ACNA vs the Episcopal Church Explained

1. ACNA and the Episcopal Church: The Short Answer

The Anglican Church in North America is a body of Anglican dioceses and congregations founded in 2009 by people who had left the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada over the authority of Scripture, the doctrine of marriage and the limits of provincial autonomy. The Episcopal Church is the Anglican Communion's province in the United States, recognised as such by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and since 2015 its own marriage canon has provided for the marriage of two people of the same sex. The Anglican Church in North America holds that marriage is the lifelong union of one man and one woman, that a province which changes the received teaching has broken faith with the wider Anglican body, and that the Anglicans who stayed with that teaching remain the Anglicans.

Those three sentences contain the whole dispute. Both bodies use Anglican prayer books, both are governed by bishops who stand in the historic episcopal succession, both recite the Nicene Creed, and both would tell you they are the continuation of the Anglican tradition in North America. They disagree about what makes a church Anglican. The Episcopal Church answers with a relationship: a province is Anglican because it is in communion with the See of Canterbury and takes part in the Communion's four Instruments. The Anglican Church in North America answers with a content: a church is Anglican because it holds the Anglican formularies and the faith they express, and a province that abandons them has walked out of the tradition whatever the official lists say.

Around that disagreement sit three further bodies that this page also covers. GAFCON, the Global Anglican Future Conference, is the international movement that gave the North American realignment its cover and its charter. The Continuing Anglican churches are older, formed in the late 1970s over the ordination of women and prayer-book revision, and they remain separate from the Anglican Church in North America for reasons of their own. The Reformed Episcopal Church is older still, founded in 1873 in a protest running in the opposite direction, against Anglo-Catholic ritual, and it is now a jurisdiction inside the Anglican Church in North America. For the Communion as a whole, its formularies and its structures, see our guide to Anglican beliefs and the Anglican Communion. This page covers the Anglicans standing outside it.

2. How the Realignment Happened, 1976 to 2009

The realignment took a little over thirty years and moved through four distinct stages, each of which left behind a set of churches that are still with us. Understanding the sequence explains why there are several traditionalist Anglican bodies in North America rather than one, and why they have not simply merged.

Stage one: 1976 and 1979

The General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1976 approved the ordination of women to the priesthood and the episcopate, regularising ordinations that had already taken place in Philadelphia in 1974. In 1979 the Convention adopted a substantially new Book of Common Prayer, which set the older 1928 American book aside as the church's standard. For a body of traditionalist Anglicans, chiefly Anglo-Catholic in churchmanship, these two acts changed the ministry and the liturgy at once. They gathered at the Congress of St. Louis in September 1977 and adopted the Affirmation of St. Louis, and the churches that grew from that congress are the Continuing Anglican jurisdictions treated in section 9.

Stage two: 2003 and the Gene Robinson consecration

In 2003 the Episcopal Church's General Convention consented to the election of Gene Robinson, a divorced man living in a same-sex partnership, as Bishop of New Hampshire, and he was consecrated that November. The Anglican Communion's primates had met in emergency session the month before and warned that the consecration would tear the fabric of the Communion at its deepest level. This was the flashpoint that turned a domestic argument into an international one, because Communion provinces in Africa, Asia and South America regarded the consecration as a public repudiation of Lambeth Conference Resolution I.10 of 1998, which had described homosexual practice as incompatible with Scripture while committing the Communion to pastoral care and to listening.

Stage three: cross-border oversight, 2000 to 2007

Congregations that wanted to remain Anglican while leaving the Episcopal Church needed a bishop, and provinces overseas supplied them. The Anglican Mission in the Americas operated under the Province of Rwanda from 2000. The Convocation of Anglicans in North America was created by the Church of Nigeria in 2005. The Anglican Network in Canada formed in 2007 under the Province of the Southern Cone, as did several departing American dioceses. These arrangements broke the ancient rule that a bishop does not exercise jurisdiction inside another bishop's territory, and their sponsors defended the breach as an emergency measure for the sake of the faith, on the model of the missionary bishops the Communion had always sent where there was need.

Four Episcopal dioceses voted to leave the Episcopal Church outright and align with the Southern Cone: San Joaquin in 2007, Pittsburgh, Quincy and Fort Worth in 2008. In each case the Episcopal Church held that a diocese cannot secede, reorganised a continuing diocese under the same name, and went to court. Section 12 sets out how those cases came out.

Stage four: GAFCON 2008 and the founding of ACNA in 2009

In June 2008 Anglican bishops, clergy and lay people from provinces across the Communion met in Jerusalem for the first Global Anglican Future Conference, having judged that the Lambeth Conference of that year would not settle the question. They issued the Jerusalem Statement and the Jerusalem Declaration and called for a new North American province. The Common Cause Partnership, the umbrella that had gathered the separated jurisdictions, ratified a constitution and canons at Bedford, Texas in June 2009, and the Anglican Church in North America came into being with Robert Duncan, formerly the Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh, as its first archbishop. The GAFCON primates recognised it as a province, and a series of Communion provinces followed with declarations of full communion.

3. What the Anglican Church in North America Is

The Anglican Church in North America is a province in structure: an archbishop, a College of Bishops, a Provincial Council, a Provincial Assembly and a set of dioceses, with a constitution and canons ratified in 2009. Two features of its design are unusual and worth knowing, because they explain a good deal of its behaviour.

Its dioceses are not all geographic

Alongside territorial dioceses such as Pittsburgh, Fort Worth and the Carolinas, the province contains non-geographic jurisdictions gathered by affinity, mission history or churchmanship. The Reformed Episcopal Church is one. The Anglican Network in Canada is another. There are dioceses formed out of the old Nigerian and Rwandan mission bodies, and networks for particular liturgical or ethnic constituencies. A single city can therefore contain congregations of several Anglican Church in North America dioceses at once. The design was a condition of the merger, since the founding groups had incompatible histories and would not have submitted to one another's oversight.

Its authority is deliberately limited

The constitution reserves substantial power to the dioceses, and the province cannot easily impose a settlement on a contested question. The framers had watched a national church body use canon law and the courts against dissenting dioceses, and they built the opposite structure. The cost is that genuinely divisive questions, most obviously the ordination of women, stay open for a long time.

Its leadership

Robert Duncan served as the first archbishop from 2009 to 2014. Foley Beach, Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of the South, followed him and also served a term as chairman of the GAFCON Primates Council. Steve Wood, Bishop of the Carolinas, was elected archbishop by the College of Bishops in June 2024. The province's leadership has been contested since late 2025 through its own disciplinary canons, so a reader who needs to know who holds the office today should check the province's current announcements rather than this page. The archbishop of this province is a primate among his fellow bishops with limited jurisdiction of his own, closer to an Anglican metropolitan than to a chief executive.

The province also runs its own seminaries and mission agencies, has planted a large number of congregations since 2009, and reports its congregational statistics annually through its provincial office. We give no membership figure here, because the published counts from the Anglican Church in North America and from the Episcopal Church are compiled on different definitions and are not comparable without care.

4. What ACNA Believes and How It Worships

The Anglican Church in North America states its doctrinal basis in Article I of its constitution, the Fundamental Declarations of the Province, which names seven elements as characteristic of the Anglican Way and essential for membership. They are the canonical books of the Old and New Testaments as the inspired Word of God, containing all things necessary for salvation and standing as the final authority for Christian faith and life; baptism and the Supper of the Lord as sacraments ordained by Christ himself in the Gospel; the godly historic Episcopate as integral to the fullness and unity of the Body of Christ; the historic faith of the undivided church as declared in the Apostles', Nicene and Athanasian Creeds; the teaching of the first four ecumenical councils, with the Christological clarifications of the fifth, sixth and seventh received so far as they agree with Holy Scripture; the 1662 Book of Common Prayer with the Ordinal attached to it as a standard for Anglican doctrine and discipline and, with the books that preceded it, as the standard for Anglican worship; and the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of 1571, taken in their literal and grammatical sense, as expressing the Anglican response to certain doctrinal issues controverted at that time.

Any Anglican province would recognise that list. The distinctive move sits in the constitution's Preamble, which records gratitude to the primates who gathered at Jerusalem in June 2008 and called for a new province in North America, and then affirms the GAFCON Statement and the Jerusalem Declaration issued on 29 June 2008. The canons carry the same appeal forward: the canon on standards of sexual morality and ethics grounds the province's teaching in Holy Scripture, the Lambeth Conference of 1998 and the Jerusalem Declaration. A twenty-first century conference document therefore stands inside the founding text of a province, which is a deliberate statement about where this church believes the centre of Anglicanism now lies.

The Book of Common Prayer 2019

The province published its own prayer book in 2019, drawing on the 1662 book and on the classical American tradition rather than on the Episcopal Church's 1979 revision. It restores older language in the eucharistic prayers, includes a catechism titled To Be a Christian, and provides both traditional and contemporary language forms. Parishes vary widely in ceremonial, from an evangelical service that would be recognisable in a Reformed congregation to a solemn High Mass with incense.

Sacraments and ministry

The province holds the two sacraments of the Gospel, baptism and the Eucharist, as generally necessary to salvation, in the language of the Articles and the catechism, and treats confirmation, ordination, marriage, absolution and anointing as sacramental rites of the Church. Eucharistic doctrine ranges across the historic Anglican spectrum, from a Reformed receptionism to a fully realist account of Christ's presence among Anglo-Catholic parishes. Ministry runs in the three orders of deacon, priest and bishop. Our guides to the Eucharist and the Catholic priesthood set out the Catholic teaching these positions are measured against.

Marriage and sexuality

The canons define marriage as the union of one man and one woman for life, and the province requires its clergy to abstain from sexual relations outside such a marriage. This is the point on which it left the Episcopal Church, and it is the point on which the GAFCON provinces have declared themselves in communion with it. Catholic teaching on the sacrament and its indissolubility is set out in our guide to Catholic marriage.

The doctrinal summary in this section follows the Constitution and Canons of the Anglican Church in North America as published by the province: Article I for the Fundamental Declarations, the Preamble for the Jerusalem Declaration, and the canons on Christian marriage and on standards of sexual morality and ethics for the marriage discipline.

5. Where ACNA and the Episcopal Church Actually Differ

The differences fall into four groups: doctrine, order, structure and standing. The table below sets out the positions as each body states them, and the paragraphs after it explain what the table cannot show.

Positions in this table are taken from each body's own published constitution, canons and prayer book. The Anglican Church in North America publishes its constitution, canons and the Book of Common Prayer 2019; the Episcopal Church publishes its Constitution and Canons and the resolutions of General Convention, including the 2015 marriage canon revision. Where the two bodies describe the same event differently, both descriptions appear in the sections above.

What the table cannot show

Neither body is uniform. The Episcopal Church contains a group of traditionalist bishops and parishes, organised as the Communion Partners, who hold the received doctrine of marriage and remain within the church, and its 2018 arrangements were designed to keep them there while guaranteeing same-sex couples access to marriage rites in every diocese. The Anglican Church in North America contains dioceses that would recognise almost nothing of each other's ceremonial and disagree sharply about women in orders. Treating either as a bloc misdescribes both.

The deeper difference is about how doctrine changes. The Episcopal Church holds that a synodical church can develop its teaching through its own constitutional processes, and that the 2015 canon change was such a development, reached lawfully after decades of study, prayer and debate. The Anglican Church in North America holds that the deposit of faith is received rather than legislated, and that no synod has the authority to reverse what Scripture and the universal Church have taught. That is a disagreement about the location of authority, and it is the same disagreement, in a different idiom, that separated Rome and the Reformers in the sixteenth century. See our guide to Sacred Tradition and how doctrine develops.

6. The Episcopal Church's Own Account of Itself

A page written from a Catholic position still owes the Episcopal Church an accurate hearing, and its own case is more coherent than its critics usually allow. Set out in its own terms, it runs as follows. Our separate guide to Episcopal Church beliefs covers that church's doctrine, worship and governance in full; what follows here is only what is needed to weigh the argument made against it.

The Episcopal Church understands itself as a church of the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral: the Holy Scriptures as containing all things necessary to salvation, the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds as the sufficient statement of Christian faith, the two sacraments ordained by Christ himself, and the historic episcopate locally adapted. On that account it has changed nothing essential. It baptises into the same faith, ordains into the same threefold ministry, and celebrates the same sacraments with the same words of institution. Its clergy recite the creeds without reservation at every Eucharist.

Its argument for the changes rests on the baptismal covenant in the 1979 prayer book, which asks the baptised to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to respect the dignity of every human being. Read alongside the Church's long record of revising its practice, including its abandonment of the defence of slavery and its recognition of the ministry of women, the church concluded that the full inclusion of gay and lesbian Christians in the life and orders of the church follows from what it already professes. It regards the shift as a legitimate development, tested through years of study and reached by the constitutional means the church has always used.

On authority, the Episcopal Church holds that the Anglican Communion is a fellowship of autonomous provinces bound in mutual affection rather than a jurisdiction, that no province has power to legislate for another, and that a province acting within its own canons has not broken any Anglican rule. It has stayed at the Communion's tables through the consequences that followed, accepting restrictions on its representation at the Instruments after 2016 while continuing to fund and take part in Communion bodies.

The Episcopal Church has also argued that the cross-border interventions of 2000 to 2008 were the real breach of Anglican order, since a bishop entering another bishop's territory without invitation violates a rule that goes back to the Council of Nicaea. Its critics answer that a rule protecting bishops cannot be used to trap the faithful under a bishop who has abandoned the faith. Both sides can quote the canons at each other with some justice, and that stalemate is precisely what happens to a communion with no agreed way to settle a contested doctrine.

7. What Is GAFCON?

GAFCON is the Global Anglican Future Conference, an international movement of Anglican provinces, dioceses, networks and congregations that first assembled in Jerusalem in June 2008. It was convened by primates and bishops who had concluded that the Communion's existing structures would not address what they regarded as a crisis of faith, and who wanted a gathering that laity and clergy could attend rather than bishops alone. It has met three times since: Nairobi in 2013, Jerusalem again in 2018, and Kigali in April 2023.

The Jerusalem Declaration

The 2008 conference issued the Jerusalem Statement, with the Jerusalem Declaration attached as its doctrinal core. The Declaration runs to fourteen clauses and reads as a summary of what its signatories take the Anglican faith to be. Its substance covers the Bible as the Word of God written and the final authority in matters of faith, the three creeds, the four ecumenical councils and the teaching of the Fathers, the Thirty-nine Articles as containing the true doctrine of the Church, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a true and authoritative standard of worship, the threefold ministry, the uniqueness of Christ as saviour, the duty of evangelism and of care for the poor, marriage as the union of one man and one woman with abstinence outside it, and the expectation of Christ's return in glory.

The Declaration also states two structural claims that made it controversial. It rejects the authority of churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith in word or deed, while declaring a desire for the salvation of such people. And it affirms that the members remain in the Anglican Communion while regarding their fellowship as founded on the faith set out in the Declaration rather than on recognition by any see.

How GAFCON is organised

Authority in the movement rests with a Primates Council, drawn largely from provinces in Africa, Asia and South America, together with a general secretariat and a network of branches. Its constituent provinces include Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan and the Anglican Church of Chile, among others, and its supporters point out that these provinces contain a very large share of the Anglicans who actually attend church on a Sunday. That last claim is worth handling carefully. Comparing Anglican populations across provinces is notoriously difficult because provinces count members on different bases, and this page gives no figures rather than repeat contested ones.

What GAFCON is for

GAFCON describes itself as a movement for the renewal of the Communion rather than a replacement of it. In practice it performs three functions. It recognises new jurisdictions, as it did with the Anglican Church in North America in 2009 and with bodies in Brazil, New Zealand and Europe since. It provides a table at which provinces that have broken communion with Canterbury still meet each other. And it produces the doctrinal statements that its member churches then adopt, which is how a conference document became a fundamental declaration of a North American province.

Jude 3 is the verse GAFCON returns to most often, and its force is real. The apostolic faith is described there as delivered once for all, as a deposit to be guarded rather than a position to be revised. A Catholic reading agrees with that entirely. Where a Catholic reading parts company is on who guards it and by what authority, which is the subject of section 14.

8. The Global South Fellowship and the Kigali Commitment

The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches is a second traditionalist alliance, older than GAFCON in its origins and overlapping with it in membership without being identical to it. It grew out of the South-to-South Encounters that began in Kenya in 1994, adopted a covenantal structure in 2019, and includes provinces that also belong to GAFCON alongside others that have preferred to work within the Communion's structures. Its emphasis has been on building an orthodox conciliar order inside the Communion rather than beside it.

What happened in February 2023

In February 2023 the General Synod of the Church of England voted to commend Prayers of Love and Faith, a set of prayers for use with same-sex couples, while leaving the church's doctrine of marriage formally unchanged. The distinction mattered a great deal in England and very little abroad. The Global South Fellowship issued an Ash Wednesday Statement declaring its communion with the Church of England impaired and stating that it could no longer regard the Archbishop of Canterbury as the leader of the global communion of churches.

The Kigali Commitment

Two months later the fourth GAFCON conference met in Kigali, Rwanda, and issued the Kigali Commitment. Its central move was to state that GAFCON and the Global South Fellowship no longer recognised the Archbishop of Canterbury as first among equals, and that the Anglican Communion's Instruments had failed to guard the faith and required resetting. The Commitment called for a reordering of the Communion around the provinces holding to the received teaching, and pledged its signatories to continue as Anglicans within a fellowship defined by that teaching.

The claim being made is precise and worth stating exactly. The Kigali Commitment does not say that the See of Canterbury has ceased to exist or that its bishop is no longer a bishop. It says that an office whose whole function is to be a focus of unity in the truth cannot perform that function once its holder's own province has departed from the truth, and that the office therefore forfeits the deference it is owed. That is the argument this page exists to explain, and it is an argument Catholics should be able to state accurately, because a version of it is made against Rome by other bodies. Our guides to the Society of St Pius X and to sedevacantism deal with the versions aimed at the papacy.

Justin Welby announced his resignation as Archbishop of Canterbury in November 2024, following the Makin Review into the Church of England's handling of abuse by John Smyth. The GAFCON and Global South objection is structural rather than personal, and it was addressed to the office and the province rather than to the man, so a change of occupant does not resolve it.

9. Continuing Anglicanism and the Affirmation of St. Louis

The Continuing Anglican churches are the jurisdictions that separated from the Episcopal Church in the years after 1976, and they are a genuinely distinct movement from the realignment of the 2000s. Their charter document is the Affirmation of St. Louis, adopted by the Congress of St. Louis in September 1977, and their self-description is in the word continuing: they hold that they have carried on the Anglican church that the Episcopal Church left behind.

What the Affirmation says

The Affirmation of St. Louis sets out a traditional account of Anglican faith and order. It receives the Holy Scriptures, the three creeds, the seven ecumenical councils of the undivided Church, and the seven sacraments. It affirms the ministry of bishops, priests and deacons as always confined to males, and it treats the 1928 American Book of Common Prayer as the standard of worship. It states that the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, by their actions, had departed from the received faith and orders, and that those who continue in that faith are therefore not the ones who left.

The Affirmation's reception of seven councils and seven sacraments places it further toward the Catholic end of the Anglican range than the Jerusalem Declaration, which receives four councils and follows the Articles on the sacraments. That difference is not accidental. Continuing Anglicanism is predominantly Anglo-Catholic in churchmanship, and the realignment that produced the Anglican Church in North America was predominantly evangelical and charismatic with an Anglo-Catholic minority.

The main jurisdictions

• The Anglican Catholic Church, organised in 1978 in the immediate aftermath of the Congress, with dioceses in North America and a substantial presence in Africa and India.
• The Anglican Church in America, the United States member of the Traditional Anglican Communion, which was formed as an international body in 1991.
• The Anglican Province of America, which took its present form in the 1990s out of earlier Continuing bodies.
• The Diocese of the Holy Cross, a smaller jurisdiction of the same tradition.
• The Anglican Province of Christ the King and the United Episcopal Church of North America, among other bodies of similar origin.

The Continuing movement's besetting difficulty has been fragmentation, and it knows it. Jurisdictions divided repeatedly through the 1980s and 1990s over personalities, oversight and the exact terms of the Affirmation. The most significant recent movement has run the other way: in October 2017 the Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Church in America, the Anglican Province of America and the Diocese of the Holy Cross signed a concordat in Atlanta committing themselves to full communion and to working toward organic unity. They are sometimes referred to collectively as the G4 jurisdictions.

Why they are not in ACNA

The obstacle is orders. The Continuing churches hold that only men can be ordained at any order, and they regard a jurisdiction that ordains women priests anywhere as having accepted a defective ministry. The Anglican Church in North America ordains women as deacons everywhere and as priests in some dioceses. A Continuing bishop cannot recognise those priests, and so cannot enter communion with a province that does. There have been cordial relations, shared conferences and some parish transfers, and the structural obstacle has held.

The Roman option

Part of this movement has looked to Rome. In October 2007 the College of Bishops of the Traditional Anglican Communion signed a petition at Portsmouth seeking full corporate communion with the Catholic Church. Benedict XVI responded in November 2009 with the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, which created Personal Ordinariates allowing groups of Anglicans to enter the Catholic Church while keeping elements of their liturgical and spiritual patrimony. The Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St Peter was erected for the United States and Canada on 1 January 2012. What Rome offered was reception into the Catholic Church rather than the corporate union between two churches that the petition had envisaged, and a number of Traditional Anglican Communion parishes and clergy took it while the jurisdiction itself continued. Our guide to the Anglican Ordinariate explains how the Ordinariates work in practice.

10. The Reformed Episcopal Church, Founded 1873

The Reformed Episcopal Church is the oldest of the bodies covered here and it was founded in a protest running in the opposite direction from all the others. George David Cummins, Assistant Bishop of Kentucky in the Protestant Episcopal Church, resigned in November 1873 and organised a new church in New York City the following month. His grievance was the growing influence of the Oxford Movement and the Anglo-Catholic ritualism it had produced: the doctrine of baptismal regeneration as it was then being taught, the language of priesthood and altar, eucharistic vestments and ceremonial, and the treatment of the ordained ministry as a sacrificing priesthood.

The immediate occasion was an ecumenical communion service in New York in October 1873, in which Cummins took part alongside ministers of other Protestant churches and was publicly rebuked for it. The Declaration of Principles adopted at the founding retained the episcopate as an ancient and desirable form of church polity while denying that it is of divine right, affirmed the Bible as the sole rule of faith, and condemned as errors the teaching that the Christian ministry is a priesthood, that the Lord's Table is an altar on which a sacrifice is offered, and that the presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper is a presence in the elements.

The church's own prayer book followed the 1785 proposed American book and the 1662 tradition, stripped of the phrases the founders objected to. For most of its history it was a small, evangelical, low-church body with congregations concentrated in the mid-Atlantic states, the South and Canada, and it ran its own seminary in Philadelphia.

How it ended up in ACNA

Through the twentieth century the Reformed Episcopal Church moved gradually back toward the Anglican mainstream, restoring elements of catholic order and language its founders had removed, and by the 1990s it was in conversation with the traditionalist Episcopalians who would later form the Common Cause Partnership. It joined that partnership and became one of the founding jurisdictions of the Anglican Church in North America in 2009, where it functions as a non-geographic sub-jurisdiction with its own bishops, canons and prayer book tradition. It does not ordain women.

11. Women in Orders: The Unsettled Question Inside ACNA

The ordination of women is the one question the Anglican Church in North America has been unable to settle, and its handling of it tells you a great deal about the province. Article VIII of the constitution forbids the province to make any canon abridging the authority of a diocese over its own practice regarding the ordination of women to the diaconate or the presbyterate, so both questions are answered diocese by diocese. Many dioceses ordain women as deacons and a number ordain women as priests, while others keep an entirely male clergy. The canons require a candidate for the episcopate to be a male presbyter, so only men are consecrated as bishops.

This arrangement is usually called dual integrity, and it was a condition of the 2009 merger. The founding groups arrived with settled and opposite practices. The former Episcopal dioceses of Fort Worth and Quincy and the Anglo-Catholic constituency generally had never ordained women priests and regarded the practice as impossible rather than inadvisable. The Nigerian and Rwandan mission bodies and much of the evangelical constituency had women priests already serving and would not disown them.

A provincial task force studied the question for five years, and in September 2017 the College of Bishops issued a statement on the ordination of women. It described the ordination of women to the priesthood as a recent innovation to Apostolic Tradition and Catholic Order, agreed that there is insufficient scriptural warrant to accept women's ordination to the priesthood as standard practice throughout the province, and acknowledged that individual dioceses hold the constitutional authority to ordain women to the priesthood. The statement changed no diocese's practice, and the disagreement it described continued. In November 2017 Jack Iker, then Bishop of Fort Worth and one of the province's founding bishops, declared his diocese in impaired communion with the dioceses that ordain women priests. In 2024 clergy from across the province published an open letter, the Augustine Appeal, asking the College of Bishops to move to a male-only priesthood, and the province's officers pointed out that the change would require amending the constitution.

The 2017 statement is published by the Anglican Church in North America as the College of Bishops Statement on the Ordination of Women, dated 8 September 2017. The constitutional provision is Article VIII of the province's constitution and the requirement that a candidate for bishop be a male presbyter is in its canons on holy orders. Bishop Iker's declaration was made in his address to the 2017 convention of his diocese and reported at the time by Anglican Ink.

Why the compromise is unstable

The instability is structural. If the priesthood is closed to women in principle, then the ordinations performed in permitting dioceses are not merely irregular but null, and the eucharists celebrated by those priests are no eucharists at all. If the priesthood is open to women, then the refusing dioceses are unjustly excluding half the baptised from a ministry Christ opens to them. A question of this shape does not have a middle position, and the province has agreed to hold both answers rather than choose.

Catholic teaching does not have this problem, because the question was answered. In the 1994 apostolic letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis, John Paul II declared that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the faithful. The Catholic position rests on the constant practice of the Church, the example of Christ in choosing the Twelve, and the Church's judgment that she is bound by what she has received. Whatever one makes of that answer, it is an answer, and the machinery that produced it is exactly what Anglicanism has never possessed. Our guide to the Catholic priesthood sets out the reasoning in full.

12. Who Owns the Buildings: The Property Litigation

The realignment produced roughly two decades of litigation over church buildings, endowments and diocesan assets, and it consumed money and goodwill on a large scale. The legal question turns on a canon and on the trust law of each individual state, which is why the outcomes were inconsistent.

The Dennis Canon

In 1979 the Episcopal Church's General Convention adopted what is known as the Dennis Canon, which declares that all real and personal property held by a parish is held in trust for the diocese and for the national church. When congregations departed after 2003, the Episcopal Church and its dioceses invoked the canon to claim the buildings. Departing congregations argued that a national body cannot create a trust over property it never owned or paid for by simply declaring one, that many of their buildings predated the canon, and that state trust law requires the owner of the property to create any trust over it.

How the cases came out

Courts split, largely along the lines of whether a state applies neutral principles of law to church property disputes or defers to the decisions of a hierarchical denomination. In Virginia, litigation over a group of large congregations including The Falls Church and Truro ended with the property awarded to the Diocese of Virginia, and the congregations left their historic buildings. In Texas, litigation over the Diocese of Fort Worth ran for more than a decade and ended with the Texas Supreme Court ruling in 2020 in favour of the departing diocese and its parishes. In Illinois, the courts found for the departing Diocese of Quincy. In South Carolina, a long and much-reversed series of decisions in the state courts ended with most parishes retaining their property and a smaller number returning to the Episcopal diocese. In California, the departing Diocese of San Joaquin lost its property.

The outcomes above are as reported in each state's published appellate decisions. Church property litigation turns on state trust and corporate law, on the specific deeds and articles of incorporation of each parish, and on whether the state follows the neutral principles approach or the hierarchical deference approach set out in United States Supreme Court cases on church property. A ruling in one state establishes nothing in another. Anyone with an interest in a specific parish should consult the record in that case rather than generalise from this paragraph.

What the litigation cost

Both sides spent heavily, and many of the buildings that changed hands were later sold or closed for want of a congregation to fill them. Christians who had prayed together for decades met each other across a courtroom. Whatever the merits of any individual case, the spectacle answered nothing about the doctrine in dispute and it damaged the witness of everyone involved. Paul told the Corinthians that going to law against a brother before unbelievers was already a defeat, whatever the verdict.

13. Is ACNA in the Anglican Communion?

The answer depends on a definition, and the two available definitions give opposite results. On the definition used by the Anglican Communion Office in London, the Communion is the fellowship of provinces in communion with the See of Canterbury, listed by that office and represented at the four Instruments of Communion. On that definition the Anglican Church in North America is outside it, and the Episcopal Church is inside it.

On the definition used by GAFCON and by the Anglican Church in North America, the Communion is constituted by a shared confession of the Anglican faith and by the mutual recognition of churches holding it. On that definition the province is inside the Communion, because Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and other provinces have declared themselves in full communion with it, and those provinces are themselves indisputably part of the Communion.

The four Instruments

The Communion has four Instruments: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conference of bishops held roughly every ten years, the Anglican Consultative Council with its lay and clergy representation, and the Primates' Meeting. None of them can legislate for a province. The Archbishop of Canterbury has no jurisdiction outside England and his own province, and his role in the Communion is to invite, to convene and to be a focus of unity. The Instruments can express a mind, request restraint and impose consequences on participation, and that is the limit of their power.

That limit is the whole problem. When the Primates' Meeting of 2016 imposed a three-year restriction on the Episcopal Church's participation in Communion bodies, the restriction was real and the underlying question was untouched. The Windsor Report of 2004 proposed an Anglican Covenant to give the Communion an agreed way of handling exactly this kind of dispute. The Covenant was circulated for adoption from 2009, and the Church of England's own dioceses declined to approve it in 2012, after which the project effectively ended.

14. A Catholic Response: Can a See Forfeit Its Standing?

The claim at the centre of GAFCON and of the Anglican Church in North America is that an office of unity forfeits its standing when the church holding it departs from the faith. A Catholic reading grants a great deal of what stands behind that claim and rejects the conclusion, and it is worth separating the two carefully.

What a Catholic can grant

Three things in the traditionalist Anglican case are simply true. The faith is a deposit received rather than a policy set by vote, and Jude 3, 1 Timothy 6:20 and 2 Timothy 1:14 all describe it in exactly those terms. A synod that changes the received teaching on marriage has exceeded its competence, whatever its constitution permits, because no assembly can legislate what Christ has taught. And an office charged with guarding unity in the truth is failing at its purpose if it presides over an unresolved division about the truth. Catholics who watch a bishop teach error know the frustration in the GAFCON documents from the inside.

Where the argument breaks

The Catholic answer is that unity in the Church has three bonds and they are held together. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 815 lists them: the profession of one faith received from the apostles, the common celebration of divine worship and above all of the sacraments, and apostolic succession through the sacrament of Holy Orders preserving the fraternal concord of God's family. Take doctrine alone as the bond and you get a communion that reconstitutes itself with every serious disagreement. Take institutional recognition alone and you get a communion with nothing to say when a province teaches error. Anglicanism has now tried both halves and both have failed, because the bonds were designed to work together.

Catholic teaching holds that Christ provided for this by giving the Church a permanent visible principle of unity in the office of Peter. The Second Vatican Council, in Lumen Gentium 23, calls the Roman Pontiff the perpetual and visible source and foundation of the unity both of the bishops and of the whole company of the faithful. The point of that office is precisely to be the place where a disputed question can be settled, so that the Church has somewhere to go when the bishops divide. Acts 15 shows the pattern in its first instance: a question that threatened to split the Church went to a council of the apostles and elders at Jerusalem, and the council's decision bound the churches. Our guide to the papacy works through the biblical and patristic case.

The question about orders

A further difficulty attaches to all the bodies on this page. Leo XIII judged in the 1896 bull Apostolicae Curae that ordinations conferred with the Edwardine Ordinal were absolutely null and utterly void, on the grounds of a defect in the intention and the form of the rite as it was used. Rome has never reversed that judgment. Because the episcopal lines of the Anglican Church in North America, the Continuing jurisdictions and the Reformed Episcopal Church all run through the same Anglican succession, the same judgment reaches them. Some Continuing bishops hold additional lines from Old Catholic sources, which raises a separate set of questions that Rome has not addressed case by case, and our guide to the Old Catholic Churches explains why those lines are themselves contested. Our guide to the validity of Anglican orders works through the bull and the Anglican replies to it. The practical result is that a Catholic cannot receive communion at an Anglican altar of any of these bodies, and their clergy entering the Catholic Church are ordained absolutely rather than conditionally.

What is not being said

None of this makes traditionalist Anglicans strangers to Christ. The Catechism of the Catholic Church 838 teaches that those who believe in Christ and have been properly baptised are put in a certain, though imperfect, communion with the Catholic Church, and Anglican baptism is valid when conferred with water and the Trinitarian form. The Second Vatican Council decree Unitatis Redintegratio 3 says that those born into separated communities and brought up in the faith of Christ cannot be charged with the sin of the separation, and that the Catholic Church accepts them as brothers with respect and affection. The people who left the Episcopal Church usually did so at real cost, often losing the buildings their families had worshipped in for generations, because they would not say what they did not believe. That deserves respect from Catholics, whatever the verdict on the ecclesiology.

Where this leaves an Anglican reading it

The traditionalist Anglican case rests on a premise Catholics share: that the faith cannot be voted away, and that a church which votes it away has broken something. The unresolved part is what to do next when the office that was supposed to hold the line has failed. GAFCON's answer is to reconstitute the fellowship around the doctrine. The Catholic answer is that Christ already provided the office that settles the question, and that the search for a church which can actually say what is true and make it stick ends where that office is. Our guide to Catholic and Protestant differences and our guide to Catholic ecumenism take that conversation further.

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