Anglican Communion

As a part of the Church of England, St George's is part of the Anglican Communion.

Rowan Williams - Archbishop of CanterburyThe Anglican Communion is an international association of national Anglican churches. As the name suggests, the Anglican Communion is an association of these churches in full communion with the Church of England and specifically with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The status of full communion means that there is mutual agreement on essential doctrines, and that full participation in the sacramental life of each national church is available to all Anglicans.
 
The Anglican Communion considers itself to be part of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church and to be both Catholic and Reformed. For some adherents it represents a non-papal Catholicism, for others a form of Protestantism. For others, their self-identity represents some combination of the two. The Anglican Communion has no official legal existence nor any governing structure which might exercise authority over the member churches.
 
Three elements have been important in holding the Communion together: First, the shared ecclesial structure of the component churches, manifested in an Episcopal polity maintained through the apostolic succession of bishops and synodical government; second, the principle of belief expressed in worship, investing importance in approved prayer books and their rubrics; and third, the historical documents that have influenced the ethos of the Communion.
 
Originally, the Church of England was self-contained and relied for its unity and identity on its own history, its traditional legal and episcopal structure and its status as an established church of the state.
 
Anglicans have typically appealed to the Book of Common Prayer and its offshoots as a guide to Anglican theology and practice. This had the effect of inculcating the principle of lex orandi, lex credendi (the law of prayer is the law of belief) as the foundation of Anglican identity and confession.
 
Protracted conflict through the seventeenth century with more radical protestants on the one hand and Roman Catholics who still recognised the primacy of the Pope on the other, resulted in an association of churches that were both deliberately vague about doctrinal principles, yet bold in developing parameters of acceptable deviation. These parameters were most clearly articulated in the various rubrics of the successive prayer books, as well as the Thirty Nine Articles of Religion.
 
With the expansion of the British Empire and hence the growth of Anglicanism outside Great Britain and Ireland, the Communion sought to establish new vehicles of unity. The first major expression of this were the Lambeth Conference of the communion's bishops, first convened by Archbishop of Canterbury in 1867.
 
For more information, see the official website of the Anglican Communion - http://www.anglicancommunion.org