The Anglican community in Singapore has its roots in 1826, shortly after the
founding of modern Singapore by
Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819 and the arrival of the first English settlers from the
British East India Company. Raffles allocated a piece of land between
Hill Street and
North Bridge Road in his
Town Plan of 1822 for the siting of an Anglican church. However, construction of the church did not begin until funds were raised by the community in 1834. The church was named
Saint Andrew after the patron saint of Scotland in honour of the Scottish community who had donated to the building fund. After falling under jurisdiction of the bishop of Labuan and Sarawak (and no longer Calcutta) in 1869,
St. Andrew's Cathedral was made the cathedral church of the diocese in 1870. Officially titled Diocese of Singapore, Labuan and Sarawak in 1881, a diocese over such a large area was quite unmanageable. In 1909 Singapore was made a
separate diocese covering the
Straits Settlements, Peninsular Malaya, Siam, Java, Sumatra and adjacent islands, with Bishop Charles J. Ferguson-Davie as the first bishop of the diocese. On 6 February 1960, it was renamed to
Diocese of Singapore and Malaya. On 8 April 1970, the diocese was dissolved and split into Diocese of Singapore and
Diocese of West Malaysia. In 1996, the
autocephalous Church of the Province of South East Asia (the "Province") consisting of the Dioceses of Singapore, West Malaysia, Kuching and Sabah was established by the then-Archbishop of Canterbury,
George Carey.
Moses Tay, Bishop of Singapore, was installed as the first Metropolitan Archbishop of the Province the same year. The Province, which celebrated its 20th anniversary in February 2016, declared itself to be in impaired communion with the Episcopal Church (previously Episcopal Church of the United States of America or ECUSA) following the consecration of
Bishop Gene Robinson in 2003. In 2018, the Province recognised the Anglican Church in North America ("ACNA") as a fellow Anglican province and declared itself to be in full communion with the clergy of ACNA. The ACNA advocates strict adherence to an orthodox Anglican theology based on the traditional doctrinal statement of Anglicanism in the
Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of 1571 and stipulates that these be "taken in their literal and grammatical sense". In the installation of Titus Chung as the 10th Anglican Bishop of Singapore, the bells at St Andrew’s Cathedral – where the consecration and enthronement service took place – were rung 39 times to symbolise the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion of the Anglican Church. ==List of bishops==