Over at The Anglican Diaspora recently, several forum members discussed the merits of the Elizabethan Settlement. One member there who posts under the handle of "manciple" wrote the following:
Given that this English form of Christianity has now become globalized, even spreading to places which were never part of the British Empire, I would suggest that the Elizabethan Settlement may have been more successful than anyone in the 16th century could possibly have envisaged.
Even as late as the 19th century it was argued that the C. of E. shouldn't send out missionaries as Anglicanism couldn't possibly take root outside of England.
I have to say I agree. While on one level the Anglican Church is a “national” and even “ethnic” church much like the Orthodox churches, the Anglican Church continued to be, even after its reforms, the Church Catholic, and as the Church Catholic not simply the property of Englishmen. The argument of the English Reformers (and of Good Queen Bess herself) was that the Reformed Catholic Church of England was simply the old Catholic Church of the Church Fathers, shorn of many of its unbiblical medieval accretions. What we believe as Anglicans can be believed, and is believed, by Africans, Indians, Latin Americans and other non-white folks. What we believe is simply the one, holy, catholic and apostolic faith without Roman hegemony or Orthodox parochialism. But with the Orthodox and against Rome, however, we believe, as I’ve said, that the Catholic faith is incarnated ecclesially as specific national churches, and so there is a sense in which the original Anglican church is the native church of the Anglo-Saxon peoples and the British Empire. And yet there is another sense in which "Anglican" has nothing to do with Englishness, and that is the fact that it is merely the Catholic, which is to say the universal, faith.