For many, the Anglican Communion appears remote: an institution for international gatherings or mission agencies rather than something that touches parish life. There are, perhaps, also perceptions that the Anglican Communion is a creation and vestige of mercantile colonialism.
On the other hand, as financial and human resources at the denominational, diocesan, and parish levels become more exacerbated, our focus has become more insular. Parish clergy increasingly focus on internal congregational vitality and development as if such a “congregation-first” or a “denomination-first” mentality is the panacea for institutional decline.
One might raise a critical question: Has the America-first mentality that has shaken the global order affected the church or, at least in the Episcopal Church, has the church created the America-first mentality? While that question is not the subject at hand, our charism is tending to the local and the global as mutually reinforcing emphases embedded in our mission to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” This very Christ has broken every barrier down so that we may be restored to our full humanity, living into the image and reclaimed likeness of the Triune God, the source of creation’s beauty, diversity, and unity.
As a parish priest, therefore, I contend that for my parish, diocese, and denomination to flourish, the Anglican Communion is not a peripheral structure but a vital resource of identity, accountability, and mission. Ignoring or downplaying the Communion risks insularity; embracing it situates us within a living tradition. The 18th-century philosopher Edmund Burke captured the heart of this calling when he described society as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”[1] Anglicanism, like society, is a covenant across generations, places, and cultures.
The Chicago–Lambeth Quadrilateral: Impetus for Communion
The Episcopal Church, historically, has yearned for connection to the Reformed-Catholic ethos of its antecedent body. The Chicago-Quadrilateral (1886), affirmed by the Lambeth Conference in 1888, provides a theological grammar of Anglican unity. Its four elements—Scripture, the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, the dominical sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, and the historic episcopate—were not intended as a complete ecclesiology but as “instruments for reunion.” At the parish level, the Quadrilateral emphasizes that our local identity is not self-invented.
It is received through communion—unity—that embraces the local and the local that embraces the global consistently engaged in the interpretive project of praying the words of a common prayer book, reading Scripture, and affirming the ancient creeds. The local parish, as evinced in our structure, ideally embodies the loop of global and local through sacramental practice blessed by episcopal oversight that bridges the catholicity of the church in its embrace of the local and global, not as binary realities, but mutually indwelling. It links the smallest parish Eucharist to the global and historic church.
Relationality, Reciprocity, and Connectivity
A focus on insular relationships serves as instruments of cultural reification and ossification that ultimately lead to institutional death. Lay people and their parish clergy should be aware, therefore, of the undeniable relationships they have with others across space and time. The Anglican Communion is not defined by a central magisterium but by relationships. Authority is mediated through consultation and recognition, rather than jurisdiction.
As Rowan Williams argues, Anglican identity is shaped by “communion before agreement, a theological stance that privileges relationship even amid difference.” In parish life, this relational model translates into reciprocity. Mission is not unidirectional but mutual: congregations give and receive. People in congregations give and receive from each other; congregations and diocese give and receive from each other; dioceses give and receive from other dioceses; dioceses and the adjudicatory give to each other; the adjudicatory feeds and receives from the Anglican Communion. Ephraim Radner describes communion as a “third way” between autonomous congregationalism and rigid centralism. It is fragile, but precisely in its fragility lies its theological witness: unity must continually be sought, not imposed.
Moral Responsibility for Relationships
Paul Avis notes that Anglican polity institutionalizes diversity within a framework of communion.[2] That expression is a unique embodiment of catholicity. In local communities, especially in the life and witness of a parish, diversity is made visible. But that diversity in catholic unity then extends beyond to life of the church in space and time. A well-known aphorism coined by patristics scholar Jaroslav Pelikan is apt to make the point—tradition is the living faith of the dead, whereas traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.[3] Anglicanism offer visible diversity within a covenant across generations.
Such a covenant invites local parishes to treat the Anglican Communion’s institutions not as dispensable but as vessels of memory, wisdom, and obligation to the other, the neighbor who we are commanded to love. The local parish, receiving the gift of diversity across space and time, reflects a reverence for the Holy Spirit’s work of bringing life to the body.
This borderless commitment to the life of the church captures Christ’s high priestly prayer that “they may all be one, so that the world may believe” (John 17:21). By engaging the mutually reinforcing structures of the local and the global, we open ourselves to the embrace of global diversity. Communion life models covenantal interdependence, resisting nationalist insularity.
Christian history reminds us that councils—Nicaea, Chalcedon, Constantinople—were interpretive spaces where diversity gathered for discernment. The Anglican Communion’s instruments (the Lambeth Conference, Primates’ Meetings, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the Anglican Consultative Council) continue this pattern.
It appears—in the saecula, in the worldly age—that there is an increasing desire on the global stage to reframe our relationships, political and ecclesiastical, along the lines of nations. Yet Anglicanism, as a healthy expression of Evangelical and Catholic Christianity, resists insularism. This tradition invites the conversations about denominational restructuring and congregational vitality and development to include a global, Communion perspective.
When parishes act as if they are independent franchises, they risk theological and missional impoverishment. It becomes a form of theological solipsism, and the consequence of such solipsism is stagnation. In other words, insularity substitutes local preference and a congregation-first attitude that stands in contradiction to the openness of the gospel. Communion connection interrupts this narrowness by recentering parishes in the wider body.
Whenever the Anglican Communion becomes tangible in parish life, whether that is in mission partnerships that expand horizons and deepen discipleship or liturgical exchanges that embody unity by celebrating a diversity of prayer, a remarkable degree of humility is gained. We who have received the gift of the church begin to see with clarity that this common life in Christ is not a possession but a trust to be stewarded across generations.
The Anglican Communion should matter to Episcopal parishes not as an optional add-on but as a theological and moral necessity. To neglect the Communion is to risk insularity. To embrace it is to enact Christ’s prayer, embodying a catholic witness that they may all be one.
Further Reading
- Paul Avis, The Identity of Anglicanism: Essentials of Anglican Ecclesiology. London: T&T Clark, 2008.
- Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner, The Fate of Communion: The Agony of Anglicanism and the Future of a Global Church. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.
- Michael Ramsey, The Gospel and the Catholic Church. London: Longmans, 1936.
- Toronto Anglican Congress. Mutual Responsibility and Interdependence in the Body of Christ. Toronto: Anglican Congress, 1963.
- Rowan Williams, Anglican Identities. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2003.
[1] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003 [1790].
[2] Paul Avis, The Identity of Anglicanism: Essentials of Anglican Ecclesiology (London: T&T Clark, 2008).
[3] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Vindication of Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).
The Rev. Manoj Zacharia, Ph.D. serves as Rector of St. Anne’s Parish in Annapolis, Maryland. Previous appointments include Sub-Dean of Christ Church Cathedral in Cincinnati and as Rector of St. Paul’s and Resurrection in the Diocese of Newark. He has served as a Deputy to General Convention and a member of the Episcopal Church’s Standing Committee on Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations.
