Continuing Anglican movement

The Continuing Anglican movement, also known as the Anglican Continuum, encompasses a number of Christian churches, principally based in North America, that have an Anglican identity and tradition but are not part of the Anglican Communion.

These churches generally believe that traditional forms of Anglican faith and worship have been unacceptably revised or abandoned within some churches of the Anglican Communion, but that they, the Continuing Anglicans, are preserving or "continuing" both Anglican lines of apostolic succession, and historic Anglican belief and practice.

The term was first used in 1948 to describe members of the Church of England in Nandyal who refused to enter the emerging Church of South India, which united the Anglican Church of India, Burma and Ceylon with the Reformed (Presbyterian and Congregationalist) and Methodist churches in India. Today, however, the term usually refers to the churches that descend from the Congress of St. Louis, at which the foundation was laid for a new Anglican church in North America and which produced the Affirmation of St. Louis which opens with the title "The Continuation of Anglicanism." Some church bodies that predate the Congress of St. Louis or are of more recent origin have referred to themselves as "Continuing Anglican", although they have no connection to the Congress of St. Louis and may not adhere to all of its principles.

The churches defined as "Continuing Anglican" are separate from GAFCON and the Anglican Church of North America.