Anglican Province of America

Heritage

Organized in 1995 under Bishop Walter Grundorf, drawing together parishes whose lineage runs through the American Episcopal Church and the wider Continuing movement that followed the 1977 Congress of St. Louis. Its center of gravity is the eastern United States, with the Diocese of the Eastern United States as its founding see. It holds the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and a churchmanship often described as central — reverent and catholic in order without requiring full Anglo-Catholic ceremonial. In 2017 it entered full communion with the Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Church in America and the Diocese of the Holy Cross.

Theological family

Traditional Anglicanism on the pattern of the Affirmation of St. Louis: the creeds, the sacraments, the male threefold ministry, and the classical Prayer Book as the standard of worship and doctrine.

Who decides what

Episcopal: a presiding bishop, dioceses and synods with clergy and lay representation.

What a first-time visitor would find

A 1928 Prayer Book liturgy — Holy Communion or Morning Prayer — with hymns and moderate ceremony; parishes are typically small and closely knit.

What it has always cared about

The classical Prayer Book inheritance; steady parish life over movement drama; and friendship across the Continuing jurisdictions, of which its 2017 concordat is the fruit.

Its gift to the wider church

With its sister jurisdictions it demonstrated that the Continuing movement's divisions were not permanent — four churches that once organized separately now share altars and holy orders.

Commonly confused with

With the Anglican Catholic Church and Anglican Church in America (in communion, not merged); with ACNA, the larger and separate 2009 body; and with the Episcopal Church, from whose earlier identity all of these departed.

Range of views inside it

Churchmanship ranges from low-central to Anglo-Catholic parish by parish; doctrine holds to the common traditionalist platform.

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.