Anglican Church in North America

Heritage

Formed at Bedford, Texas in June 2009, gathering congregations and whole dioceses that had left the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada in the realignment that followed the 2003 consecration of a bishop in a same-sex relationship. Those who left said the issue beneath the issue was the authority of Scripture; the Episcopal Church gives its own account, and both are told in earnest. For years many of these congregations sheltered under provinces in Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda and the Southern Cone — a striking inversion in which the global South sent bishops and missionaries to North America. Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh was the first archbishop, and the GAFCON movement of global South provinces recognized the new province from its birth.

Theological family

Classically Anglican and consciously evangelical-plus-charismatic-plus-Anglo-Catholic: the Thirty-Nine Articles, the creeds, and the Jerusalem Declaration of 2008, held together with a stated commitment to the Bible as the church's final authority. It spans low-church evangelicals, charismatics and high sacramentalists on purpose.

Who decides what

Episcopal: bishops in dioceses, a College of Bishops, a Provincial Council and Assembly, and an archbishop elected for a term. Dioceses vary meaningfully in practice — most visibly on the ordination of women to the priesthood, which each diocese decides for itself; none consecrates women as bishops.

What a first-time visitor would find

A first-time visitor might find a formal liturgy from the 2019 Book of Common Prayer with vestments and weekly Eucharist, or a church-plant in a school gym with a worship band that lands in the same eucharistic prayer. Common threads: the creed, confession, communion most weeks, and an unhurried seriousness about liturgy even when the room is casual.

What it has always cared about

The authority of Scripture; church planting as the province's stated reason for existing (it was founded with a goal of a thousand new congregations); the recovery of catechesis; and communion with the global South as a defining relationship rather than a diplomatic courtesy.

Its gift to the wider church

ACNA gave American Christianity its largest living experiment in realignment without dissolution — proof that a communion-wide dispute could produce a functioning new province rather than scattered independents — and its 2019 Book of Common Prayer has been taken up by worshipers well beyond its membership.

Commonly confused with

With the Episcopal Church constantly — same prayer-book lineage, separated since 2009, and a visitor who cares about the differences should ask, because the two bodies give different answers about why they parted. Also with the Continuing Anglican churches of 1977, an earlier and separate departure that ACNA did not absorb.

Range of views inside it

Dioceses differ on women's ordination to the priesthood, on churchmanship from revivalist to Anglo-Catholic, and on how much charismatic practice shapes worship. What does not vary is the Jerusalem Declaration baseline and the episcopal structure.

Where Anglican Church in North America churches are on the map

1 Anglican Church in North America congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.

• Virginia — 1

Moments this body was part of

• 2009 — The Anglican realignment

  After years of dispute within the Episcopal Church over Scripture and sexuality, departing dioceses and congregations — joined by missionary jurisdictions planted by African and Southern Cone provinces — formed the Anglican Church in North America at Bedford, Texas in 2009. The realignment inverted the old missionary map: provinces once evangelized from the West planted churches in America.

  Painful as the split is, it carries a remarkable fact: the global South church now sends missionaries here. The mission field and the missionary have traded places.