Priest (Anglicanism)

The Anglican ministry is both the leadership and agency of Christian service in the Anglican Communion. "Ministry" commonly refers to the office of ordained clergy: the threefold order of bishops, priests and deacons. More accurately, Anglican ministry includes many laypeople who devote themselves to the ministry of the church. Ultimately, all baptized members of the church are considered to partake in the ministry of the Body of Christ. "...[I]t might be useful if Anglicans dropped the word minister when referring to the clergy...In our tradition, ordained persons are either bishops, priests, or deacons, and should be referred to as such."

Each of the provinces of the Anglican Communion has a high degree of independence from the other provinces, and each of them have slightly different structures for ministry, mission and governance. However, personal leadership is always vested in a member of the clergy (a bishop at provincial and diocesan levels, and a priest at parish level) and consensus derived by synodical government. At different levels of the church's structure, laity, clergy and bishops meet together with prayer to deliberate over church governance. These gatherings are variously called conferences, synods, convocations, councils, chapters and vestries.

The effect of Henry VIII's Act in Restraint of Appeals and first Act of Supremacy was to establish royal authority in all matters spiritual and temporal, even assigning the power of ecclesiastical visitation over the Church in the English Realm.Queen Elizabeth I, while declining the title of Supreme Head, was declared to be "Supreme Governor of this realm ... as well in all spiritual or ecclesiastical things or causes as temporal". Thus, although the Church of England was regarded in the sixteenth century as a church of the Reformation, it nonetheless maintained the historic church structure including the maintenance of the threefold order of the ministry, with bishops, consecrated in apostolic succession, ordaining deacons and priests. Thus, Anglican ordained ministry resembles that found in churches of the Catholic tradition (see Minister (Catholic Church)). While the Puritan ascendency in England briefly introduced a parallel presbyterian polity, Anglicanism worldwide is defined in part by the historic structure, although outside the British Isles it has no supreme governor.

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