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About Anglicans
No Central Authority
Anglican Communion
Church Governance
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Other Sources
This section on
Church Vocabulary
was produced by
Brian Reid at http://www.anglican.org
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Home/Vocabulary/Church
Governance |
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There is no central governance of the Anglican
Church. Each of the member churches or provinces of the Anglican Communion
is governed independently. The rules under which a church is governed
are called canon law.
The structure of canon law is not altogether unlike that of modern
civil law. A parish has rules or bylaws, which must conform to the
rules or canons of the diocese of which it is a member; that diocese
in turn must stay within the canons of its province or national church.
The provinces and national churches, by choice, have inherited the
canons of the Christian church dating back to its earliest days. This
accumulation of canons over the centuries and throughout the world
is collectively referred to as Anglican Canon Law; we refer the interested
reader to the Anglican
Canon Law web site.
An interesting lecture given in 1995 by Dr. Pamela Chinnis, president
of the ECUSA House of Deputies, and transcribed on the ECUSA web site,
explains the very concept of authority in the Anglican church.
Some of the member churches of the Anglican Communion have placed
their constitutions and canons online; so have many dioceses and even
a parish or two. The list is collected
on one of the pages of the Anglican Canon Law web site.
Every 10 years there is a Lambeth
Conference at which all of the bishops of the Anglican Communion
gather to debate issues of doctrine. Doctrine can indirectly affect
church governance, but resolutions passed at the Lambeth Conference
are not binding on any member churches unless they choose to modify
their own canons to be bound by them. However, a church that rejects
too much of the doctrine of the Anglican Communion may find itself
unwelcome to be or remain part of that Communion. |
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