What Is the Anglican Church?

What is the Anglican Church?

The Anglican Church is the worldwide family of churches that grew out of the Church of England and share its pattern of worship, its ministry of bishops, priests and deacons, and its use of the Book of Common Prayer. It is not a single institution with a single head. It is a communion of self-governing churches that recognise one another.

That last point is the one newcomers most often miss, and it explains nearly everything else — why Anglicans in different countries can reach different conclusions, why there is no Anglican equivalent of a papal ruling, and why “what do Anglicans believe?” has a real answer but not a short one.

Where Anglicanism came from

Christianity was in the British Isles for centuries before there was anything called Anglicanism. What made the English church distinct was the sixteenth century.

The break in jurisdiction was legal and political: the Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared the king, not the pope, supreme head of the Church of England. But the church that resulted was shaped by what followed rather than by that act. Vernacular prayer books appeared in 1549 and 1552. Mary I restored communion with Rome. The Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 fixed the shape of English worship. The Thirty-nine Articles reached their final form in 1571, and after the upheavals of the seventeenth century the Act of Uniformity of 1662 annexed the Book of Common Prayer that remains the Church of England’s standard today.

The claim Anglicans make about all this is worth stating plainly, because it is contested: that this was a reform of the existing church in England, not the founding of a new one. Whether you find that persuasive is much of what is at stake in comparing Anglicanism with Rome — which is the subject of a separate comparison.

What Anglicans believe

Scripture, creeds and the formularies

Anglicanism’s working rule is that Scripture is supreme and that nothing beyond it may be required of anyone. Article VI of the Thirty-nine Articles states it:

Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.

The clearest short statement of what Anglicans hold in common is the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, adopted by the American House of Bishops at Chicago in 1886 and passed in modified form by the Lambeth Conference of 1888. It names four things:

1. The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as containing all things necessary to salvation and as the rule and ultimate standard of faith.
2. The Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the latter as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.
3. The two Sacraments ordained by Christ — Baptism and the Supper of the Lord — ministered with Christ’s own words of institution and the elements he ordained.
4. The Historic Episcopate, “locally adapted in the methods of its administration to the varying needs of the nations and peoples called of God into the unity of His Church.”

The Quadrilateral was written to say what Anglicans would need in any reunited church, so it is a floor rather than a full account. Alongside it stand the historic formularies: the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-nine Articles of 1571, and the Ordinal.

On the sacraments the Articles draw a line that surprises people who expect seven. Article XXV: “There are two Sacraments ordained of Christ our Lord in the Gospel, that is to say, Baptism, and the Supper of the Lord.” The other five it calls “those five commonly called Sacraments.” Most Anglican parishes today offer all seven in some form; the Article is about what may be required as necessary to salvation, not about what is available.

Where Anglicans disagree among themselves

Anglicanism has no mechanism for closing a question permanently, so it doesn’t. Visit two Anglican parishes in the same city and you may find markedly different worship, different vocabulary and different convictions about the sacraments. This is usually described as churchmanship, and it runs roughly from Evangelical through Broad Church to Anglo-Catholic.

Nobody should pretend this is only richness. It is also the source of the divisions that have split Anglican bodies from one another, particularly over holy orders and sexuality. A newcomer deciding where to worship needs to know that “Anglican” on a sign tells you less than the parish’s jurisdiction and churchmanship do.

How Anglicans worship

The distinctively Anglican thing is common prayer: a shared liturgy that the whole congregation prays from a book, in a language they speak, in a pattern that repeats daily and annually.

That pattern has three parts. The daily office — Morning and Evening Prayer — works through the psalms and reads the Bible on a fixed cycle, and is prayed by clergy and laity alike. The Eucharist is the principal Sunday service in most parishes. The church year moves through Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Trinity, with the readings and prayers set accordingly.

The practical consequence is that Anglican worship does not depend on the minister’s personality or on how anyone present is feeling. You can pray the daily office yourself, from the 1662 or 1928 book, without a priest and without a congregation.

The Church of England and the wider Communion

The Church of England is one church among many, not the head of the others. The Anglican Communion comprises 42 self-governing member churches, usually called provinces, together with five extra-provincial areas, and the Communion reports around 85 million members worldwide — the large majority now in Africa rather than in England.

Because no province has authority over another, coordination runs through four Instruments of Communion: the Archbishop of Canterbury as a focus of unity; the Lambeth Conference of bishops, first held in 1867; the Anglican Consultative Council, which includes clergy and laity; and the Primates’ Meeting. None of the four can compel a province to do anything. That is a feature of the design, and also the reason the Communion’s disagreements have been so hard to resolve.

Anglicans in North America

The landscape here is more complicated than in most countries, and the names are genuinely confusing.

The Episcopal Church is the Anglican Communion’s member church in the United States, and the Anglican Church of Canada is its Canadian counterpart.

The Anglican Church in North America was founded on 22 June 2009 by conservatives who had left those two bodies. It reported 1,005 congregations and 129,868 members in 2025. It is not a member church of the Anglican Communion, though it is recognised by a number of Communion provinces.

The Continuing Anglican churches are older, dating from the Congress of St Louis of 14–16 September 1977 and the Affirmation of St Louis it produced. They are generally smaller, more uniformly traditional in worship, and typically use the 1928 or 1662 prayer book.

What this means in practice: a parish calling itself Anglican may belong to any of these, and they differ on prayer book, on holy orders and on churchmanship. Check which one before you visit.

Is Anglicanism for me?

Anglicanism suits people who want the historic creeds, the sacraments and a liturgy older than any of us, without a teaching authority that can settle every disputed question by decree. If you find the second half of that sentence a relief, this is a tradition worth your time. If you find it evasive, you should know that now rather than after six months.

Two things are worth doing before deciding anything. Read further — the guided reading paths are ordered for readers coming from a particular background, and the rest of the library covers the prayer book, the jurisdictions and the comparison with Rome in more depth. Then go on a Sunday. No amount of reading substitutes for an hour in a pew.