Anglican Communion

The Anglican Communion is a global fellowship of 42 autonomous member churches — the national and regional churches that trace their heritage to the Church of England — comprising approximately 85 million members across more than 165 countries. Its Secretariat is based in London, and the Archbishop of Canterbury serves as its spiritual leader and symbolic primus inter pares. Since the 2022 Lambeth Conference, the Communion has developed a coordinated institutional voice on artificial intelligence: establishing a global Science Commission, issuing a Lambeth Call on Science and Faith that names AI as a priority challenge, and signing the Rome Call for AI Ethics — formal commitments extending AI ethical advocacy into every province of the worldwide Anglican family.

Founding and structure

The Anglican Communion's origins trace to the first Lambeth Conference in 1867, convened by Archbishop of Canterbury Charles Longley to gather the bishops of the global Anglican family in a common consultative assembly. The Lambeth Conference meets approximately once per decade and represents the closest thing the Communion has to an authoritative assembly, though its resolutions are by convention advisory rather than binding on autonomous member churches. The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Anglican Consultative Council, and the Primates' Meeting provide ongoing governance between Lambeth gatherings. The 42 member churches range from the Church of England and the Episcopal Church (United States) to the Church of Nigeria, the Church of Uganda, and the Anglican Church of Kenya — giving the Communion its most significant institutional weight in the Global South, where membership is growing most rapidly.

Anglican Communion Science Commission

The Anglican Communion Science Commission (ACSC) was formally launched at the 2022 Lambeth Conference in Canterbury, established to resource all 42 provinces for "courageous and confident spiritual leadership in issues involving science." The Commission identified artificial intelligence, the climate crisis, and global health as its three priority areas, framing AI not as a secular technical matter but as a domain requiring the Church's distinctive ethical wisdom. Co-chaired by the Rt Revd Steven Croft (Bishop of Oxford) and the Revd Professor Kwamena Sagoe (Head of Virology, University of Ghana), with Professor Andrew Briggs of the University of Oxford as Convenor, the Commission's leadership structure deliberately balances senior ecclesiastical leadership with working research scientists from both the Global North and the Global South. Its approximately 30 members — bishops, scientists, and theologians — represent provincial churches in Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Central Africa, Central America, England, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines, Southern Africa, Tanzania, and the West Indies, making it one of the most geographically diverse institutional bodies the Communion has established for any single policy area.

The Commission's animating conviction is that the Church must ask not merely "can we?" but "should we?" regarding scientific capabilities, and that the Church's accumulated ethical wisdom makes a contribution that purely technical reasoning cannot supply. Each of the Communion's 42 provinces was requested to designate a Lead Science Bishop to develop provincial action plans for science-faith engagement — creating a structural mechanism to translate global Commission work into local pastoral and policy engagement across diverse national contexts.

Lambeth Call on Science and Faith (2022)

At the 2022 Lambeth Conference, assembled bishops produced a Lambeth Call on Science and Faith — one of several Lambeth Calls addressing defining challenges facing the Communion and the world. The Call urged the Anglican Communion to "recognise within science God-given resources for the life of faith, and to offer the wisdom of faith to the work of science," declaring that the perceived rift between science and faith should be "laid to rest in every part of our Anglican Communion over the coming critical decade." Among the practical challenges named in the Call were the growing influence of artificial intelligence, the climate crisis, and the legacy of COVID-19 — framing AI as a question the Church was obligated to engage as part of its core ministry. Bishop Croft described the stakes plainly: a Church that refuses to engage with science and technology "will have nothing to say to a world whose future is being decided by changes of science and technology."

Church of England: House of Lords, General Synod, and Rome Call (2024)

The Diocese of Oxford — led by Bishop Steven Croft, who served simultaneously as the Church of England's lead bishop on AI in the House of Lords, co-chair of the ACSC, and a founding board member of the UK government's Centre for Data Ethics and Innovation — built sustained AI ethics engagement over seven years from 2016 to 2024, tracing an arc from "What should we think?" through "What shall we say?" to "What should we do?" as AI moved from emerging concern to urgent policy question. This engagement catalyzed broader Church of England and Communion action.

In February 2024, the Church of England's General Synod passed a landmark resolution on AI and work, affirming the dignity and value of purposeful work in the face of AI automation, endorsing the Rome Call for AI Ethics, committing Church organizations to the living wage, and requesting the Faith and Order Commission to study how the "fourth industrial revolution" affects dignified work. During Synod debate, Bishop Croft highlighted the exploitative conditions of "ghost work" — low-wage data labeling and content moderation in the Global South — as a live justice concern embedded in AI supply chains, while Alan Smith, First Church Estates Commissioner, drew an explicit connection between AI labor practices and historical colonialism, describing the AI economy as "powered by a vast army of human labour in the Global South — particularly Africa — doing the mind-numbing, drudge work of labelling data and monitoring content in inhumane conditions."

Following the Synod resolution, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby signed the Rome Call for AI Ethics on April 30, 2024, at the headquarters of the Pontifical Academy for Life in Rome — the most significant ecumenical Anglican gesture on AI governance to date, formally aligning the Church of England with the Catholic, Jewish, and Muslim leaders who had co-signed the document. The Rome Call's six principles — transparency, inclusion, responsibility, impartiality, reliability, and security and privacy — provided a shared multi-faith ethical framework that the Archbishop endorsed while maintaining the Church of England's distinctive emphases on human dignity, economic justice, and spiritual authenticity. Bishop Croft separately articulated a "Ten Commandments for AI" grounding AI ethics in pro-human principles, including an explicit prohibition on vesting "the autonomous power to hurt or destroy" in AI systems.

All Africa Conference of Churches and global reach

The Communion's AI ethics engagement extends beyond Western ecclesial contexts. In July 2025, the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) — the largest association of Protestant, Anglican, Orthodox, and Indigenous churches in Africa — convened a two-day consultation in Nairobi with 25 African church leaders on AI's opportunities, risks, and challenges, co-organized with the Future of Life Institute. The consultation produced concrete institutional outcomes: a permanent AACC AI and Faith Working Group, integration of AI ethics into seminary curricula and Christian education programs, production of policy briefs for African governments and the African Union, and the development of an African-centered ethical framework for AI. These outcomes signal that Anglican AI ethics engagement is not a purely Western project but is developing institutional roots in the part of the Communion where membership growth is most rapid.

In September 2024, Anglican representatives participated in the UN Summit of the Future, contributing a faith voice to global deliberations on AI alongside the Communion's longstanding engagements on climate change, conflict resolution, and public health — positioning the Communion's AI ethics work as a contribution to multilateral governance processes, not solely internal denominational reflection.

Relation to the ecumenical faith-institutional AI movement

The Anglican Communion's AI ethics work situates it within the emerging ecumenical coalition of faith-institutional actors on AI governance. The Rome Call signature placed the Archbishop of Canterbury alongside the Pontifical Academy for Life, Religions for Peace, and leading Muslim and Jewish institutions in a shared multi-faith ethical framework — a convergence across traditions that had not previously found institutional common ground on technology governance. The Communion's particular contribution is its reach into Protestant and Anglican traditions across the Global South, especially Africa, Asia, and the Pacific, where the AI governance conversation has often lacked anchored denominational voices; its Science Commission structure and province-level Lead Science Bishop appointments provide a mechanism to bring that reach into the formal ecumenical network of which Religions for Peace, the Pontifical Academy for Life, and the World Council of Churches form the Catholic and multi-confessional pillars.