Anglican Church in North America

What Anglican Church in North America is

The Anglican Church in North America is a province in the broader global Anglican family — a Christian denomination organized into dioceses, led by an Archbishop and a College of Bishops, and ordered around the historic threefold ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons. It was formed in 2009 when congregations and dioceses that had departed The Episcopal Church (TEC) and the Anglican Church of Canada gathered into a new provincial structure. It now reports roughly 130,000 members across about 1,000 parishes in the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

anglicanchurch.net itself is the province's denominational website. It is not a teaching ministry, not an app, not a media brand — it is the digital infrastructure of a church body. The site's job is to host the denomination's public documents, point seekers toward parishes, publish news from the Archbishop and bishops, and make the Book of Common Prayer 2019 freely available. Compared to flashier "Christian website" properties, it reads less like a product and more like a constitution with a navigation bar.

Why conservative Anglicans use ACNA

The single biggest practical difference between ACNA and The Episcopal Church is what each body has decided about sexuality, marriage, and the ordering of ministry — and on those questions ACNA has settled on traditional, conservative positions while TEC has moved in a progressive direction. Members who use anglicanchurch.net as their home base have, almost without exception, made a deliberate choice to be in a province that holds the traditional definition of marriage and orders its life around the Book of Common Prayer 2019 and the 39 Articles. The site reflects that — it is not coy about its commitments.

The second draw is liturgical seriousness without losing evangelical theology. ACNA parishes pray the Daily Office, celebrate the Eucharist on Sundays, observe the Christian calendar, and use vestments — the full Anglican liturgical pattern — while affirming the authority of Scripture, salvation by grace through faith, and the historic creeds. For readers raised in low-church evangelical settings who have grown curious about liturgy and the sacraments but who do not want to leave a conservative theological frame, ACNA is the obvious doorway, and anglicanchurch.net is where the doorway is hung.

The Book of Common Prayer 2019: ACNA's distinctive product

The Book of Common Prayer 2019 is ACNA's flagship liturgical text and the single most-linked resource on anglicanchurch.net. It is the province's own revision of the Anglican prayer book tradition — drawing on the 1662 BCP (the classical English standard), the American 1928, and the Kenyan and other Global South prayer books — and it was officially released in 2019 after years of drafting by a Liturgy Task Force. It contains the full Daily Office (Morning and Evening Prayer in traditional and contemporary language), the Holy Eucharist in two rites, the pastoral offices (baptism, confirmation, marriage, burial), the Psalter pointed for chanting, the catechism, and the 39 Articles of Religion.

This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is transformative for readers used to free-church worship. The BCP 2019 gives any literate Christian a complete daily prayer rhythm — Scripture readings, psalms, canticles, intercessions — that can be prayed alone at a kitchen table or with a congregation in a sanctuary, and that does not change based on the preacher's mood that week. The entire text is hosted free on anglicanchurch.net, and print editions are available from Anglican House Publishers for around $30. That combination of doctrinal weight and zero paywall is the site's killer feature.

The Anglican Realignment: where ACNA actually comes from

ACNA did not appear from nowhere. It is the institutional outcome of what is usually called the Anglican Realignment — a roughly two-decade process in which a substantial bloc of conservative Anglicans, both globally and in North America, separated from the official Anglican Communion structures over disagreements about Scripture, sexuality, and ordained ministry. The flashpoint was the 2003 consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire by The Episcopal Church, but the underlying tensions over biblical interpretation and the boundaries of Anglican identity had been building since the 1970s.

anglicanchurch.net is unusually candid about this lineage. The "About" pages tell the story plainly: congregations and dioceses that had left TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada gathered, were initially recognized by Global South Anglican primates, and were formally inaugurated as a new province in 2009 with Archbishop Robert Duncan as the first Archbishop. ACNA is in full communion with the GAFCON provinces (the Global Anglican Future Conference bloc — Nigeria, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, the Southern Cone, and others) but is not formally a constituent province of the Canterbury-led Anglican Communion. For readers trying to understand why "Anglican" can refer to two North American bodies with different addresses, this is the explanation.

Liturgy and sacramental resources: the daily layer

Beyond the BCP 2019 itself, anglicanchurch.net publishes the supporting layer that makes Anglican daily life work — a daily lectionary (the schedule of Scripture readings for Morning and Evening Prayer), a Sunday Eucharistic lectionary, the catechism "To Be a Christian," and resources for the Christian year (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, ordinary time). Many of these are downloadable as PDFs and a few partner sites and apps wrap them in friendlier interfaces — but the canonical versions live here.

The pastoral upshot: a layperson with no prior Anglican background can land on anglicanchurch.net and, within an afternoon, assemble a complete daily prayer practice — the day's readings, the appointed psalm, the collect of the week, and Morning and Evening Prayer in either traditional or contemporary language. That is the thoughtful person's entry into Anglican spirituality, and it is the part of the site that gets used long after a visitor has already found a parish.

Pricing

Where Anglican Church in North America falls behind

Site design is dated. The navigation works and the doctrinal documents are where they should be, but visually anglicanchurch.net feels closer to a 2015 mainline denominational site than to anything that would win a 2026 web design award. The contrast with sister projects like bibleproject.com or hallow.com is sharp.

No first-party app. Anglican daily prayer has spawned several excellent third-party apps — Daily Office, Venite, and others — but the province itself does not publish one. Readers who would prefer to pray the Office on a phone have to leave the site to do it.

Search and discoverability lag. The in-site search prioritizes recent news over the doctrinal pages most visitors actually want, and finding the BCP 2019 the first time often requires two or three clicks instead of one. A more product-minded site would make the prayer book the front door.

Multimedia is thin. There is no video catechism, no province-wide podcast hub, and no streaming worship aggregator. For a tradition whose worship is unusually well-suited to video — choirs, vestments, liturgical color — this is a missed opportunity, though it reflects the fact that ACNA is a denomination, not a content brand.

Provincial positions on some questions intentionally do not exist. The most-asked example: women in ordained ministry. Some ACNA dioceses ordain women to the diaconate and priesthood; others ordain women only to the diaconate; the provincial position is that women may serve as deacons, while the question of women priests is left to each diocese, and the College of Bishops has held a moratorium on consecrating women as bishops. Readers who want one clean answer will not get one — and that is real, not a documentation gap.

ACNA vs. The Episcopal Church vs. Continuing Anglican bodies

Different bodies, different vantage points. ACNA is the conservative North American province formed in 2009 from departures from TEC and the Anglican Church of Canada, in full communion with the GAFCON-aligned Global South provinces, using the Book of Common Prayer 2019. The Episcopal Church (TEC, episcopalchurch.org) is the older body — a constituent province of the Anglican Communion via the Archbishop of Canterbury, with roots in the colonial Church of England in America, currently holding progressive positions on marriage and ordination and using a 1979 BCP plus a 2018 marriage liturgy.

The Continuing Anglican bodies — the Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Province of America, the Anglican Church in America, and others — predate ACNA. They left The Episcopal Church earlier, mostly in 1977–78 in the wake of the Affirmation of St. Louis, principally over the ordination of women and the 1979 Prayer Book revision. They typically use the 1928 BCP and tend to be more uniformly Anglo-Catholic in churchmanship. They are smaller than ACNA and not in communion with it.

Practical takeaway: ACNA is broader (theologically conservative but holding evangelical, charismatic, and Anglo-Catholic streams together); TEC is the established, progressive, Canterbury-affiliated body; the Continuing bodies are smaller, older, and more traditionally Anglo-Catholic. Which one a reader belongs in is a question for that reader and a local rector — but anglicanchurch.net is the right starting point for understanding ACNA itself.

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