| Porvoo Communion | |
| Type: | Communion |
| Orientation: | Protestant |
| Theology: | Lutheran and Anglican |
| Area: | Europe |
| Founded Date: | 1992 |
| Website: | https://porvoocommunion.org/ |
The Porvoo Communion is a communion of 15 predominantly northern European Anglican and Evangelical Lutheran churches, with a couple of far-southwestern European (in the Iberian Peninsula) church bodies of the same denomination. It was established in 1992 by a theological agreement entitled the Porvoo Common Statement which establishes full communion between and among these churches.[1] The agreement was negotiated in the town of Järvenpää in Finland, but the communion's name comes from the nearby city of Porvoo, where a joint Eucharist (or Holy Communion) was celebrated in Porvoo Cathedral after the formal signing in Järvenpää.
The first seeds to the broader communion formed in 1992 were planted in 1922 when the Anglican Church and the Church of Sweden agreed to enter communion with each other. In 1938, the Archbishop of Canterbury, symbolic head of the Anglican Communion, invited the representatives of the Estonian Evangelical Lutheran Church and Latvian Lutheran Church to Lambeth Palace in London in order to reach "altar and pulpit fellowship" between the Anglican and Baltic Lutheran churches. This process came to a formal conclusion with the establishment of the much wider Porvoo Communion in 1992. The churches involved are the several Anglican churches of the British Isles (headed by the founding Church of England) and the other Evangelical Lutheran churches of the Northern European countries. Later negotiations brought the small Anglican churches of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) into the agreement. These churches all share episcopal polity of church organization with the three-fold ministry of bishops, priests (or pastors) and deacons within the historical episcopate with apostolic succession (only bishops ordaining clergy or other bishops, priests and deacons). This is based on the original ministry of the early church.
The Porvoo Communion has no central office or overseer. Each member church has a contact person and these form a contact group which meets each year. Two bishops, one Lutheran and the other Anglican, are co-moderators of the contact group, and there are two co-secretaries also drawn from each tradition. Both are members of the Lutheran World Federation and the Anglican Communion.[2] There are also various conferences and meetings organized to discuss issues of concern to the entire Communion.[3]
Signatories of the Porvoo Communion:[4] [5]