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Faith & Church LifeIn a memorial lecture on postcolonial Anglicanism and women’s ministry and leadership, the Hong Kong-born theologian argued that the Communion’s center of gravity has moved to the Global South, and that women have long been driving its growth.
Dr. Kwok Pui-lan, one of the leading voices in Asian feminist and postcolonial theology, delivered a memorial lecture on postcolonial Anglicanism and women’s ministry and leadership, urging the Anglican Communion to stop telling its story as an extension of the British Isles. Anglicans, she said, should learn to hear many voices at once, especially those of women and of churches in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific.
She framed the talk around what she calls a “contrapuntal” reading of Anglicanism. Borrowing from music, where counterpoint layers several melodies at the same time, she argued that studying only the English tradition means hearing just one line. Other people were experiencing Anglicanism in the same period, and their accounts change how the whole tradition is understood.
Watch the Full Lecture
Introduced as a “titanic figure” in global Anglicanism
Dr. Kwok holds a PhD from Harvard Divinity School and taught for 25 years at Episcopal Divinity School (EDS) until 2017. She has also taught at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Auburn Theological Seminary and Union Theological Seminary, and served as president of the American Academy of Religion in 2011. From 2017 she held the Dean’s Professorship of Systematic Theology at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, and she has returned to EDS as a Distinguished Scholar.
Her writing career took off in 2000 with Introducing Asian Feminist Theology. She is also known for work that includes:
Dr. Kwok began with her own church, Holy Trinity in Hong Kong, built in the 1930s in Chinese architectural style by Chinese Anglicans who wanted a worship space that looked more like home. Visitors might mistake it for a Buddhist temple. Inside, the cross is surrounded by Chinese symbols of thunder clouds, rain and a good harvest, and the church banner shows a cross resting on a lotus, which Buddhists see as a symbol of purity. It is now a cathedral.
She also recalled that Holy Trinity was where she, as a teenager, saw women ordained as priests in 1971, an event she described as a milestone in the whole Communion.
Anglicanism spread, Dr. Kwok noted, hand in hand with the British Empire, which at its height in the 1920s covered more than 13 million square miles, about a quarter of the Earth’s land. She pointed to the “three Cs” of colonialism: commerce, colonialism itself, and Christianity. Hong Kong was a British colony from 1842 until 1997.
Today the picture looks very different. In 1900 most Anglicans lived in the United Kingdom, but more than half now live in Africa. In the 1970s about 9 percent of Anglicans were in the United States and Canada, and that has fallen to roughly 3 percent. Bishops and primates from larger provinces sometimes ask why they should be listening to the small Episcopal Church or the Church of England, she said. Teaching Anglicanism only through the stories of Hooker, Cranmer, Temple and the Archbishops of Canterbury means studying a tiny minority of the Communion.
She also distinguished between two related ideas. Postcolonial thinking, associated with scholars such as Edward Said and his book Orientalism, looks at British and European empires and how they portrayed the colonized. Decolonial theory, rooted in Latin America, traces colonial origins back to Columbus. Her own work, she said, falls mainly in the postcolonial tradition. She was clear that the Communion is “not yet a postcolonial Anglican communion, far from it.”
Citing Dana Robert, a historian of mission at Boston University, Dr. Kwok argued that the shift in world Christianity should be seen as a women’s movement. Men may hold most formal ordained posts, but women make up the majority of participants, especially in Africa. She focused on four areas where women’s leadership shows up.
Area One
The familiar picture of white missionaries abroad is incomplete. In China, “Bible women” learned to read, taught other women, visited homes and hospitals, and traveled with women missionaries. A book on East Africa tells how local women with little formal education became missionaries to other regions.
Women also organized themselves. The Mothers’ Union, founded by an Englishwoman in 1876, now has about four million members, and in Africa it grew well beyond promoting motherhood into wider social service. The International Anglican Women’s Network, formed in 1996, works for gender equality, an end to poverty and hunger, and women’s economic empowerment.
Area Two
The story begins in Hong Kong, not in the West. Women still cannot be ordained in some parts of the Communion, including Southeast Asia, and she cautioned that ordination alone does not settle deeper questions.
She asked whether churches that ordain women have changed their prayer-book language, their ministry or their hierarchical structures. Her answer was that there is still a way to go.
Area Three
Dr. Kwok drew on African colleagues, including Dr. Esther Mombo of Kenya and Dr. Beverley Haddad of South Africa. They link today’s violence to colonial legacies, including borders drawn arbitrarily at the Berlin Conference, which left ethnic divisions and conflict, and to the combined weight of imperialism and patriarchy. Women also suffered disproportionately during the AIDS and COVID pandemics.
She described safe-church projects aimed at clergy sexual abuse and resources on “redeemer” or transformative masculinity, which calls for changing relations between women and men rather than only lifting up women.
Area Four
She profiled three women educators from different contexts, including Dr. Jenny Te Paa Daniel, the first Māori woman to lead a theological school in New Zealand, and Dr. Esther Mombo, newly appointed vice chancellor of St. Paul’s University near Nairobi.
Dr. Kwok summarized her vision as four “Ds,” set out below.
- 1944The Rev. Florence Li Tim-Oi is ordained in wartime Macau, because male clergy could not reach the congregation. The Archbishop of Canterbury and other bishops objected, the matter went to the 1948 Lambeth Conference, and the bishop who ordained her did not ordain another woman for decades. Chinese male clergy, Dr. Kwok noted, supported her.
- 1971Two women are ordained in Hong Kong, in what she describes as a far less controversial occasion.
- 1974The “Philadelphia Eleven” are ordained in an irregular ceremony in the United States.
- 1989Barbara Harris is consecrated bishop in the Diocese of Massachusetts, the first woman bishop in the Communion.
- TodaySix women bishops serve in Africa, and the Communion has two women primates, in Wales and Brazil.
Dr. Kwok called it a very important question. She noted a proposal to move from a single presiding leader toward regional groupings with rotating leadership, but said that would still depend largely on primates, who are overwhelmingly male. She pointed to the Anglican Congress, which brings in lay people, and to networks such as the International Anglican Women’s Network and the Anglican Indigenous Network as other ways of building communion. She expressed hope that the new Archbishop of Canterbury might open new possibilities.
She said different schools are trying different approaches. EDS, which currently has no campus or regular degree program, offers short courses and responded quickly with webinars on events such as the war in Gaza and the bombing of Iran. She also highlighted contextual Bible study, led in South Africa by Professor Gerald West and Dr. Haddad, in which facilitators listen to congregations rather than lecture, much like Latin American base communities. She suggested online classes across continents as another route, recalling a pandemic-era course whose international participants became its best resource.
Dr. Kwok called the Communion a gift, a tradition with many lines that, if seen that way, can help congregations understand their own situation. Even a small church’s troubles, such as lost jobs and closed factories, are tied to global economic forces. She urged students not to limit themselves, saying God may call them to larger ministries than they expect, and shared her own story: the daughter of barely literate farmers from southern China, she never imagined becoming a theologian in the Communion. She also recommended Barbara Brown Taylor’s Leaving Church to women students on avoiding burnout.
This report is based on a recording of the lecture and an accompanying transcript. Please verify names and titles against the video before publication.
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