The Anglican Church of Canada (ACC or ACoC; ) is the province of the Anglican Communion in Canada. In 2016, the Anglican Church of Canada responded to a peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Anglican Studies published by Cambridge University Press reporting that the church has 1,447,080 total baptized members. In 2022, the Anglican Church counted 294,931 active members on parish rolls in 1,978 congregations, organized into 1,498 parishes. The 2021 Canadian census counted 1,134,315 self-identified Anglicans (3.1 percent of the total Canadian population), making the Anglican Church the third-largest Canadian church after the Catholic Church and the United Church of Canada.2021 is the most recent census to collect information on religion in Canada. Statistics Canada: "Please note that information about religion is only collected once every 10 years."
Like other Anglican churches, the Anglican Church of Canada's liturgy utilizes a native version of the Book of Common Prayer, the 1962 prayer book. An alternative liturgical resource was developed in 1985 titled the Book of Alternative Services, which has developed into the dominant liturgical book of the church.
Unlike in the United Kingdom, the past title of "Defender of the Faith" in the title of the Canadian sovereign did not officially refer to the Christian faith, or to the Anglican Church of Canada. However, two out of three Chapels Royal in Canada are consecrated Anglican chapels.
Official names
Until 1955, the Anglican Church of Canada was known as the "Church of England in the Dominion of Canada" or simply the "Church of England in Canada". In 1977, the church's General Synod adopted l'Église episcopale du Canada as its French-language name. This name was replaced with the current one, l'Église anglicane du Canada, in 1989; however, the former name is still used in some places along with the new one.
A matter of some confusion for Anglicans elsewhere in the world is that while the Anglican Church of Canada is a province of the Anglican Communion, the Ecclesiastical Province of Canada is merely one of four such ecclesiastical provinces of the Anglican Church of Canada. This confusion is furthered by the fact that Canada has ten civil provinces, along with three territories.
In recent years, there have been attempts by splinter groups to incorporate under very similar names. 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 body.The breakaway group now styles itself as the Anglican Coalition in Canada. "Group drops name", Anglican Journal (1 May 2006), Retrieved 23 January 2007.
History Anglicanism in British North America
The Anglican Church of Canada's prayer book commemorates John Cabot's landing on Newfoundland on 24 June 1497.
The first Church of England service was a celebration of Holy Communion at Frobisher Bay around 3 September 1578 by the chaplain on Martin Frobisher's voyage to the Arctic. The chaplain was Maister Wolfall (probably Robert Wolfall), minister and preacher', who had been charged by Queen Elizabeth 'to serve God twice a day.
The propagation of the Church of England occurred in three ways. One way was by officers of ships and lay military and civil officials reading services from the Book of Common Prayer regularly when no clergy were present. For example, in the charter issued by Charles I for Newfoundland in 1633 was this directive: "On Sundays Divine Service to be said by some of the Masters of ships, such prayers as are in the Book of Common Prayer". A second way was the direct appointing and employing of clergy by the English government on ships and in settlements. A third way was the employment of clergy by private "adventurous" companies.
The first documented resident Church of England cleric on Canadian soil was Erasmus Stourton, who arrived at the "Sea Forest Plantation" at Ferryland, Newfoundland, in 1612 under the patronage of Lords Bacon and Baltimore. Stourton was of the Puritan party and remained in Ferryland until returning to England in 1628.
The overseas development of the Church of England in British North America challenged the insular view of the church at home. The editors of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer found that they had to address the spiritual concerns of the contemporary adventurer. In the 1662 Preface, the editors note:
The Hudson's Bay Company sent out its first chaplain in 1683, and where there was no chaplain the officers of the company were directed to read prayers from the BCP on Sundays.
Members of the Church of England established the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1698, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG) in 1701, and the Church Missionary Society (CMS) in 1799. These and other organizations directly financed and sent missionaries to establish the English Church in Canada and to convert Canada's First Nations people. Direct aid of this sort lasted up to the 1940s.
The first Anglican church in Newfoundland and in Canada was the small garrison chapel at St John's Fort built sometime before 1698. The first continuously resident cleric of the chapel was John Jackson – a Royal Navy chaplain who had settled in St. John's and was supported (but not financially) by the SPCK in 1698. In 1701, the SPG took over the patronage of St John's. Jackson continued to receive little actual support and was replaced by Jacob Rice in 1709. Rice wrote a letter to the Bishop of London detailing his efforts to repair the church which had been "most unchristianly defaced" and asking for help in acquiring communion vessels, a pulpit cloth, surplices and glass for the windows. The garrison chapel was replaced in 1720 and in 1759. The Cathedral 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, Henry Compton.
The first Anglican services in Nova Scotia are dated from 1710 when a New England army from Boston with assistance of the Royal Navy captured for the fourth time Port Royal in Nova Scotia and renamed it Annapolis Royal. When Annapolis was captured, one of the chaplains, John Harrison, held a service of thanksgiving with Samuel Hesker, the chaplain of the Marines, preaching the sermon. When the war ended in 1713 with the Treaty of Utrecht, Harrison continued to act as chaplain to the Garrison at Annapolis Royal.
The oldest Anglican church in Canada still standing is St Paul's Church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, whose foundation stone – the church is a wood structure – was laid by the Nova Scotia governor on 13 June 1750. St. Paul's opened for services on 2 September 1750 with an SPG cleric, William Tutty, preaching. St Paul's became the first Anglican cathedral in all of North America when Charles Inglis was appointed bishop in 1787. It has been a parish church since 1845 when St. Lukes Pro-Cathedral in Halifax replaced it. The Church of All Saints in Halifax was made the cathedral of the Nova Scotian diocese in 1910 and remains as such to date.
After the American Revolution Anglicans were a more numerous minority among the United Empire Loyalists who fled to Canada after the American Revolution than Anglicans had been in the Thirteen Colonies as a whole (in 1775, 70–90% of the white population was not formally affiliated with a church). The Anglican Church was a dominant feature of the compact governments that presided over the colonies in British North America. See drop-down essay on "Early European Settlement and the Formation of the Modern State"
One of the former Americans was Charles Inglis who was rector of Trinity Church in New York when George Washington was in the congregation. He became the first bishop of the diocese of Nova Scotia on 12 August 1787 and the first Church of England bishop of a diocese outside the United Kingdom and in the British Empire. The Anglican Church of Canada's Prayer Book commemorates Inglis on 12 August.
There were historical connections between the Episcopal Church in the United States of America and the Anglican Church of Canada. Samuel Seabury and Inglis knew each other. In March 1783, a group of eighteen clergy – most prominent was Charles Inglis – met in New York to discuss the future of Nova Scotia, including plans for the appointment of a bishop in Nova Scotia and the college that would in time become the University of King's College, Halifax.
The connections between the now administratively separated churches continued in many ways. In the summer of 1857, Bishop Thomas F. Scott of Oregon visited Victoria and confirmed twenty candidates as the first British Columbian bishop would not be appointed for another two years. From the 1890s to 1902, Henry Irving (also known as Father Pat) was licensed in both the Diocese of Kootenay and the Diocese of Spokane – the two dioceses meet at the border between B.C. and the state of Washington. As Irving told his friends, he was
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 interpreted to mean that the Church of England 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, the presence of a Roman Catholic majority made establishment in that province politically unwise. Bishop John Strachan of Toronto was a particular champion of the prerogatives of the Church of England.
The secular history of Canada depicts Bishop Strachan as an ally of the landed gentry of the so-called Family Compact of Upper Canada, opposed to the political aspirations of farmers and bourgeoisie for responsible government. Nonetheless, Strachan played considerable part in promoting education, as founder of Kings College (now the University of Toronto) and Trinity College. The Clergy reserves, land which had been reserved for use by the non-Roman Catholic clergy, became a major issue in the mid-19th century. Anglicans argued that the land was meant for their exclusive use, while other denominations demanded that it be divided among them.
In Upper Canada, leading dissenters such as Methodist minister Egerton Ryerson – in due course a minister of education in the government of Upper Canada – agitated against establishment. Following the Upper Canada Rebellion, the creation of the united Province of Canada, and the implementation 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 Canadian Confederation in 1867, the Church of England was disestablished throughout British North America.Curtis Fahey, In His Name: The Anglican Experience in Upper Canada, 1791–1854 (McGill-Queen's Press-MQUP, 1991).
Autonomy and interdependence