The first time I knelt to receive the Eucharist after entering discernment for the diaconate, I felt the gentle press of the kneeler beneath me and the calm presence of the congregation around me. The organ played softly as I waited my turn, and the rhythm of the liturgy held me steady: the priest placing the bread in each open palm and saying, “The Body of Christ, the bread of heaven,” followed by the Eucharistic Minister offering the chalice and saying, “The Blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.” I had learned to love Anglicanism through words, through the rhythm of prayer and the poetry of grace, but that morning it was my body that prayed. My whole being whispered what my lips could not: I am being fed. In that moment, I began to understand that kneeling is a way of life, a posture of learning to receive the gospel again through the hands of others.
Anglicanism has given me much to love. Common prayer joins voices across continents, and sacramentality honors God’s presence in bread and breath. The tradition also bears deep wounds. The same Book of Common Prayer that formed me once traveled through the world as an instrument of empire, proclaiming the gospel in English while silencing other tongues. Beauty and power became entangled, and that contradiction still lives in the church I call home. To live postcolonial Anglicanism requires facing this inheritance with honesty and learning to love the church while trusting that God’s grace exceeds its limits.
Living postcolonial Anglicanism begins with learning to receive. Through study and conversation, I have seen how Christians around the world embody faith in ways that resist imperial expectations. I am drawn to the ways believers in Africa, Asia, and the Americas have reshaped Anglicanism into local expressions of beauty and justice. Their theology, art, and worship remind me that God’s voice belongs to every language and culture. Living this truth unsettles my habits of control and calls me to listen more deeply. Discipleship begins with humility.
Embodiment allows decolonization to move from idea to practice. The body resists abstraction and remembers what words forget. When I bow, when I extend my hands to receive the Eucharist, and when I walk beside those I serve, I practice conversion. Harvey Kwiyani writes that decolonization restores life that empire once suppressed. I see that restoration in small acts of humility, where control gives way to communion and where grace moves quietly through ordinary gestures of love.
The Incarnation itself reveals divine decolonization. The Almighty chose vulnerability and power chose proximity. If God meets the world through a body, then I must also meet the world through mine, through presence and attentiveness rather than authority. Formation becomes most honest when it begins with touch, listening, and compassion. These moments of encounter are where theology breathes. They teach me that ministry grows from participation in divine humility.
I remain within the Anglican tradition because I believe it can learn to pray in new ways. The call is to let common prayer become shared prayer, a language of communion that honors difference. I dream of liturgies that sound like the whole creation: drums and silence, English and Nahuatl, chant and sigh. The collect and the chorus can stand together, each complete in its beauty. Living postcolonial Anglicanism means trusting that God’s grace can hold the dissonance of many voices until they form a new harmony.
This way of life is a continual conversion of the heart. It means noticing where power hides in my habits, whose stories fill my sermons, whose suffering I overlook, and whose gifts I take for granted. It means allowing grace to interrupt efficiency and compassion to outweigh certainty. It means praying for the humility to learn the gospel again from those who carried it through oppression. To live postcolonial Anglicanism is to keep kneeling in awe, repentance, and hope, receiving from God what I cannot control and sharing what I can only hold lightly.
Writing this reflection is part of that learning. I write as someone being changed by the work of postcolonial theology. Each paragraph confesses that I have more to unlearn, and each sentence becomes an act of kneeling. In the end, all that remains is prayer:
God of many tongues and one love,
Teach me to kneel without fear.
When I speak, let my words make room for others.
When I lead, let me remember that You are already there.
Turn our common prayer into a shared song,
a harmony wide enough to hold every accent of Your grace.
Amen.
Under the Fig Tree 