Anglican Province of Christ the King

Heritage

Formed in the immediate aftermath of the 1977 Congress of St. Louis under Robert Sherwood Morse, a Bay Area priest who became its first archbishop, and strongest from California up the west coast. It holds the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and a firmly Anglo-Catholic doctrine of the sacraments and ministry. Morse founded St. Joseph of Arimathea Theological College in Berkeley, across from the university, to train its clergy. Unlike its sister jurisdictions, it did not join the 2017 intercommunion agreement, preferring its accustomed independence while remaining on friendly terms.

Theological family

Anglo-Catholic Anglicanism in the terms of the Affirmation of St. Louis: seven sacraments, the real presence, a male priesthood, and the undivided church's faith as the boundary of what a synod may alter.

Who decides what

Episcopal: an archbishop and diocesan bishops with synods; in practice a closely held, high-touch province shaped by its founder's long tenure.

What a first-time visitor would find

A sung 1928 Prayer Book Mass with vestments, chant and ceremony — worship that takes beauty seriously as an argument for God.

What it has always cared about

Catholic order and sacramental worship; clergy formation done in person and locally; the west-coast persistence of a tradition often assumed to live only in the east.

Its gift to the wider church

It kept a rigorous Anglo-Catholic standard of worship and formation alive on the west coast, and its Berkeley college has trained clergy serving well beyond its own parishes.

Commonly confused with

With the other Continuing jurisdictions of the St. Louis stream — same origin, but the APCK stands outside the 2017 concordat; and with ACNA, the separate 2009 realignment.

Range of views inside it

Parishes vary mainly in scale and music; the doctrinal and liturgical range is intentionally narrow.

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.