Continuing Anglican movement

The Continuing Anglican movement, also known as the Anglican Continuum, encompasses a number of Christian churches, principally based in North America, that have an Anglican identity and tradition but are not part of the Anglican Communion. These churches generally believe that traditional forms of Anglican faith and worship have been unacceptably revised or abandoned within some churches of the Anglican Communion, but that they, the Continuing Anglicans, are preserving or "continuing" both Anglican lines of apostolic succession and historic Anglican belief and practice. In 2014, Reuters reported that there were 400,000 members of the Traditional Anglican Communion, a communion of "Continuing Anglican" churches. In 2020, the World Christian Encyclopedia and World Christian Database estimated that there were approximately 2.4 million Anglicans among the churches "independent" of the Anglican Communion. The term was first used in 1948 to describe members of the Church of England in Nandyal who refused to enter the emerging Church of South India, which united the Anglican Church of India, Burma and Ceylon with the Reformed (Presbyterian and Congregationalist) and Methodist churches in India. Today, however, the term usually refers to the churches that descend from the 1977 Congress of St. Louis, at which the foundation was laid for a new Anglican church in North America and which produced the Affirmation of St. Louis, which opens with the title "The Continuation of Anglicanism". Some church bodies that pre-date the Congress of St. Louis (such as the Free Church of England and the Reformed Episcopal Church), or are of more recent origin (such as the Church of England (Continuing), have referred to themselves as "Continuing Anglican" as they are traditional in belief and practice, though they did not emerge subsequent to the Congress of St. Louis. The churches defined as "Continuing Anglican" are historically separate from GAFCON, comprising...