The presentation by Robert and Abraham was very informative. The history of mission in Africa is mingled with the colonization, slave trade, exploitation and strife. We need to see the mission in new perspectives, free from colonial overtones.
It was interesting to discover, via this class, that the Anglican presence in India is as strong in numbers as it presently is at this time. Much of my information about Kerala comes from the time when I taught with five Roman Catholic nuns from Kerala. The five young women came to serve a suburban church in a Minneapolis suburb at a time when there were few nuns in America. They basically came as missionaries to the United States; and in the process they literally "saved" a parish financially along the way. The warmth and the love that these nuns provided to me in the eight years when I taught at St. Therese can not be totally measured. Three of the five nuns stayed in America for a very long time, and two of them are still here twenty-five years later.
Another observation, which came to me in class during the discussion of inter-marriage between Anglicans and Roman Catholics , was a very personal one. When I married my first husban in 1959 I was Roman Catholic. We had our wedding in an Episcopal Church, and thus I left (or was excomunicated) from the Roman Church. Almost no one at that time was inter-marrying between faiths in those days. Our guest speaker and classmates were firm on the fact that in India today there is to be no inter-marriage. It is important to realize that what they were discribing in India today was the norm in America less than fifty years ago. It is my hope that these small differences in religious denominations will some day not be factors which divide and separate members of families and communities.