In December 2017 the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses To Child Sexual Abuse established by the Commonwealth Government of Australia published its final report. The Church of England, the Anglican Church, were represented and disgraced by behaviour by both lay and clerical officers of church institutions and grossly negligent conduct by a number of bishops were reported. Several bishops, including one archbishop, resigned when this negligence was exposed. The actual offenders are being or have been dealt with by police and church authorities. However the commission had some difficulty in coming to terms with the organisational complexity of the Anglican Church. They worked with the General Synod thinking that it was the national body and had some kind of jurisdiction in relation to the twenty-three dioceses. The reality was that the jurisdiction lay with the dioceses and the General Synod was an arena in which some agreement might be negotiated but from which no certain jurisdiction flowed to the dioceses. When the Commission asked for information from the dioceses about schools one diocese included all the schools in the diocese that described themselves as Anglican, another diocese included only those that came specifically under the jurisdiction of the synod of the diocese. In one sense both were correct depending on how one counted what was the Anglican Church and what counted as an Anglican institution. Such distinctions in a loose voluntary association such as the Anglican Church of Australia presented a real difficulty the Royal Commission. It worked in jurisdictional terms and generally on assumptions that were national in character. For outside bodies such as the government it is not entirely straight forward to identify what is the Anglican Church or even an Anglican body. This becomes a more complex question for Anglican welfare agencies who receive substantial government funding for some of their services. This is even more complicated where entities themselves comprehend a variety of internal sub groups such as schools within a diocesan church schools system. It has not always been so in relations between church and state. In the early years of the colony of New South Wales it was much simpler. The governor represented the state and the Anglican Archdeacon represented the Church of England. In 1829 William Grant Broughton arrived in Sydney as the Church of England Archdeacon. He was responsible for all schools in the colony and was third in seniority in the government. In 1836 he became bishop of the new Diocese of Australia and in the same year lost his monopoly control of schools in the colony and of government financial support for his church. He remained part of the government but with a diminished role. In 1847 his diocese was divided and he became bishop of Sydney but Metropolitan of Australasia. In 1852 he left for England hoping to sort out the problems of colonial churches but he died without achieving this goal. When he left Sydney he was no longer part of the government and had to battle for private support for his church. He was challenged by a growing presence of other churches and more so by dramatic changes in society and the politics of the colony which arrived at local representative government just as he was leaving. Broughton's transition from senior government officer to independent player in a plural environment was neither easy nor comfortable for him. He was not alone in this. The abandonment of convict immigration, which Broughton had strongly supported, had a profound effect on the colony. Older social groups like the 'exclusives' were being challenged by the new men of the rising generation. Shadows of uncertainty clouded hopes for the future for some while others could not wait to embrace what was to come. The middle two decades of the century was a time of great transition that heralded profound changes in the colony and in the place of the Church of England in the colony. Broughton was greeted with gubernatorial splendour and public acclaim when he arrived. When he departed it was a somewhat miserable and lonely affair. His personal circumstances had been marred by personal tragedy and he had given away half his income to support the creation of another diocese. His church reforms for Sydney had been rejected in the midst of public protest and counter petitions to the Queen. When he departed there was no public farewell from the governor. The great social and political currents in the colony in the middle of the nineteenth century enveloped Broughton but he was not to be swept away. He had the intelligence, strength and personal gifts to be a major contributor to the colony. At a memorial event for Broughton the Chief Justice, Sir James Stephen, declared 'There was not one great object for the promotion of civilisation and special advancement in the colony with which he was not connected; there was not one effort to raise its name in the estimation of the world with which his name was not identified'. In England he was entombed in Canterbury Cathedral as a hero of the Church of England and the Empire. This period in the history of Australia has been widely studied and in many respects has become a distinctive turning point by which to interpret succeeding decades and generations. It was a significant period in the sense that major changes occurred which had a profound influence on the future. But the history of societies is more a wandering affair than a series of straight grid lines as if a great matter settled at one point remains a determining force into the future. This mid century period has itself been seen to be marked by some surprising even unexpected turns.The period also draws attention to areas of startling surprise in the longer run. Who at the time could have thought that the long struggle over the control of school education from Bourke in the 1830s to Parkes in 1880 might be totally turned on its head in the second half of the twentieth century by a Commonwealth Government providing finance for science laboratories and then moving on to provide munificent funding for non-government schools. The case of the Church of England in mid nineteenth century New South Wales in relation to some critical social and institutional changes does however present a useful study of how some of the dynamics of memory and hope contribute to informing action in the present. The essays in this volume are concerned with these social and political issues as they affected both the government and the Church of England in the middle of the nineteenth century. On the one hand was the heritage that the Church of England brought to the colony, principally in the person of the archdeacon and later bishop Broughton. But on the other hand were the social and political dynamics that emerged in the colony. The matter was complicated by the fact that these two aspects of life in the colony did not arrive as separate streams. The colonising power was the political entity of the English Christendom, a system in which the clerical and lay elements shared in the government of the kingdom. Not only so but the kingdom was professedly a christian kingdom, indeed in this case a kingdom that professed the faith of the Church of England. Its colony in New South Wales began on the same terms. At one level these essays could be seen as historical in character and intention. They address particular historical events or people and seek to set them in their context. In that respect they participate in the general conversation about mid nineteenth century history of New South Wales. However they are also concerned with a theological endeavour that has to do with the way in which a christian tradition like Anglicanism is sustained through changes in time and place. In that respect they are theological. Christianity is rightly described as an historical religion. That is not only because it has existed over time, but more importantly because it is founded on beliefs about an historical figure, Jesus of Nazareth, who lived in a particular time and place. The belief, central to Christianity, is that Jesus of Nazareth, as articulated by the apostle Peter and by subsequent Christians, is the Christ the Son of the living God. Debates among early christians about what came to be called Christology arise from these roots. How may christians speak of Christ as both divine and human, and in what way. These foundations have meant that christians have had to exist, as they early began to express it, in two worlds or kingdoms: the kingdom of this world and the kingdom of Christ. But this dynamic in Christianity has also meant that christians have had to take the mundane historical reality of their lives seriously and thus also the material culture that they created over the centuries. As a consequence for christians historical interpretation has always paid attention to continuities in history and to the means of transmission in christian culture and faith. Such continuity has been thought of in a variety of terms such as the working of the Holy Spirit to reveal new truths; the memory of things Jesus or the apostles did or said or wrote; memory laden activities like the Lord's Supper or Baptism; arrangements like ministerial order or texts regarded as authoritative or political relations with governments. These are matters that involve theological questions; they are not simply historical developments. The inter-penetration of events and theology remains whether the christian lives in a christendom or some other kind of society. These essays are focussed on a period in which the transition from a Church of England Christendom to a different kind of society was already underway. That transition dynamic shaped the character of significant parts of the conflict described in these essays. These essays do not refer to these changes in the middle of the nineteenth century as if they necessarily set the path ahead into the distant future for either church or state. Rather they are offered as examples of how these Church of England Christians responded to significant changes in their day. In that sense they offer examples of how christians in the twenty first century in Australia might engage with the dramatic cultural changes of their own day.