Anglican Communion - Controversies

Controversies

See also: Homosexuality and Anglicanism and Anglican realignment

One effect of the Communion's dispersed authority has been that conflict and controversy regularly arise over the effect divergent practices and doctrines in one part of the Communion have on others. Disputes that had been confined to the Church of England could be dealt with legislatively in that realm, but as the Communion spread out into new nations and disparate cultures, such controversies multiplied and intensified. These controversies have generally been of two types: liturgical and social.

The first such controversy of note concerned that of the growing influence of the Catholic Revival manifested in the tractarian and so-called ritualism controversies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This controversy produced the Free Church of England and, in the United States and Canada, the Reformed Episcopal Church.

Later, rapid social change and the dissipation of British cultural hegemony over its former colonies contributed to disputes over the role of women, the parameters of marriage and divorce, and the practice of contraception and abortion. In the late 1970s, the Continuing Anglican movement produced a number of new church bodies in opposition to women's ordination, prayer book changes, and the new understandings concerning marriage.

More recently, disagreements over homosexuality have strained the unity of the Communion as well as its relationships with other Christian denominations, leading to another round of withdrawals from the Anglican Communion. Some churches founded outside the Anglican Communion in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, largely in opposition to the ordination of openly homosexual bishops and other clergy are usually referred to as belonging to the Anglican realignment movement, or else as "orthodox" Anglicans. In some ways they represent a stronger opposition because they have the backing of many member provinces of the Anglican Communion and, in some cases, are or have been missionary jurisdictions of such provinces of the Communion as the Churches of Nigeria, Kenya, Rwanda, and the Southern Cone of America. Simultaneous with debates about social theology and ethics, the Anglican Communion has debated prayer book revision and the acceptable grounds for achieving full communion with non-Anglican churches.