The Continuing Anglican movement, also known as the Anglican Continuum, encompasses a number of Christian churches that are from the Anglican tradition but that are not part of the Anglican Communion. These churches generally believe that traditional forms of Anglican faith and worship have been unacceptably revised or abandoned within some Anglican Communion churches in recent decades. They claim, therefore, that they are "continuing" or preserving the Anglican line of apostolic succession as well as historic Anglican belief and practice.
The modern "continuing" movement principally dates to the 1977 Congress of St. Louis in the United States, at which meeting participants rejected the ordination of women and the changes that had been made in the American Episcopal Church's Book of Common Prayer.
Continuing Anglican churches have generally been formed by clergy and lay people who left churches belonging to the Anglican Communion. These particular Anglican Communion churches are charged by the Continuing movement with being greatly compromised by adopting what they consider to be secular cultural standards and liberal approaches to theology. Many Continuing Anglicans believe that the faith of some churches in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury has become either unorthodox or un-Christian and therefore have not sought to also be in communion with them. Although the term Anglican refers also to those churches in communion with the Church of England and the Archbishop of Canterbury, many Continuing churches, particularly those in the United States, use the term Anglican to differentiate themselves from the Episcopal Church. Many continuing Anglicans feel that they are remaining true to historic Anglican tradition and Biblical Christianity and that it is the Episcopal Church in the United States, as well as other parts of the Anglican Communion, which have become unorthodox.