Anglican Church in America

Heritage

Formed in 1991 by a union of Continuing Anglican bodies descending from the 1977 Congress of St. Louis, and serving as the United States branch of the Traditional Anglican Communion, a worldwide family of Continuing churches. Its history includes a dramatic chapter: in the 2000s the TAC petitioned Rome for corporate reunion, and when Rome answered with the Anglican ordinariates in 2009, some ACA parishes and clergy entered the Roman Catholic Church while the ACA itself remained Anglican. Since 2017 it has been in full communion with the Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Province of America and the Diocese of the Holy Cross.

Theological family

Anglo-Catholic within the terms of the Affirmation of St. Louis: the faith of the undivided church, seven sacraments, and a male priesthood, expressed through the classical Anglican formularies.

Who decides what

Episcopal: dioceses with bishops, a House of Bishops, and synods of clergy and laity, within the wider fellowship of the Traditional Anglican Church (as the TAC is now named).

What a first-time visitor would find

The 1928 Book of Common Prayer or the Anglican Missal, with traditional hymns and ceremony, usually in small parishes where liturgy is kept with care.

What it has always cared about

The 1928 Prayer Book as a rule of faith and prayer; catholic order; and the long, sometimes costly pursuit of Christian unity — toward Rome in one era, toward its sister Continuing churches in another.

Its gift to the wider church

Its 2017 concordat with three sister jurisdictions helped mend the Continuing movement's own fractures — a small church modeling the reconciliation the whole tradition preaches.

Commonly confused with

With the Anglican Catholic Church and Anglican Province of America, sister jurisdictions with which it is now in communion but not merged; with ACNA, the separate 2009 realignment body; and with the Roman Catholic ordinariates, where some of its former parishes now live.

Range of views inside it

Parishes range in ceremonial style from Prayer Book simplicity to full missal ceremonial; the remaining body is uniformly traditionalist in doctrine.

Moments this body was part of

• 1977–1978 — The Congress of St. Louis and Continuing Anglicanism

  After the Episcopal Church's 1976 decisions on the prayer book and the ordination of women, nearly two thousand Anglicans met at St. Louis in 1977 and issued the Affirmation of St. Louis; the Continuing Anglican jurisdictions organized the following year, keeping the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. The movement fragmented into several jurisdictions — and four of the principal ones entered full communion with one another in 2017.

  Even a fragmenting movement can mend: the four main Continuing jurisdictions restored full communion among themselves in 2017, forty years after St. Louis.