The Church of England remains the established church of England, meaning it holds a formal constitutional relationship with the state that most other national churches, including other member churches of the Anglican Communion, do not share with their governments. The reigning monarch is Supreme Governor of the church, its senior bishops sit by right in the House of Lords, and its canon law carries a status in English law that no other religious body's internal rules hold, arrangements that draw periodic political debate in an increasingly religiously diverse and secular England.
The church is governed synodically, through a General Synod of bishops, clergy and laity that shares legislative authority with Parliament over the church's own affairs, a structure built up gradually since the early twentieth century to give the church more practical self-governance without formally ending establishment. Women were first ordained to the priesthood in 1994 and to the episcopate in 2014, changes that arrived after decades of internal debate and that some traditionalist parishes and clergy still decline to accept, a tension the church manages through special pastoral arrangements rather than resolution.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, as the Church of England's senior bishop, holds no formal jurisdiction over any other Anglican Communion province, but is recognized by convention as the Communion's symbolic head and the traditional convener of the Lambeth Conference.