Prayer Books, Decisions, and the Wider Communion

The church revises its prayer book roughly once a lifetime, and each revision has been an argument about what the church is. The book of 1979 was the most consequential: it made the eucharist rather than morning prayer the normal Sunday service, printed traditional and contemporary language side by side, and set baptism and its covenant at the centre of the church self-understanding. A minority left over it, and some continuing Anglican bodies date from that revision rather than from any later dispute.

Decisions about ministry followed a similar pattern. Eleven women were ordained priest in Philadelphia in 1974 by bishops acting without canonical authority; General Convention regularised the position in 1976, and the first woman was consecrated bishop in 1989. In 2003 the diocese of New Hampshire elected and the church consented to the consecration of Gene Robinson, a bishop in a same-sex relationship.

That decision had effects across the Anglican Communion, whose provinces are autonomous and bound by mutual recognition rather than by any legislature. Several provinces declared broken or impaired communion, a realignment movement in North America formed the Anglican Church in North America in 2009, and prolonged litigation over parish and diocesan property followed. The atlas records the decisions, the reactions and the litigation as events, and does not adjudicate the theological question they turned on.