By John Sandeman, from Anglican Ink.
The number of Anglican Christians is growing by more than a million people every year, according to the respected scholar David Goodhew, visiting fellow of St John’s College, Durham University.
“…new data show[s] that the Communion has radically changed, and this raises questions about the process. The online World Christian Database gives the best data on the current size of the Communion. Numbers last recorded in 2020 show that global Anglicanism has doubled in the past 50 years,” Goodhew reported in The Church Times. Anglican churches are those derived from the Church of England (C of E) through inherited doctrine and practises.
“As it continues to increase by about one million a year, there are about 100 million Anglicans, as of 2025. This is the result of massive growth in the global South, while Anglicanism in the global North has mostly shrunk. Talk of Anglicanism’s demise is the opposite of the truth.”
Goodhew states the figure of 100 million is actually an undercount. He cites sub saharan Africa as the engine of growth. “The biggest Anglican Church in the Communion is no longer the C of E, but the Church of Nigeria. Add in Ugandan and Kenyan Anglicans, and those three Provinces [national churches] constitute nearly half the global Communion.” Goodhew does not use the exxagerated Sts from England in his calculations.
These three national churches are members of Gafcon, the Global Anglican Futures movement, that supports an Anglicanism centred on the Bible’s teaching. Together with other Anglican provinces (national churches) such as Myanmar and South Sudan, and conservative breakaway bodies such as the Anglican Church in North America and Australia’s Diocese of the Southern Cross, Gafcon contains a super majority of the world’s Anglicans.