Daily Reading for April 11 • George Augustus Selwyn, Bishop of New Zealand, and of Lichfield, 1878

When George Augustus Selwyn went as bishop to New Zealand, where Queen Victoria had assigned him a large part of Polynesia as well as the two islands of New Zealand itself, he realized the need for synodical forms to be developed to give Anglicanism outside of the Church of England establishment a coherent theological structure. In the twentieth century those synodical forms became the pattern of church polity in all parts of what developed as the Anglican Communion, particularly as churches in Africa and Asia achieved self-government in a way which was often parallel with independence from colonial rule by Britain. With the first Lambeth Conference in 1867, there began the series of Lambeth Conferences which have been a chief means of holding together an increasingly widespread Communion now rooted in many different cultures, and freed from domination first by the British Empire, then by English education and language.

From Love’s Redeeming Work: The Anglican Quest for Holiness, compiled by Geoffrey Rowell, Kenneth Stevenson, and Rowan Williams (Oxford, 2001).