Background. After the Revolutionary War, members of the Church of England in the newly formed United States need to organise their Church, and secure the consecration of Anglican Bishops for the Church. In the event, such efforts began very shortly after the end of hostilities.

They had also elected Bishops, but, although Seabury of Connecticut was consecrated in Scotland, by Non-Jurors, the Bishops-elect of New York and Pennsylvania had to wait until the British Parliament had repealed the legislation requiring an oath of allegiance to the Monarchy for Anglican Bishops before being consecrated. The two Candidates that were able to make the trip were White, and Provoost, who were consecrated Bishops of Pennsylvania and New York, respectively, by Archbishop Moore of Canterbury, assisted by three other Bishops of the Church of England on 4^th February 1787.

The Need for the Continuing Church. The story of the Protestant Episcopal Church from the 1780s to the 1960s is one of steady expansion, apart from the Civil War period when the Church in the Southern States suffered heavy losses. However, by the 1960s the Episcopal Church was deeply engaged in dialogue with other denominations with a view to forming a single united Protestant Church. Unfortunately for these discussions to come to fruition it would be necessary for all that was distinctive about the Episcopalian Tradition to be sacrificed. The 1960s were also a period when theological liberalism was on the rise. The wayward antics of Bishop James Pike (California), and the refusal of the House of Bishops to discipline him, provided the final nudge necessary for groups of Episcopal Priests and Lay People to seceed from the Episcopal Church and form continuing Episcopal Churches. This is the origin of the Anglican Church, Incorporated. They elected bishops and had them consecrated by Old Catholic Bishops, in the ACI's precursors these were later regularised by the Phillipine Independent Church, which had derived its orders form the Episcopal Church during the 1940s.

Originally there were three of these groups, the Anglican Orthodox Church, the American Episcopal Church, and the Southern Episcopal Church. The first two eventually merged, and the Episcopal Church grew increasingly weird, and went into numerical decline, so the Continuing Churches began their slow growth. Unfortunately, when the ordination of women brought a new generation of Continuers into being in 1977, they refused to join the existing jurisdictions, and even went so far as to exclude representatives of the existing Continuing Churches from the St Louis Congress of Concerned Churchmen. Instead they formed their own Anglican Catholic Church, which was very largely of Anglo-Catholic (or 'High') Churchmanship. It adopted an elaborate code of Canons (incidently causing the schism that led to the formation of the Anglican Province of Christ the King), and in many parishes unauthorised Missals replaced the 1928 Prayer Book (this being the origin of the United Episcopal Church, which started off as the 'Low Church' party in the ACC. Clearly by revising the Canons, and adopting the Anglican Missal as its Eucharistic Rite, this was the creation of an Anglo-Catholic dream Church, not the continuation of the Anglican or Episcopal Tradition inherited from PECUSA. The result has been to perpetuate the history of division within the Continuing Church, especially as the ACC has itself given rise to four other jurisdictions.

However since 1991, there has been a move towards greater unity in the Continuing Church. The Anglican Church, Inc., was formed in that year to bring together Continuing Anglicans on the basis of the Bible, the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, and the 1928 Book of Common Prayer, with a common threefold male ministry. To the original three dioceses, two more have been added, and the Church's work overseas has expanded to include England and Wales, and India.