What do Anglicans believe?

We are Christian. Before we are anything else, we hold the faith the apostles received and proclaimed, and we hold their witness above all else: Holy Scripture, the Old and New Testaments, in which God has spoken and still speaks to his people.

That faith is confessed in the three ancient creeds of the Church: the Nicene, the Apostles', and the Athanasian. With the whole Church we receive the first four ecumenical councils, which gave us the language of the Holy Trinity and of Jesus Christ as one person in two natures, fully God and fully man, and we hold to the Christological clarifications that followed in the fifth through seventh councils.

We are not so presumptuous as to think we are the entirety of Jesus Christ’s Church. We give thanks for our brothers and sisters across the Christian family who worship the same Triune God, and we count ourselves one part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

Scripture

We believe God has spoken, and that he speaks still through the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. They hold the supreme authority over what we believe and how we live, containing all things necessary for salvation. Whenever we gather we hear them read aloud in order that we may read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them.

Creeds

The Nicene, Apostles, and Athanasian creeds are the faith handed down to us, the Church's own summary of what the apostles taught, settled in the early centuries and confessed ever since. Each Sunday, when we stand and say the Nicene Creed together, we add our voices to those of Christians in every age and every land.

Councils

When the early Church faced serious error about who God is, her bishops gathered in council to carefully search and articulate what Scripture had always taught: that God is one in three persons, and that Jesus Christ is one person in two natures, fully God and fully man.

We are Anglican. Christianity took root in England in the earliest centuries of the Church, and that ancient faith was renewed in the Reformation of the sixteenth century. Anglicanism is that same faith, prayed in the language of the people and handed on across the centuries to us. Its doctrine and worship are shaped by three historic texts we call the formularies: the Book of Common Prayer, the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the Ordinal.

We are global. We are not a congregation out on our own. We belong to the Diocese of Cascadia, the Anglican Church in North America, and the worldwide Global Anglican Communion, where the historic Anglican faith is held and flourishing across Africa, Asia, and the Global South. With that global family we affirm the Jerusalem Declaration (2008) and the Abuja Affirmation (2026), standing firmly on the authority of Scripture, apostolic faith, and the Anglican formularies.