Anglican Communion

The Anglican Communion is an association of churches around the world that are in communion with the Church of England. The worldwide Anglican Communion membership is approximately 77 million. Included within the communion are the Episcopal Church of the United States, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Nippon Sei Ko Kwai (Japan), and more than 30 other ecclesiastical bodies. The late 20th century saw the communion's greatest growth occur in Africa. Each of the “provinces,” as the national churches are called, is autonomous, determining such matters as who is eligible for ordination. The first decade of the 21st century was a time of increased tension within the communion, as schism was threatened over the ordination of openly gay clergy and the acceptance of women in the office of bishop.

The Anglican Communion recognizes the ordination of deacons, priests, and bishops. Controversy has surrounded the ordination of women in each of these offices. In the 1960s, largely because of the effects of the feminist movement, women were ordained as deacons, although even this ordination created controversy. It was almost a decade later before the first female deacon was ordained at Canterbury Cathedral. In the 1970s, controversy centered on the ordination of women as priests: As early as 1971, the first women were ordained into the priesthood, but it was near the end of the decade before an official resolution advised churches that did not ordain women to do so. Some churches refused, and many believed female ordination would create a split within the communion.

The debate next moved in the 1980s to the ordination of women as bishops. The worst fears of conservative members were realized in 1989, when the Anglican Church of New Zealand consecrated Penny Jamieson as the seventh Bishop of Dunedin. The ordination of Barbara Harris, an African American woman, as bishop by the Episcopal Church, USA, took place later the same year. Less than a decade later, more than 4,000 women priests and at least 10 women bishops were part of the communion. By the 1990s, with a majority of provinces ordaining women as priests and most accepting the ordination of women bishops in principle, if not in fact, the controversy seemed to have subsided.

The storm broke again in 2003, however, when the election of a noncelibate gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire led four dioceses to break with the Episcopal Church and created dissension within the worldwide Anglican Communion. The 2006 election [Page 66]of Katharine Jefferts Schori as the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, USA-making her the only female primate in the communion-worsened tensions. Conservative bishops gathered in Jerusalem in June 2008 for the Global Anglican Future Conference, denying a break with the worldwide communion but calling for the formation of a new Anglican Church in North America and for relegating the Archbishop of Canterbury to history. Disaffected parishes in North America met the same month and formed the Anglican Church in North America. Two months later, Lambeth 2008, an assembly of bishops of the Anglican Communion, convened by the Archbishop of Canterbury, was boycotted by approximately one-third of the bishops in the communion and ended with no resolutions and with growing fear of schism.

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