Anglican Communion

The Anglican Communion (AC) is a Christian communion consisting of the autocephalous national and regional churches historically in full communion with the See of Canterbury. Member churches exercise jurisdictional independence but share a common heritage concerning Anglican identity and commitment to scripture, tradition, and reason as sources of authority. The Archbishop of Canterbury acts as a focus of unity, recognised as primus inter pares ("first among equals"), but without formal authority in Anglican provinces outside of the Church of England. Most, but not all, member churches of the communion are the historic national or regional Anglican churches. With approximately 85–110 million members in 2025, among its 47 member churches, it is the third or fourth largest Christian communion of churches globally, after the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and, possibly, World Communion of Reformed Churches. In 2021, excluding the United and Uniting churches, research published in the World Christian Database estimated that the Anglican Communion had approximately 94,976,000 members. The Anglican Communion considers baptism to be "the traditional gauge" or definition for membership. The Anglican Communion was officially and formally organised and recognised as such at the Lambeth Conference in 1867 in London under the leadership of Charles Longley, Archbishop of Canterbury. The churches of the Anglican Communion consider themselves to be part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church, with their liturgy based on the Book of Common Prayer. The traditional origins of Anglican doctrine are summarised in the Thirty-nine Articles (1571) and The Books of Homilies. As in the Church of England itself, the Anglican Communion includes the broad spectrum of beliefs and liturgical practises found in the Evangelical, Central and Anglo-Catholic traditions of Anglicanism; both the larger Reformed Anglican and the smaller Arminian Anglican theological perspectives have been represented. Each national or regional church is fully independent, retaining...