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The Continuing Anglican movement, also known as the Anglican Continuum, encompasses a number of Christian churches, principally based in North America, that have an Anglican identity and tradition but 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 churches of the Anglican Communion, but that they, the Continuing Anglicans, are preserving or "continuing" both Anglican lines of apostolic succession and historic Anglican belief and practice.[1][2][3]
The term was first used in 1948 to describe members of the Church of England in Nandyal who refused to enter the emerging Church of South India, which united the Anglican Church of India, Burma and Ceylon with the Reformed (Presbyterian and Congregationalist) and Methodist churches in India.[4][5] Today, however, the term usually refers to the churches that descend from the Congress of St. Louis, at which the foundation was laid for a new Anglican church in North America and which produced the Affirmation of St. Louis, which opens with the title "The Continuation of Anglicanism".[6] Some church bodies that pre-date the Congress of St. Louis or are of more recent origin have referred to themselves as "Continuing Anglican", although they have no connection to the Congress of St. Louis and may not adhere to all of its principles.
The churches defined as "Continuing Anglican" are separate from GAFCON and the Anglican Church in North America.[7]
The Church of South India is a United Church that came into existence on 27 September 1947. The churches that came into the union were the Anglican Church, the Methodist Church, and the South India United Church (a union in 1904 of the Presbyterian and Congregational churches). Later the Basel Mission Churches in South India also joined the Union. The Church of South India is the first example in church history of the union of Episcopal and non-Episcopal churches, and is thus one of the early pioneers of the ecumenical movement. The CSI strives to maintain fellowship with all those branches of the church which the uniting churches enjoyed before the union. It is a member of the World Methodist Council, the Anglican Consultative Council, the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, the Council for World Mission, and the Association of Missions and Churches in South West Germany.
affirmation
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).