The Anglican Church in North America, usually called ACNA, is one of the newest major Anglican bodies in the Western world, but the people who created it would tell you they weren’t trying to invent anything new. They were trying to preserve something old.
ACNA was formally organized in 2009, bringing together several groups of Anglicans in the United States and Canada who believed that the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada were moving away from biblical and historic Christianity. Disputes over sexuality brought the conflict to a head, but the people involved generally argued that homosexuality wasn’t really the fundamental issue. Underneath it was a much older question: Who has the authority to determine what the church believes?
That question eventually divided American Anglicans badly enough that some decided they needed another church.
The Road to ACNA
As we saw in our article on the Episcopal Church, tensions within American Anglicanism had been building for decades. The ordination of women divided traditionalists during the 1970s, while debates over biblical authority, liturgical revision and increasingly progressive theology created additional friction. Some Episcopalians left long before ACNA existed and formed what became known collectively as the Continuing Anglican movement.
The crisis that produced ACNA came later. The Episcopal Church’s 2003 consecration of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man living in a same-sex relationship, convinced many conservative Episcopalians that the disagreement had reached a breaking point. The issue wasn’t merely that they disliked a denominational decision. They believed the church had approved behavior Scripture prohibited and had done so by adopting a method of biblical interpretation that could affect far more than sexual ethics.
Some congregations remained in the Episcopal Church and fought for traditional teaching from within. Others left and began looking elsewhere in the worldwide Anglican Communion for ecclesiastical oversight.
That’s when Africa became extremely important.
Africa Comes to America
The Anglican Communion had changed enormously since the days when British missionaries carried Anglicanism around the world. Some of its largest and fastest-growing churches were now in Africa, where many bishops held strongly conservative positions on Scripture and sexual morality.
So something historically remarkable happened. American congregations descended from missionaries sent out by Western churches began seeking oversight from the churches those missionaries had helped establish.
Anglican provinces including Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and others became involved in providing relationships or oversight for conservative Anglicans in North America. The old missionary relationship had effectively reversed direction. Churches in the Global South were now helping traditionalist Christians organize in the countries that had once sent missionaries to them.
Whatever you think about the theological controversy, that’s a fascinating development in church history.
Forming a New Province
By the late 2000s, conservative Anglican groups in North America included former Episcopal dioceses, individual congregations, church-planting networks and jurisdictions connected with overseas Anglican provinces. They didn’t all have the same history or church culture, but they increasingly concluded that they needed to come together.
In 2009, these groups formally organized the Anglican Church in North America. Former Episcopal bishop Robert Duncan became its first archbishop. ACNA describes its founding purpose as creating a biblical, orthodox and gospel-centered Anglican church committed to the historic Anglican tradition and to planting churches throughout North America.
The new church wasn’t starting from scratch. It inherited bishops, clergy, congregations, seminaries, missions and ministries from the organizations that formed it. What it needed was a structure capable of bringing all those pieces together while maintaining a recognizable Anglican identity.
That turned out to be easier said than done..
What Does ACNA Believe?
ACNA’s foundational declarations are intentionally traditional. It affirms the Old and New Testaments as the inspired Word of God, containing everything necessary for salvation and serving as the final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life. It confesses the Apostles’, Nicene and Athanasian Creeds, recognizes Baptism and the Lord’s Supper as sacraments instituted by Christ, maintains the historic episcopate and receives the Thirty-Nine Articles as expressing fundamental principles of Anglican belief.
The church also identifies the 1662 Book of Common Prayer as a standard for Anglican doctrine and worship, although ACNA developed its own Book of Common Prayer 2019 for contemporary use. The 2019 Prayer Book contains the familiar Anglican pattern of Daily Prayer, Holy Communion, baptism, confirmation, ordination, the church year and the lectionary while drawing deliberately from the older Anglican prayer-book tradition.
If you’ve followed our articles from the Church of England through the Episcopal Church, all of that should sound familiar. ACNA didn’t reject Anglicanism when it separated from Episcopal structures. It claimed that it was trying to recover Anglicanism. Its critics, of course, tell the story differently.
Is ACNA Part of the Anglican Communion?
This is where things get complicated, because apparently we haven’t had enough Anglican complications already.
ACNA understands itself as an Anglican province and has strong relationships with numerous Anglican churches around the world, particularly conservative provinces in the Global South. But it isn’t one of the provinces formally recognized through the traditional structures centered on the Archbishop of Canterbury.
That creates an unusual situation. ACNA can be recognized as authentically Anglican by Anglican bishops and provinces representing millions of Christians while still lacking the same institutional status within the Canterbury-centered structures that the Episcopal Church possesses.
This disagreement reflects a much larger struggle over what actually makes a church Anglican. Is Anglican identity determined primarily by communion with Canterbury and the historic institutional structures of the Anglican Communion? Or is it determined by adherence to Anglican doctrine, worship and episcopal order?
ACNA’s existence forces that question into the open.
What Does an ACNA Church Look Like?
Here’s where you may be surprised. There isn’t one answer.
Walk into one ACNA congregation and you may encounter incense, chanting, vestments, candles and a Eucharistic service that looks thoroughly Anglo-Catholic. Walk into another and you may find contemporary worship music, evangelical preaching and a service that feels much closer to a modern Protestant church, except that everyone eventually ends up at the Communion table.
That’s not an accident. ACNA inherited Anglicanism’s old High Church and Low Church traditions along with evangelical, charismatic and Anglo-Catholic streams. ACNA itself describes Anglicanism as bringing together Protestant emphasis on the Word, holiness and evangelical concern for mission, and the sacramental heritage represented by the Anglo-Catholic tradition.
So don’t assume that visiting one ACNA parish tells you exactly what the next one will look like. If nothing else, Anglicans remain committed to variety.
Scripture
One of ACNA’s strongest self-defining characteristics is its emphasis on biblical authority.
This is directly connected to the circumstances of its creation. Conservatives who left the Episcopal Church generally believed the disputes over sexuality reflected a deeper disagreement about whether Scripture establishes permanent boundaries for Christian doctrine and morality.
ACNA therefore doesn’t merely say that the Bible is important. Its foundational declarations describe Scripture as the final authority and unchangeable standard for Christian faith and life.
That wording is significant. The founders wanted to make it considerably harder for future generations to resolve difficult theological questions simply by saying that the church had moved beyond an older biblical understanding.
Whether that protection will work indefinitely is something history will decide. Denominations have an impressive ability to surprise their founders.
Marriage and Sexuality
ACNA maintains the traditional Christian understanding of marriage as the union of one man and one woman. That position is closely connected with the controversies that led to its formation and distinguishes it sharply from the Episcopal Church’s current practice regarding same-sex marriage.
But reducing ACNA to “the Anglicans who oppose gay marriage” misses most of what the church is trying to accomplish. Its leaders have consistently presented the denomination as an effort to recover orthodox Anglican Christianity more broadly, including evangelism, discipleship, liturgical renewal, church planting and connection with global Anglicanism.
Same-sex relationships helped cause the institutional rupture, but they don’t explain the entire church that emerged afterward.
The Women’s Ordination Problem
Here’s where ACNA becomes particularly interesting.
You might assume that a conservative Anglican church formed partly in reaction to changes within the Episcopal Church would simply prohibit women from becoming priests. It doesn’t.
When ACNA was organized, its constituent groups already disagreed about women’s ordination. Some dioceses ordained women as priests, while others believed the priesthood was restricted to men. Rather than allow that disagreement to prevent the new province from forming, ACNA permitted individual dioceses to maintain their own practices concerning women in the priesthood.
Women cannot become bishops in ACNA under its current canons. But depending on the diocese, a woman may be ordained as a priest. In 2017, ACNA’s College of Bishops acknowledged that women’s ordination to the priesthood was a recent innovation in the historic catholic order and concluded that there was insufficient scriptural warrant to establish it as the standard practice throughout the province. At the same time, the bishops retained the authority of individual dioceses to continue the practice.
So ACNA solved one disagreement by agreeing to continue disagreeing.
If that sounds Anglican, you’ve been paying attention.
Evangelical, Catholic and Charismatic
Another interesting feature of ACNA is the coexistence of theological streams that often live in separate denominations elsewhere.
There are strongly evangelical Anglicans who emphasize conversion, biblical preaching and missions. There are Anglo-Catholics who emphasize sacramental theology, apostolic succession and ancient Christian worship. There are also charismatic Anglicans who believe the gifts of the Holy Spirit remain active in the church.
Sometimes these traditions overlap. You can therefore encounter an Anglican priest who believes strongly in biblical inerrancy, celebrates Communion in vestments, or quotes the church fathers and prays for healing.
American Protestantism usually likes putting people into cleaner boxes than that.
Bishops Without a Pope
ACNA retains the historic Anglican structure of bishops, priests and deacons. Congregations belong to dioceses overseen by bishops, and the bishops together form the College of Bishops. Clergy and laypeople also participate in provincial governance through bodies such as the Provincial Council and Provincial Assembly. ACNA describes itself as a conciliar church, meaning governance isn’t simply handed to one central authority.
The church elects an archbishop to serve as its primate, but the archbishop isn’t a pope and doesn’t possess unlimited authority over the dioceses. That distinction matters because ACNA includes dioceses with different histories, churchmanship and practices. Its structure attempts to provide enough unity to function as one church without eliminating all of that local diversity.
Again, very Anglican.
The Book of Common Prayer 2019
One of ACNA’s most ambitious projects was the production of the Book of Common Prayer 2019.
Creating a Prayer Book may not sound terribly exciting if your church prints the worship lyrics on a screen every Sunday and changes the songs next week. For Anglicans, it’s a very big deal.
The Prayer Book helps determine how generations of Christians worship, pray, read Scripture, celebrate Communion, baptize converts, marry couples and bury the dead. ACNA’s founders therefore wanted a Prayer Book that recovered historic Anglican patterns while remaining usable in contemporary North American churches.
The result draws heavily on the older Anglican tradition, particularly the 1662 Prayer Book, while using language and structures designed for modern congregations. ACNA also produced a catechism, To Be a Christian, as another tool for teaching the faith.
This tells us something important about what ACNA thinks it’s doing. It’s trying to build something that will outlive the protest.
Church Planting
ACNA has placed considerable emphasis on starting new congregations.
That’s significant because breakaway denominations can easily spend their first generation looking backward. They define themselves by whatever church they left, rehearse old battles and eventually become museums dedicated to a controversy nobody under forty remembers.
ACNA has tried to avoid that by emphasizing evangelism and church planting as central parts of its identity. Its official description presents it as a church-planting movement, and as of 2026 it reports more than 1,000 parishes and over 130,000 members across the United States, Canada and parts of Latin America.
Whether ACNA becomes a permanent feature of North American Christianity will depend partly on whether it can produce Christians who know why they’re Anglican rather than merely why they aren’t Episcopalian.
That’s a much harder task.
ACNA and the Global South
ACNA’s relationship with global Anglicanism may ultimately be more important than its relationship with the Episcopal Church.
Christianity’s demographic center has been moving toward Africa, Asia and Latin America for decades, and Anglicanism reflects that shift dramatically. ACNA points out that the typical Anglican in the world today is much more likely to be an African Christian than an Englishman sitting in a medieval cathedral.
Many Global South Anglican leaders share ACNA’s conservative positions on biblical authority and sexual ethics. That has given the North American church relationships and international legitimacy that it couldn’t obtain simply by declaring itself Anglican.
It also creates one of the great ironies of modern church history. Anglicanism traveled around the world largely through British colonialism and Western missions. Now some of those former mission fields are trying to preserve what they regard as historic Anglican Christianity in Britain and North America.
The missionary has become the mission field.
Is ACNA Just Conservative Episcopalianism?
Not exactly. A visitor could certainly recognize similarities. ACNA inherited much of the same Anglican tradition, and many of its founding clergy and congregations came directly from the Episcopal Church. Both have bishops, liturgy, sacraments, Prayer Books, vestments and the historic Anglican vocabulary.
But ACNA has increasingly developed its own institutional culture. Younger priests may never have belonged to the Episcopal Church. New congregations may have no history of leaving anything. People can now discover Anglicanism through an ACNA church plant without knowing much about the battles that created the denomination.
That’s probably healthy for the movement. A church can’t spend forever being the church that left another church. Eventually it has to explain why somebody should join this one.
Another Anglican Experiment
The Church of England began when England broke with Rome. The Episcopal Church began when American Anglicans separated politically from England. ACNA emerged when another group of North American Anglicans concluded that their existing church had moved too far from historic Christian teaching.
Those separations weren’t identical, and it would be silly to pretend they were. But each produced a version of the same question: What exactly has to remain unchanged for Anglicanism to remain Anglican?
ACNA’s answer is fairly clear. Bishops matter. The sacraments matter. The creeds matter. The Prayer Book tradition matters. The Thirty-Nine Articles matter. But underneath all of them, Scripture must remain the final authority by which the church’s teaching is judged. That’s how ACNA officially describes the Anglican identity it is trying to preserve.
Whether ACNA can hold together its evangelicals, Anglo-Catholics, charismatics, supporters of women’s ordination and opponents of women’s ordination over the long term remains an open question. Anglicanism has always contained tensions, and ACNA brought several of them into the new church on the day it was founded.