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Recommendation 11
Missionary Bishops and Missionaries of Various Branches
Your Committee have considered the case of missions in countries not under English or American rule, and they recommend as follows:
- In cases where two bishops of the Anglican Communion are ministering in the same country, as in China, Japan, and Western Africa at the present time, your Committee are of opinion that under existing circumstances each bishop should have control of his own clergy, and their converts and congregations.
- The various bishops in the same country should endeavour, as members of the same Communion, to keep up brotherly intercourse with each other on the subject of their missionary work.
- In countries not under English or American rule, the English or American Church would not ordinarily undertake to establish dioceses with strictly defined territorial limits; although either Church might indicate the district in which it was intended that the missionary bishop should labour. Bishops in the same country should take care not to interfere in any manner with the congregations or converts of each other.
- It is more undesirable that either Church should for the future send a bishop or missionaries to a town or district already occupied by a bishop of another branch of the Anglican Communion.
- When it is intended to send forth any new missionary bishop, notification of such an intention should be sent beforehand to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the Presiding Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America, and to the metropolitan of any province near which the missionary bishop is to minister.
[NOTE: The Lambeth Conference of 1878 did not adopt any formal Resolutions as such. The mind of the Conference was recorded by incorporating the Reports of its five Committees, received by the plenary Conference with almost complete unanimity, into an Encyclical Letter which was duly published. Recommendations embodied in the Committee Reports were evidently accorded equivalent status to formal Resolutions, and they are reproduced here as they appeared in the course of the Encyclical Letter, under appropriate reference.]
