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In recent years, the Five Marks of Mission have attained an omnipresence in Anglican and Episcopal thinking. At the General Conventions of the Episcopal Church in 2012 and 2015, the Marks formed the outline of the budget. The United Thank Offering of the same Church structures its grants in terms of this understanding of mission. In the Church of England, candidates for ordination are asked about the Five Marks at bishops’ advisory panels. At the 2016 meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), one resolution proposed that the Five Marks be considered a fifth instrument of communion. The Marks are displayed, in five languages, on the Anglican Communion’s website.2 This definition of mission – to proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom; to teach, baptize, and nurture new believers; to respond to human need by loving service; to transform unjust structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and pursue peace and reconciliation; and to strive to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth – is, in parts of the Communion, ubiquitous.
Despite their central role in Anglican thinking about mission, little attention has been paid to the history, development, and theology of the Five Marks of Mission. While it is often noted that this definition was formulated at meetings of the ACC in 1984 and 1990, it is rarely noted that neither meeting referred to the list as ‘marks of mission’. Nor is the strong influence through a handful of African bishops of global ecumenical and evangelical debates about mission on the formation of the Five Marks of Mission noted. Most significantly, few Anglicans have asked whether a three-decade-old understanding of mission that was a response to a particular set of theological concerns is best suited for a global Communion in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The use of the Five Marks of Mission in recent years should be seen as the latest invocation of a mission ‘slogan’ in the post-war Anglican Communion that can tend to sidestep important questions of contextualization and critical engagement in mission.
In this paper, I investigate the emergence of the Five Marks of Mission over 25 years, first as a definition of mission offered by the ACC...