Archbishop

An Anglican archbishop presides over an ecclesiastical province, a grouping of dioceses, and holds a metropolitan authority over its bishops broadly comparable to the Roman Catholic metropolitan's, though considerably lighter in practice: the Church of England's two provinces, Canterbury and York, are each headed by their own archbishop, and other Anglican churches worldwide, most organized as independent, self-governing provinces since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the British Empire's colonial churches became autonomous national bodies, are typically headed by their own archbishop or, in smaller provinces, a bishop styled primate without the archiepiscopal title.

Anglican archbishops beyond Canterbury and York generally hold no authority over provinces other than their own; unlike the Roman Catholic papacy, the Anglican Communion has no single archbishop or other figure with jurisdiction spanning the whole Communion, and the Archbishop of Canterbury's widely recognized status as first among equals across the Communion is one of moral and historical standing rather than of governing power over provinces outside England itself, a structure that has become a source of real strain as member provinces have taken sharply differing positions on contested questions in recent decades.

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.