The Four Characteristics of Anglicanism 

By Gerald Bray

What Sets the Anglican Church Apart? Four Defining Characteristics of Anglicanism 

Anglican churches share certain characteristics that set them apart from other Christians, though to what extent these characteristics can be said to reflect a distinctive Anglican theology is not at all obvious and is debated within the Anglican world itself.  

These common characteristics can be listed as follows: 

1. Episcopal Church Structure 

They all have an episcopal structure, which distinguishes Anglicans from many other Protestant bodies.  

Anglicans do not enter into formal union with other denominations unless they are prepared to take episcopacy into their systems, which they usually are, though there have been exceptions—the Church of Scotland, for example—and when that happens, full unity or intercommunion does not occur. 

Anglicans share episcopalianism with Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, though neither body recognizes Anglican bishops as canonically consecrated. As a result, Anglican episcopacy is in a curious position ecumenically, because on the one hand it is regarded as unnecessary by non-episcopal Protestants, and on the other hand it is seen as illegitimate by other episcopal churches that it claims to resemble. 

2. The Book of Common Prayer 

Anglicans all have a set vernacular liturgy contained in a Prayer Book, though the content of this liturgy may vary considerably from one province to another.  

It is also true that recent liturgical revision and ecumenical convergence has made this characteristic less definitive than it used to be. Many churches, both Protestant and Catholic, now have shared forms of worship that make it easier for people to worship across denominational lines. At the same time, some Anglican churches, like the Church of Aotearoa New Zealand, have developed liturgies that are so distant from the classical model provided by the Church of England that it is hard to know whether they are really Anglican at all. 

The Book of Common Prayer reflects the Anglican desire to communicate theological principles through the medium of public worship, and ideally that is what a Prayer Book should do. 

Unfortunately, liturgical revision in recent times has seldom paid much attention to Anglican theology, and this failure has led to criticism and confusion in some cases. Modern liturgies are often worked out on an ecumenical basis and aim to reflect the earliest known forms of Christian worship, factors that tend to dilute their specifically Anglican character. That may not be a bad thing in some cases, but it means that Anglican liturgy is no longer a reliable guide to specifically Anglican theology and must be used with caution in determining what the latter is. 

3. Laity in Church Government 

They all involve the laity in church government.  

Here Anglicans differ from Roman Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox, where the clergy dominate everything and lay people seldom have much of a voice. Clericalism is by no means absent from the Anglican world, but it is not intentional, and lay people are almost always represented in the synods and councils of the Church. In this respect, the decennial Lambeth Conferences that unite the bishops of the Anglican Communion are an anomaly, and the chances that they (or the even more restricted Primates’ Meetings of the heads of the individual provinces) will ever acquire legislative authority are remote, despite occasional pleas for them to do so. 

4. The Anglican Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion 

Anglicans have a hierarchy of beliefs that are rooted in their historic relationships to other churches and are set out sequentially in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion.  

First come the catholic articles, which are intended to show that Anglicans confess the same basic faith as all other orthodox Christian churches.  

Secondly, there are the doctrines that make Anglicanism a branch of Reformed Protestantism.  

Finally, there are a few beliefs and practices that were designed specifically for the Church of England and may be irrelevant (or inapplicable) to other churches, including most Anglican ones.

These four characteristics are typical of Anglican churches worldwide, but only the last of them directly reflects Anglican theology.