Anglican Church of Canada - Ecumenical Relations

Ecumenical Relations

For more details on the on-going dialogue between Anglicanism and the wider Church, see Anglican communion and ecumenism.

The ACC is a member of the World Council of Churches and Archbishop Ted Scott was a president of that body; the ACC has been an active participant in the Canadian Council of Churches from its establishment immediately after the Second World War. Through the 1960s the ACC was involved in talks with the United Church of Canada and the Disciples of Christ with a view to institutional union, in the course of which a comprehensive Plan of Union was formulated and a joint Anglican-United Church hymnal produced in 1971. Ultimately such talks foundered when the Houses of Laity and Clergy voted in favour of union but the House of Bishops vetoed it, largely due to concerns over the maintenance of the Apostolic Succession of the episcopacy.

More recently, in 2001, the ACC established full communion with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada (ELCIC). Contrary to the practice in Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox communions, all baptized Christians are welcome to receive Holy Communion in Canadian Anglican churches, in accordance with the resolution in favour of open communion at the 1968 Lambeth Conference.

Through the Anglican Communion, the ACC is also in full communion with the churches of the Old Catholic Utrecht Union (represented by St. John's Cathedral, Toronto), the Mar Thoma Church, and the Philippine Independent Church. Unlike the Anglican Churches of the British Isles, it is not a signatory to the Porvoo Agreement which established full communion between those bodies and a number of European Lutheran churches.