Links - Enlaces

THIS PAGE LISTS CHURCHES that are 'In full communion' with the See of Canterbury, as defined by the 1958 Lambeth Conference, but which are not culturally or denominationally Anglican. Provinces or national churches that are not in communion with the See of Canterbury are listed on the Not In Communion page.

There are two ways that a Province or national church can be listed here. It can be a 'United Church' formed from the union of an Anglican church with Christians of other traditions. Or it can be an Old Catholic church, with which the Anglican Church entered into full communion by ratifying the Bonn Agreement of 1931.

Note that a member Province or national church of the Anglican Communion can be in full communion with a non-Anglican national church, without having the entire Anglican Communion share that relationship. While from a mathematical standpoint this means that "in communion with" is not an equivalence relation, it is an important category of ecumenical relations. We list some important examples of such relationships, provided that they have some online presence.

http://anglicansonline.org/communion/infull.html

Churches No in The Communion with Canterbury House:

THE CHURCHES LISTED HERE are not 'in the communion'. That means that they are not part of the Anglican Communion. To be part of it, a church must have a formal relation with the See of Canterbury. It is entirely possible for a church to be in full communion with the Anglican Church without being in the Anglican Communion. It is also entirely possible for a church to be completely Anglican in heritage and origin, but for it not to be in communion with the See of Canterbury.

Many of the churches listed below refer to themselves as 'continuing churches'. By this they mean that they are continuing with characteristics that some Canterbury-communion churches have chosen not to continue. You will often see the term 'the continuum' to refer to the collection of churches that have broken away from Canterbury in order to do what they see as continue the old traditions.

In order to have an Anglican church in valid apostolic succession, one needs to have one bishop whose consecration is through an Anglican origin. While that bishop may have been consecrated in the Anglican church, he or she has no obligation to remain administratively part of it. Each of these churches listed on this page has at least one independent bishop, and has a compelling reason for not being part of the Canterbury communion.

Those compelling reasons are all different. In the past we have tried hard to keep, along with the facts below, some explanations of what the churches are and how they relate to one another. We know a lot about the Canterbury 'mainstream' portion of the Anglican church, and, more important, we do not have to make judgement calls about what does or does not belong in Canterbury-communion churches, because the church governance structure takes care of that for us. We have stopped maintaining any information that explains these churches, and have reduced this page to being a set of links to them.

Many people have offered us facts and opinions to improve these pages, but the problem is that they disagree with each other, and we have no way to referee disputes between them. The only money that Anglicans Online has ever spent on purposes unrelated to publishing was on legal fees to defend ourselves against a Not in Communion bishop who didn't like what we said about his church here.

Do not make the mistake of believing that the churches listed below (in alphabetical order) are similar because we list them together. If they were very similar, they would find a way to unify, and then they wouldn't need to be listed separately.

http://anglicansonline.org/communion/nic.html