Selection And The Office's Colonial-Era Expansion

Selection of an Anglican archbishop varies by province: in the Church of England it follows the same Crown Nominations Commission process used for diocesan bishops generally, while other provinces elect their own archbishops or primates through their province's own synod or house of bishops, without any role for the British Crown. The office multiplied considerably from the nineteenth century onward as the Church of England's missionary expansion alongside British colonial administration produced dozens of new dioceses across Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, which were progressively organized into self-governing provinces, each eventually gaining its own archbishop or primate as the colonial-era pattern of oversight from England gave way to full local autonomy over the twentieth century.

This expansion has shifted the Anglican Communion's demographic center decisively toward the Global South: provinces such as Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya now report considerably larger active membership than the Church of England itself, a shift in numerical weight that has not been matched by a corresponding shift in the Communion's older, England-centered structures of moral authority, a mismatch several Global South provinces have pointed to directly in disputes over doctrine and practice with the Communion's historic English center.