Anglican Denominations & Communions: A Guide to Global Alignments

The landscape of global Anglicanism can be confusing, even for those well acquainted with it. In a single US city, one can find Anglican churches from two or three different dioceses of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), along with other congregations connected to the Anglican Province of America, the Anglican Mission in the Americas, the Anglican Catholic Church, the United Episcopal Church of North America, and The Episcopal Church.

All present themselves as Anglican. Yet even a little casual digging reveals more than minor differences in worship expression and ethos, including some major variance in doctrine and even disparate definitions of what constitutes the gospel. Matters become more confusing when the Anglican Church in North American and The Episcopal Church both claim to be part of the Anglican Communion while denying that status to the other.

Who are all these groups, and how does a church belong to the Anglican Communion, if such a thing exists?

What is a communion?

Anglicans don’t prefer the term “denomination” to describe their groups, since essentially all Anglicans would say there’s only one Anglican “denomination,” to which all belong. Instead, Anglicans prefer to speak of communions. A better way to understand the Anglican landscape, then, is to consider which of its groups are in communion with each other.

But first, we need to clarify what is meant by a communion.

Communion among congregations

In the ancient and medieval church, communion had two primary referents. On a local level, it referred to individual Christians being in good standing with a Christian community, signified by participation in the Lord’s Supper. The loss of good standing due to unrepentance of notorious sins could result in ex communicatio, or removal from church fellowship signified by the pastor’s refusing to admit the unrepentant person into participation in the Lord’s Supper.

Extending from this local understanding, the second use of communion referred to relationship between congregations. These relationships included groups of congregations under a single bishop (eventually called a diocese), as well as of a diocese to the wider church of that region whose leadership periodically assembled for a synod.

The good standing of a congregation with its bishop was signified by the bishop from time to time presiding at the Lord’s Supper among them. They took communion together. Likewise, the mutual fellowship and goodwill of the diocese with the wider church was signified by their bishop’s participation in the Lord’s Supper at a regional synod or council. Bishops represented their dioceses and stood “in communion” together—in mutual acknowledgement, respect, and affirmation of faithfulness to “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph 4:5). In cases where a congregation or a diocese violated the region’s norms of doctrine, worship, or behavior, correction was exercised by refusing participation in the Supper, effecting an excommunication. The offending parties were “out of communion.”

Communion among Protestants

With similar assumptions, Reformation churches struggled to establish new Communions, or broad coalitions of churches linked by agreement on doctrine and practice. Famously, Martin Luther and Ulrich Zwingli failed to agree on a doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, preventing a unification of German-speaking Protestants and resulting in fragmented Communions. By the end of the sixteenth century, Protestants fell roughly into three Communions:

• Lutherans, who believed in a real presence of Christ located in the bread and wine at the Lord’s Supper, with grace conveyed by eating the sanctified elements
• The Reformed, who believed in a spiritual presence of Christ in believers of the gathered body, with grace conveyed through the act of faithful reception of the signs of the body and blood of Christ
• Zwinglians, who saw the Lord’s Supper as only a memorial meal intended to stir up faith among the participants

Agreement on these eucharistic theologies allowed for a Communion between like-minded churches. In the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (5:8), Richard Hooker situated the Church of England’s eucharistic theology among the Reformed, distinguishing it from the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Zwinglian. As such, pastors from Basel or Strasbourg or Geneva could not only receive communion in English churches but could also be installed as Church of England pastors.

Emergence of an Anglican Communion

How then did multiple churches come into Communion from the Church of England?

British colonial expansion

While the term Ecclesia Anglicanae had long been used to refer simply to the Church of the English people, meaning simply the church on the island of Britain, the modern English adjective “Anglican” first came into common use in the nineteenth century. By this time, the Church of England had become the authorized state denomination, standing among tolerated dissenting denominations and sects including Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Quakers, and more extreme radicals.

Before British colonial expansion, there was also no Anglican Communion. There was simply the Church of England. When colonists began chartering lands overseas, they brought the Church of England alongside overseas English settlers and merchant communities. At different rates, churches of non-English people multiplied through mission efforts. These colonial churches were extensions of the Church of England, and their bishops received letters patent from the crown, which granted them the right of office, even if they were elected by the colonial church.

As things stood in 1850, it could be said that there were three independent Anglican churches in communion together:

• England (including Ireland until 1869), the mother church with high, low, and broad expressions of worship, whose dependents were scattered around the world in British colonies
• Scotland, a high church expression in extreme minority next to the dominant Presbyterian Church of Scotland
• United States, a broad church expression with mixed high and low church influences and persisting as one denomination among many

The term “Anglican Communion” first appeared in 1851 and was used officially at the first Lambeth Conference in 1867.¹ The title and the conference where it became official resulted from the spread of the church in overseas territories of the English.

The Colenso controversy and its consequences

The first Lambeth Conference (1867) and its articulation of an Anglican Communion was prompted by a problem in the colonial church of South Africa. The English Bishop of Natal, John W. Colenso, was charged by his archbishop Robert Gray with teaching heresy by denying the reliability and authority of the Bible.² Though found guilty and inhibited, Colenso appealed the church’s decision to the secular court of the Privy Council. The Communion-altering ruling stated,

The Church of England, in places where there is no Church established by law, is in the same situation with any other religious bodies, in no better but in no worse position, and the members may adopt rules for enforcing discipline within their own body.³

This verdict legally disestablished every colonial Anglican church. Every church that had been founded through mission efforts by the Church of England had then to reconstitute itself as a new Anglican church in the colony. The heretic escaped, as the court ruled Colenso held his position by letters patent from the queen and could not be removed by the church in South Africa.

The first Lambeth Conference (1867)

In the wake of the case, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Longley, called a meeting at Lambeth Palace of all the colonial bishops, plus those of America and Scotland, to consider how the colonial churches could maintain formal relationship with the Church of England that had founded them. The Lambeth Conference of 1867 determined that since rules of governance—called canons—could now not transcend national boundaries, there was a canonical impossibility of authority over foreign churches issuing from the Archbishop of Canterbury or the Church of England. They formally resolved,

That, in order to the binding of the Churches of our Colonial Empire and the Missionary Churches beyond them in the closest union with the Mother Church, it is necessary that they receive and maintain without alteration the standards of Faith and Doctrine as now in use in that Church. That, nevertheless, each Province should have the right to make such adaptations and additions to the services of the Church as its peculiar circumstances may require. (Resolution 8)

The result of the first Lambeth Conference was an Anglican Communion in which authority over doctrine and discipline rested in autonomous national churches and in which Lambeth conferences every ten years would provide a venue for counsel and consideration of common issues, producing non-binding resolutions. Not even the doctrinal statement of the Church of England, the Thirty-Nine Articles, was held as legally binding on national churches. In fact, the Episcopal Church of the United States had never required clergy to subscribe to them.

The Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral (1888)

If not by formal governance or doctrine, then how could an Anglican Communion be recognized?

The next Lambeth conference produced a resolution, the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral of 1888 (so-called because it was first proposed at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in Chicago two years earlier). It began as an effort to invite reunification with non-Anglican bodies but became a cipher for interpreting Anglicanism.

The first three minimal requirements for establishing communion were basic principles of Protestant Christianity, specifying that churches must hold to:

1. “The Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, as ‘containing all things necessary to salvation,’ and as being the rule and ultimate standard of faith.”
2. “The Apostles’ Creed, as the Baptismal Symbol; and the Nicene Creed, as the sufficient statement of the Christian faith.”
3. “The two Sacraments ordained by Christ Himself—Baptism and the Supper of the Lord—ministered with unfailing use of Christ’s words of Institution, and of the elements ordained by Him.”

The fourth principle, which flagged the Anglican church as continuously connected to antiquity, was distinct among Protestant denominations:

1. “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.”

In practice, the quadrilateral located Anglican identity in the fourth distinctive. While the great majority of Anglicans from the Reformation to the nineteenth century had seen bishops as not a necessary feature of a true church but as providing the best governance, the quadrilateral made bishops in the historic succession an innovative key criterion of legitimate Anglicanism.

Recognition and advisory bodies

Following Lambeth 1888, official recognition of a national church’s belonging to the Anglican Communion largely fell to the Archbishop of Canterbury, by means of his invitation to Lambeth Conferences. Those churches in communion with the Church of England, as seen by the invitation, were recognized by all as part of the Anglican Communion.

Subsequently, two other advisory bodies were formed to further strengthen cooperation amongst the Communion: the Anglican Consultative Council (formed in 1971) and the Primates’ Council (formed in 1991).

⛪ Interested in more on Christian traditions?
See our full series on denominations.

Realignment of the Anglican Communion

With no overarching governance nor binding theological commitments, what counted as an Anglican church or Anglicanism became increasingly murky.⁴

Independent Anglican bodies

Networks of churches in both England and the United States that became dismayed by theological drift within the Church of England or The Episcopal Church in the nineteenth century hived off and formed independent Anglican bodies—beginning with the Free Church of England (1841) and the Reformed Episcopal Church (1873) in America,⁵ both of which formed from evangelical opposition to the perceived Roman Catholicizing of the national church.

Other organizations of Anglican churches seeking to hold on to certain threatened convictions branched off to form independent structures. Several groups of Continuing churches, named as such for their claim to continue the faithful stream of The Episcopal Church while the majority abandoned the traditional faith, formed during the 1960s and 1970s. Of these Continuing groups, the Anglican Catholic Church (ACC), Anglican Province of America (APA), Anglican Province of Christ the King (APCK), Holy Catholic Church—Anglican Rite, and Anglican Church in America (ACA) tend to be Anglo-Catholic in doctrine and practice, while the United Episcopal Church of North America (UECNA) is Reformed and the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA) is evangelical and charismatic. All of these organizations accepted the Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral and have long been recognized as valid Anglican churches, yet not part of the Anglican Communion defined by participation at Lambeth conferences.

Additionally, churches that use the Book of Common Prayer for worship or adhere to the Thirty-Nine Articles might also claim to be Anglican. Such churches are often seen as Anglican in style but not ecclesiology.

Doctrinal crisis within the communion

A more dramatic and thorough realignment of the Anglican Communion itself resulted from a failure of the inherited structure to maintain the foundational principle of the Lambeth Quadrilateral: The Holy Scriptures as the revealed Word of God. When American bishops explicitly denied biblical authority, along with pushing for rites to bless same-sex marriages, many leaders of the Anglican Communion began to doubt the basic Christianity of Western bishops and to consider how correction could be effected. At the Lambeth Conference of 1998, the gathered representatives passed Resolution I.10, which affirmed the traditional Christian view of marriage as between one man and one woman, and called for pastoral care for those experiencing same-sex orientation without blessing same-sex unions.

When dioceses in the United States, Canada, and England subsequently elected bishops in homosexual relationships, member provinces of the Anglican Communion were pushed to determine whether and how the church could hold together. After the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, invited the offending bishops of the United States, Canada, and England to the Lambeth Conference of 2008, conservative bishops across the Communion organized an alternative meeting in 2008, the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON) in Jerusalem, to consider how the Anglican Communion could remain in relationship when communion had been broken.

Emerging from the conference, the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008 provided “the basis for the fellowship,” essentially restating the guiding norms of the English Reformation. The conference established a Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans identifiable by adherence to the Jerusalem Declaration. Finally, the gathering called for the formation of new structures to facilitate the Anglican Communion without reference to the instruments that had failed to bring discipline or maintain doctrinal unity, specifically the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Anglican Church in North America was also formally initiated by a resolution of GAFCON 2008.

Competing Anglican communions

Since 2008, two different narratives have claimed to speak authoritatively about what the Anglican Communion is.

The Anglican Communion, Canterbury

Centered on Canterbury, an office called The Anglican Communion maintains that inclusion in the Anglican Communion follows the colonial-era “instruments of unity”—the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference, Anglican Consultative Council, and Primates’ Council.

This explanation is unapologetically institutional, continuing to lack doctrinal or worship standards while resting communion on recognition by the Church of England. On this account, The Episcopal Church, which has departed from historical Christian teaching on Scripture’s authority, is part of the Anglican Communion while the Anglican Church in North America, which holds to the historic doctrine, is not.

Global South Fellowship of Anglicans

The next two groups reject the colonial-era instruments as sufficient for communion and representing the vast majority of Anglicans globally. They have proposed approaches to communion that prioritize doctrinal and worship standards.

The first is the Global South Fellowship of Anglicans (GSFA). GSFA has worked toward a covenantal structure that maintains provincial autonomy together with voluntary submission to an Anglican Covenant.

Some national churches of the GSFA have been reluctant to break communion with Canterbury and the Church of England, while acknowledging the insufficiency of those institutions to maintain unity. Thus, the GSFA approach holds to the traditional structures while shifting leadership to the Global South.

The Global Anglican Communion

The second is the Global Anglican Communion, a global Anglican structure established at a conference of bishops in Abuja, Nigeria, in March 2026. This Anglican structure emerged from the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (GAFCON) which put forward the Jerusalem Declaration and sought to return to the original vision of Anglican unity expressed at the first Lambeth Conference. It draws together all Anglicans who wish to hold to the doctrinal and liturgical inheritance of Anglicanism.

Because inclusion requires only consent to the Jerusalem Declaration, the large majority of the Global Anglican Communion churches are also part of the GSFA. In fact, most leaders of the Global Anglican Communion leadership council are also part of the GSFA leadership.

The Global Anglican Communion definitively rejects Canterbury as the focal point for Anglican identity, instead locating the Communion in the Bible, creeds, and historic formularies of the Anglican Church. It is a traditional and doctrinal proposal rather than an institutional one. This move realigns the Anglican Communion to a shared heritage issuing from the Church of England, through global mission, and ever bounded by biblical authority.

Conclusion

Anglicanism is in the midst of a watershed moment. Many leaders hope that the fragmentary impulse, so common to Protestantism and resulting in denominations, can be reversed by a broad inclusion under basic doctrines and standards of the Anglican tradition. Rather than end up with unrelated denominations, communion can be held together and even expanded as churches in the Anglican tradition hold fast to the historic faith.

Share your thoughts

How would you describe Anglicanism’s “denominations”? Join us in the Word by Word group to share your thoughts.

Benjamin Fischer’s recommended resources

• Fischer, Benjamin. Confessional Anglicanism. Anglican House, 2026.
• Chapman, Mark D., and Jeremy Bonner, eds. Costly Communion: Ecumenical Initiative and Sacramental Strife in the Anglican Communion. Anglican-Episcopal Theology and History. Brill, 2019.

Additional resources on Anglicanism

Related content

• What Is Anglicanism? Its History, Beliefs & Practices
• Anglican History: Reformed, Catholic, or Confused?
• Are Anglicans & Episcopalians the Same? Understanding Their Similarities & Differences
• Anglican Bible Study: The Major Books, Thinkers, and Principles
• 10 Anglican Books You Should Know

1. Paul Avis, “What Is Anglicanism?,” in Stephen Sykes et al., eds., The Study of Anglicanism (SPCK, 1988), 461.
2. The Trial of the Bishop of Natal for Erroneous Teaching, Before the Metropolitan Bishop of Cape Town, and the Bishops of Graham’s Town and the Orange Free State as Assessors (Cape Argus Office, 1863), 2.
3. “Judgment of the Lords of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council,” Long v. Bishop of Cape Town (London, 1866), 159.
4. While independent Anglican bodies emerged only in England and North America, they have mission presence in other countries. Outside of England and North America, only Brazil and South Africa have more than one Anglican body.
5. The REC later joined in the formation of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) in 2009.