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The Anglican Church of Canada (the "ACC") is the Canadian branch of the Anglican Communion. It formally consists of 800,000 members worshipping in 29 dioceses and one grouping of parishes in the Central Interior of British Columbia, although over 2 million Canadians, or 6.9% of the population, declared themselves as Anglican in the 2001 Census. As a proportion of the population at large, Anglicans have been steadily decreasing, due to attrition and to large scale immigration to Canada by persons of other religious affiliation.

The Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada is the Most Rev. Andrew Hutchison. The chief governing body of the church is the General Synod, which meets every three years and consists of lay people, priests, and bishops from each diocese. The church is in full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada under the Waterloo Declaration of 2001.

Prior to 1955, the Church was formally styled the Church of England in Canada and in general parlance was called "the English Church." Corporations Canada, the agency of the federal government which has jurisdiction over federally incorporated companies, ruled on 12 September 2005 that a group of dissident Anglicans may not use the name "Anglican Communion in Canada," holding that in Canada the term "Anglican Communion" is associated only with the Anglican Church of Canada, being the Canadian denomination which belongs to that international association. The breakaway group now styles itself as the Anglican Coalition in Canada.

Dioceses and provinces

The ACC is divided into four ecclesiastical provinces, 29 dioceses and one grouping of churches in British Columbia that was formerly the Diocese of Cariboo, until it was disestablished because of residential schools litigation costs. This area of churches, while not a diocese, is now collectively referred to as the Anglican Parishes of the Central Interior (APCI). Each province has its own archbishop, known as the Metropolitan, and each diocese has a bishop. The list of dioceses below indicates in parentheses the Canadian provinces in which the dioceses are located.

Ecclesiastical Province of Canada Founded in 1860, it consists of seven dioceses:

Ecclesiastical Province of Rupert's Land Formed in 1875, it consists of ten dioceses:

Ecclesiastical Province of Ontario Formed out of the province of Canada and the diocese of Moosonee (which had been in Rupert's Land) in 1912, it consists of seven dioceses:

Ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia and Yukon Formed in 1914 as the ecclesiastical Province of British Columbia, it was expanded in 1943 to incorporate the diocese of Yukon, which was transferred from Rupert's Land. The province includes five dioceses:

History

The first clergy of the undivided English Church arrived in Canada as chaplains on John Cabot's expedition in 1497. The first Anglican (i.e. post-Reformation) Eucharist on what is now Canadian territory was celebrated in 1578 by Robert Wolfall, who was chaplain to Martin Frobisher's expedition to the Arctic. The Parish of St. John the Baptist in St. John's, Newfoundland is the oldest Anglican parish in Canada, founded in 1699 in response to a petition drafted by the Anglican townsfolk of St. John's and sent to the Bishop of London, the Rt. Rev. Henry Compton.

Members of the Church of England established the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1701 which provided missionaries to Canada until 1940. Another Anglican mission, the Church Missionary Society was established in 1799, and sent missionaries to try to convert Canada's First Nations until World War I. The Church of England in Canada, as it was called until the 1950s, established numerous residential schools which sought to assimilate native peoples into British concepts of civilization.

The Anglican Church was a dominant feature of the compact governments that dominated the colonies in British North America. Adherents to the Church of England were also numerous amongst the United Empire Loyalists who fled to Canada after the American Revolution.

After the conquest of Quebec and the American Revolution, many leading Anglicans argued for the Church of England to become the established church in the Canadian colonies. The Constitutional Act of 1791 was promulgated, and so interpreted to mean that the Church was the established Church in the Canadas. The Church of England was established by law in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. In Lower Canada (now Quebec), the presence of a Roman Catholic majority made establishment in that province politically unwise.

In Upper Canada (now Ontario), leading dissenters such as Methodist minister Egerton Ryerson would later argue against establishment. Following the Upper Canada Rebellion and the Durham Report and establishment of responsible government in the 1840s, the unpopularity of the Anglican-dominated Family Compact made establishment a moot point. The Church was disestablished in Nova Scotia in 1850 and Upper Canada in 1854. By the time of Confederation in 1867, the Church of England was disestablished throughout British North America.

The Clergy reserves, land that had been reserved for use by the Protestant clergy, became a major issue in the mid-19th century. Anglicans argued that the land was meant for their exclusive use, while other Protestant denominations demanded that it be divided among them.

Until the 1830s, the Anglican church in Canada was treated as the property of the Church of England: bishops were appointed by the church in England, and funding for the church came from the British Parliament. The first Canadian synods were established in the 1850s, giving the Canadian church a degree of self-government. As a result of a Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decision in 1861 (Long v. Gray), all Anglican churches in colonies of the British Empire became self-governing. Even so, the first General Synod for all of Canada was not held until 1893. In that meeting, Robert Machray was chosen as the Canadian church's first Primate.

In recent years the Anglican Church of Canada has been a leading force for liberal reform within the Anglican Communion. In the 1970s, Primate Ted Scott argued at the Lambeth Conference in favour of women's ordination. The Anglican Church of Canada ordained its first female priest in 1976 and its first female bishop in 1993. More recently, in 2002, the New Westminster Diocese permitted the blessing of same-sex unions, a move that was condemned by some Canadian Anglicans and some churches in the world wide Anglican Communion and has threatened a schism. There is currently a moratorium on blessing of same-sex unions. The concern around the action of the Diocese of New Westminster, along with the action of the Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. (in which an openly gay priest living in a same-sex relationship was made a bishop) resulted in the commissioning of the Windsor Report.

In 1992 an Anglican priest, James Ferry, was brought before a Bishops' Court for being in a same-sex relationship. Ferry was stripped of his licence to preach and "inhibited" from practising other Anglican rituals. Ferry left the church and joined the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto; in 1998, Ferry was partially reinstated. As of 2004, the Anglican Church has resolved neither the question of ordaining non-celibate gay and lesbian clergy nor the question of blessing same-sex unions. Recently, some members of the church have expressed the desire to recognise same-sex marriages as fully sacramental.

In 2006, Patrick Yu became the first Asian-Canadian bishop in the Church.

Primate

The Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada is elected by the general synod. Primates hold the ex officio rank of archbishop but as with Presiding Bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA and unlike Primates of England, Australia and elsewhere, they are not diocesan bishops and generally do not carry out ordinary episcopal functions; they originally held office for life but in recent years they have retired at the age of 70. There have been twelve primates in the history of the church:

  1. Robert Machray (1893 – 1904)
  2. William B. Bond (1904 – 1906)
  3. Arthur Sweatman (1907 – 1909)
  4. Samuel Pritchard Matheson (1909 – 1931)
  5. Clarendon Lamb Worrell (1931 – 1934)
  6. Derwyn Trevor Owen (1934 – 1947)
  7. George Frederick Kingston (1947 – 1950)
  8. Walter Barfoot (1950 – 1959)
  9. Howard Clark(1959 – 1971)
  10. Ted Scott (1971 – 1986)
  11. Michael Peers (1986 – 2004)
  12. Andrew Hutchison (since 2004)

Anglican cathedrals in Canada

See also

External links

Anglican Church of Canada | Anglican churches | Anglicanism | Christian denominations of North America | Churches in Canada | Religion in Canada

Anglican Church of Canada

 

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