This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On 22 June 2009, at St. Vincent's Cathedral in Bedford, Texas, a coalition of theological traditionalists ratified a constitution and canons founding the Anglican Church in North America. Its founding members had already left the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada over the ordination of women and of an openly gay bishop, organizing first through the Common Cause Partnership formed in 2004.
The new church's formation grew directly out of an international meeting held the year before. The Global Anglican Future Conference, held in Jerusalem in 2008, issued a Jerusalem Declaration calling explicitly for a new orthodox province in North America, and the 2009 founding in Bedford answered that call directly.
The resulting church occupies an unusual place in world Anglicanism. The Anglican Church in North America is not itself a member province of the worldwide Anglican Communion, but it belongs to GAFCON and holds full communion with several Anglican Global South primates, standing outside one structure while remaining inside another.
What the 2009 Bedford founding changed for Anglicanism's spread in North America was giving departing traditionalists, already organized informally since 2004 and endorsed by an international declaration in 2008, a fully constituted church of their own, built outside the Anglican Communion's own governing structure rather than inside it.