkok), at least one university, a growing population influx, and a means — such as English language instruction — by which a congregation can serve the broader community in a “pioneering” phase. Like spokes on a wheel, mission congregations can then be planted out of the hubs in smaller communities, such as hillside villages.

In some deaneries, diaspora communities have also been fertile ground for mission work. The Deanery of Indonesia has a Farsi-language congregation reaching Persians in Jakarta, while the Church of Christ Our Peace in Cambodia’s capital of Phnom Penh has Khmer and Mandarin congregations of 90 persons each. The latter gives financially on the same level as the much larger English-speaking international congregation.

Among the surprises, said the Rev. Steven Seah, Dean of Cambodia, has been the arrival of Chinese Christian families quietly seeking to homeschool their children, a practice not allowed in mainland China. These Chinese families, while previously unfamiliar with Anglicanism, are theologically grounded and on guard against both theological revisionism and prosperity gospel teachings. They find Anglicans in Cambodia are adhering to traditional orthodox teaching rather than theological innovations.

‘Creative Access Nations’

Thailand has relatively few Christians, but offers broad freedoms for those conducting Christian ministry. That isn’t the case everywhere in Southeast Asia, where unconventional missionary tactics are sometimes needed.

The Deanery of Laos faces legal restrictions in what it can do through the Church of the Holy Spirit in the capital of Vientiane. Christians there report intimidation and even violence exerted against Christian families and villages. Such places are known in mission circles as “creative access nations,” where Christians must serve in another official “tent-making” capacity, such as business-as-mission or through a language training center established in 1991.

“Every government is concerned with social order,” said the Rev. Ian Dierdan, Dean of Laos.

Even in Nepal, a Hindu monarchy until 2008, the Anglican Church has only recently achieved a sort of government recognition by legally registering as a guthi, a Nepali religious trust for holding properties and furthering the objectives and interests of the trust.

The Anglican Church in Nepal offered among the most promising news, counting 11,316 members and 17 clergy in 2023, and it marks the 25th anniversary of its founding this November. It is on a trajectory to become a diocese in the near future and will be guided by its first local leader, the Rev. Prem Tamang, a member of the Tamang people group, in 2025. Previous deans of Nepal have been American or Singaporean clergy.

Partnerships

The Consultation hosted a meeting with recognized mission partners of the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans (GSFA) who aspire to explore future mission initiatives in the GSFA family. South-to-South partnerships were cheered, with the soon-to-be inaugurated Deanery of Timor-Leste, once a Portuguese colony, receiving 100 Portuguese language prayer books provided by the GAFCON-affiliated Anglican Church in Brazil.

Benefits from partnership flow in both directions and can be transformational.

“Our people begin to see what the Kingdom of God looks like in its diversity,” said the Rev. Canon Kimberley J. Beard, a priest at St. Paul L’Amoreaux Church in the Anglican Church of Canada’s Diocese of Toronto who has participated in the Consultation before.

“We face similar issues with people who are secular in orientation,” Beard said of a commonality between Singapore and Canada, also identifying parallels between the mission deaneries and a large immigrant population in Toronto. Beard’s parish has provided school supplies for students from the Karen ethnic minority in Thailand and has recruited for short-term missions there.

“Since its inception, the purpose of the Consultation has been to dialogue, to facilitate networking, to update and renew commitment, to share ongoing missiological learnings so that the missions of the Church can grow from strength to strength and for the future planning of the mission initiatives of the deaneries,” said Dr. Titus Chung, Archbishop of Southeast Asia and Bishop of Singapore, in his welcoming comments.

For all the discussion of missiology, ecclesiology, and best practices in the strategic planting of churches, there was still an overriding sense at the Mission Consultation that the work of each deanery is guided by a greater hand. As Beard said, “The Holy Spirit works across all boundaries.”

“Please don’t think What a great diocese. Rather, What a great God,” said Rev. Jonathan Wong, Dean of Vietnam.

Jeff Walton
Jeff Walton
Jeff Walton is communications director and Anglican program director for the Institute on Religion & Democracy in Washington, D.C.

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