Continuing Anglican Movement

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The Continuing Anglican Movement is a group of Christian churches which follow the Anglican tradition but which split from one or another province of the Anglican Communion because of its perceived rejection of orthodoxy. The movement originated in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA) and the Anglican Church of Canada. Related churches in other countries, such as the Church of England (Continuing), founded in 1995 after the Church of England approved women's ordination and a new prayer book, and the Anglican Catholic Church in Australia, were established later. The most controversial issues were the decisions made in various countries to ordain women and to make theological changes in new modern-language editions of the Book of Common Prayer.

In 1976, the General Convention of the ECUSA voted to approve the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate and provisionally adopted a revised Book of Common Prayer. During the following year, 1977, several thousand dissenting clergy and laypersons responded to those actions by meeting in St. Louis, Missouri under the auspices of the Fellowship of Concerned Churchmen and adopted a theological statement, the Affirmation of St. Louis. The Affirmation expressed a determination "to continue in the Catholic Faith, Apostolic Order, Orthodox Worship and Evangelical Witness of the traditional Anglican Church, doing all things necessary for the continuance of the same".

Out of this meeting came a new church with the provisional name of Anglican Church in North America. During the process of ratifying the new church's Constitution, disputes developed which split its several dioceses into two American churches and one separate Canadian church. These are the Anglican Catholic Church, the Diocese of Christ the King (later renamed the Anglican Province of Christ the King), and the Anglican Catholic Church of Canada. Several years after this, the United Episcopal Church of North America was founded in opposition to the alleged inhospitality of the other jurisdictions towards Low Churchmen.

The continuing churches are generally Anglo-Catholic in approach, and their liturgies are usually more high church than low church. Most of them use the 1928 Book of Common Prayer that preceded the prayer book adopted by ECUSA in 1979, although some use Missals and other forms. The use of the Authorized Version of Holy Scripture (also known as the King James Version) as opposed to modern translations, is a distinguishing mark of most continuing churches.

The principles of the Affirmation of St. Louis and the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion provide some basis for unity in the movement, but these jurisdictions are numerous and often splinter and recombine. Reports put their number at somewhere between 20 and 40, mostly in the United States. Less than a dozen of the churches popularly called "continuing churches" can be traced back to the meeting in St. Louis.

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Other Anglican churches

Other bodies not in communion with Canterbury include the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) in the United States, which left the Episcopal Church in 1873 in opposition to the advance of Anglo-Catholicism; the Free Church of England, which was founded in 1844 for similar reasons; and the Anglican Orthodox Church, another Low Church body that was founded in 1963.

These churches are not always considered to be Continuing Anglican churches, although the REC has recently moved to associate itself more closely with them by entering into agreements with several continuing churches, the Anglican Province of Nigeria, and with conservative elements in ECUSA itself. The REC has signed a concordat of intercommunion with the Anglican Province of America, a largely Anglo-Catholic Continuing body. This agreement projects a formal merger of the two churches by 2008.

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External links

The following is a list of churches commonly called "Continuing Anglican," with the approximate number of North American parishes shown in parentheses. Some have additional affiliates in other countries.

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See also

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