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 its own legislative process and episcopal polity under the leadership of a local primate. For many adherents, Anglicanism represents a distinct form of Reformed Protestantism that emerged under the influence of the Reformer Thomas Cranmer; for others, it is a via media between two branches of Protestantism—Lutheranism and Calvinism; or for yet others, it is a denomination that is both Catholic and Reformed. Full participation in the sacramental life of each church is available to all communicant members.
Most members of the churches of the Anglican Communion live in the Anglosphere: a group of dozens of countries and regions that are predominantly English-speaking, often former British colonies or territories, many of which still voluntarily associate as members of the Commonwealth. Because of their historical link to England (ecclesia anglicana means "English church"), some of the member churches are known as "Anglican", such as the Anglican Church of Canada. Others, for example the Church of Ireland and the Scottish Episcopal and American Episcopal churches, have official names that do not include "Anglican". Conversely, some churches that do use the name "Anglican" are not part of the communion. These have generally disaffiliated over disagreement with the progress and direction of the broader communion.
The Anglican Communion traces much of its growth to the older mission organisations of the Church of England such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (founded 1698), the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (founded 1701) and the Church Missionary Society (founded 1799). The Church of England (which until the 20th century included the Church in Wales) initially separated from the Roman Catholic Church in 1534 in the reign of Henry VIII, reunited briefly in 1555 under Mary I and then separated again in 1570 under Elizabeth I (the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated Elizabeth I in 1570 in response to the Act of Supremacy 1559).
The Church of England has always thought of itself not as a new foundation but rather as a reformed continuation of the ancient "English Church" (Ecclesia Anglicana) and a reassertion of that church's rights. As such it was a distinctly national phenomenon. The Church of Scotland was formed as a separate church from the Roman Catholic Church as a result of the Scottish Reformation in 1560 and the later formation of the Scottish Episcopal Church began in 1582 (in the reign of James VI) over disagreements about the role of bishops.
The Church of England was the established church not only in England, but in its trans-Oceanic colonies. Thus the only member churches of the present Anglican Communion existing by the mid-18th century were the Church of England, its closely linked sister church the Church of Ireland (which also separated from Roman Catholicism under Henry VIII) and the Scottish Episcopal Church which for parts of the 17th and 18th centuries was partially underground (it was suspected of Jacobite sympathies).
The oldest-surviving Anglican church building outside the British Isles is St Peter's Church in St. George's, Bermuda, established in 1612 (though the actual building had to be rebuilt several times over the following century). This is also the oldest surviving non-Roman Catholic church in the New World. It remained part of the Church of England until 1978 when the Anglican Church of Bermuda was formed.
The enormous expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries of the British Empire brought Anglicanism along with it. At first all these colonial churches were under the jurisdiction of the bishop of London. After the American Revolution, the parishes in the newly independent United States found it necessary to break formally from a church whose supreme governor was (and remains) the British monarch. Thus they formed their own dioceses and national church, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, in a mostly amicable separation.
At about the same time, in the colonies which remained linked to the crown, the Church of England began to appoint colonial bishops. In 1787, Charles Inglis (Bishop of Nova Scotia) was appointed with jurisdiction over all of British North America; in time several more colleagues were appointed to sees in other provinces in present-day Canada. In 1814, a bishop of Calcutta was appointed. In 1824 the first bishop was sent to the West Indies. And in 1836 Australia received its first Anglican bishop. By 1840 there were still only ten colonial bishops in the Church of England; but this small beginning quickly facilitated the growth of Anglicanism around the world. In 1841, a "Colonial Bishoprics Council" was set up and soon many more dioceses were created.
In time, it became natural to group these into provinces and a metropolitan bishop was appointed for each province. Although it had at first been somewhat established in many colonies, in 1861 it was ruled that, except where specifically established, the Church of England had just the same legal position as any other church. Thus a colonial bishop and colonial diocese was by nature quite a different thing from their counterparts back home. In time bishops came to be appointed locally rather than from England and eventually national synods began to pass ecclesiastical legislation independent of England.
A crucial step in the development of the modern communion was the idea of the Lambeth Conferences (discussed above). These conferences demonstrated that the bishops of disparate churches could manifest the unity of the church in their episcopal collegiality despite the absence of universal legal ties. Some bishops were initially reluctant to attend, fearing that the meeting would declare itself a council with power to legislate for the church; but it agreed to pass only advisory resolutions. These Lambeth Conferences have been held roughly every ten years since 1878 (the second such conference) and remain the most visible coming-together of the whole communion.