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The Church of England ( C of E) is the established Christian church in England. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain by the 3rd century and to the 6th-century Gregorian mission to Kent led by Augustine of Canterbury. Its adherents are called Anglicans .
- C of E
- Church House, Westminster, England
- 26 million (baptised)
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Church of England, English national church that traces its history back to the arrival of Christianity in Britain during the 2nd century. It has been the original church of the Anglican Communion since the 16th-century Protestant Reformation. As the successor of the Anglo-Saxon and medieval English church, it has valued and preserved much of the tr...
The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons, who began invading Britain after Rome stopped governing the country in the 5th century, was undertaken by St. Augustine, a monk in Rome chosen by Pope Gregory I to lead a mission to the Anglo-Saxons. He arrived in 597, and within 90 years all the Saxon kingdoms of England had accepted Christianity. Augustine’s archbishopric at Canterbury soon became the symbolic seat of England’s church, which established important ties to Rome under his leadership. Subsequent mission work, such as that of St. Aidan in northern England about 634, helped to solidify the English church. At the synod of Whitby in 664, the church of Northumbria (one of the northern English kingdoms) broke its ties with the Celtic church and accepted Roman usage, bringing the English church more fully into line with Roman and Continental practices.
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In the centuries before the Reformation, the English church experienced periods of advancement and of decline. The early church in England was a distinctive fusion of British, Celtic, and Roman influences. Although adopting the episcopal structure favoured by the church of Rome, it retained powerful centres in the monasteries that had been established due to the influence of Irish Christianity. During the 8th century, English scholarship was highly regarded, and several English churchmen worked in Europe as scholars, reformers, and missionaries. Representatives of the church, such as the great historian and scholar Bede, played an important role in the development of English culture. Subsequently, Danish invasions destroyed monasteries and weakened scholarship. Political unity in England was established under the Wessex kings in the 10th century, however, and reforms of the church took place.
In the 11th century the Norman Conquest of England (1066) united England more closely with the culture of Latin Europe. The English church was reformed according to Roman ideas: local synods were revived, celibacy of the clergy was required, and the canon law of western Europe was introduced in England.
During the Middle Ages, English clergy and laity made important contributions to the life and activities of the Roman Catholic Church. The English church, however, shared in the religious unrest characteristic of the later Middle Ages. John Wycliffe, a 14th-century reformer and theologian, became a revolutionary critic of the papacy and is considered a major influence on the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.
Women deacons, known originally as deaconesses and serving basically as assistants to priests, were first ordained by the Church of England in 1987, allowing them to perform virtually all clerical functions except the celebration of the Eucharist. The church voted in 1992 to ordain women as priests, and the first ordination, of 32 women, took place in 1994 at Bristol Cathedral. Following an intense debate, the church voted in 2008 to consecrate women as bishops, a decision upheld by a church synod in 2010. In 2012 the lower house of the General Synod, the church’s governing body, defeated a bill that would have authorized the installation of women as bishops. In 2014, however, all three houses of the General Synod passed a bill authorizing the installation of women as bishops. The bill was approved by the church’s most senior officials—the archbishop of Canterbury and the archbishop of York—later that year. The first woman bishop of the Church of England, the Rev. Libby Lane, was consecrated in January 2015.
Homosexuals in celibate civil unions were first ordained as priests in 2005 and were permitted to become bishops in 2013. Later that year the House of Commons passed legislation that legalized same-sex marriages but prevented the Church of England from performing them. Ministers are also not permitted to bless such marriages.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Feb 13, 2018 · Learn about the history, doctrines, and practices of the Church of England, the primary state church in England and the original church of the Anglican Communion. Find out how the Church of England is linked to Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and the Protestant Episcopal Church in the US. Discover how the Church of England has been progressive on issues such as women and LGBTQ rights.
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The Christian faith is not a human invention, but a gift from God, who has revealed himself through the Bible, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. Learn how to profess the faith of the Church of England, which is based on the Apostles' Creed and the Pilgrim Way, and how to go to church and pray as a Christian.
The Church of England traces its history back to 597. That year, a group of missionaries sent by the pope and led by Augustine of Canterbury began the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons. Augustine became the first archbishop of Canterbury. Throughout the Middle Ages, the English Church was a part of the Catholic Church led by the pope in Rome.
The roots of the Church of England go back to the time of the Roman Empire when a Christian church came into existence in what was then the Roman province of Britain. The early Christian writers Tertullian and Origen mention the existence of a British church in the third century AD and in the fourth century British bishops attended a number of ...
