Anglican and Episcopal

Heritage

The English Reformation settlement, given its enduring shape by Thomas Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (1549). Anglican worship in America began at Jamestown in 1607; after the Revolution the church reorganized itself as the Episcopal Church — Samuel Seabury consecrated bishop in Aberdeen in 1784, the first General Convention in 1789 — the first Anglican church to stand outside the British crown. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century divisions produced Continuing Anglican bodies and, in 2009, the Anglican Church in North America; the family in this taxonomy includes every church worshiping in the Prayer Book tradition.

Theological family

Creedal Christianity — Scripture read with tradition and reason, the Thirty-nine Articles held with varying weight — across a deliberately broad range. Comprehension is a founding principle of this family, not a lapse: it was built to hold Reformed and catholic instincts in one communion.

Who decides what

Bishops in apostolic succession, but governed synodically: bishops, clergy and laity share authority in conventions and synods; parishes are led by rectors with elected vestries. No Anglican body in America answers to Canterbury juridically — the ties are ties of communion and history.

What a first-time visitor would find

Liturgy from the Book of Common Prayer or its descendants: collects, confession, creed, lectionary readings, and increasingly a weekly Eucharist. The same skeleton wears very different clothes — incense and chanted Mass in an Anglo-Catholic parish, guitars and preaching in an evangelical one — and the family considers that range a feature.

What it has always cared about

Common prayer as the bond of unity — the conviction that praying the same words matters more than agreeing on every doctrine; the English choral tradition; careful, beautiful liturgical language; a global communion's breadth felt at parish level.

Its gift to the wider church

The Book of Common Prayer itself, whose cadences — "till death us do part," "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" — shaped English-speaking prayer and speech far beyond Anglicanism; the hymnody and choral music every tradition borrows; and the working demonstration that a church can hold real theological breadth and still kneel at one rail.

Commonly confused with

With Roman Catholicism, by visitors reading vestments and liturgy; the labels "Episcopal" and "Anglican" now usually mark different bodies of the same family in America, invisible to most outsiders; and Methodism is this family's offspring, near enough to blur.

Range of views inside it

The widest formally tolerated range in American Protestantism: evangelical, Anglo-Catholic, charismatic and progressive parishes all claim the tradition authentically. Current divisions over marriage and ordination run between bodies and within them; this record describes the range and does not referee it.

Where Anglican and Episcopal churches are on the map

6,341 Anglican and Episcopal congregations appear on The Church Map, across 51 states.

• New York — 527
• Texas — 452
• California — 446
• Florida — 352
• Virginia — 335
• Pennsylvania — 297
• New Jersey — 221
• Maryland — 220
• Massachusetts — 219
• North Carolina — 210

Bodies and networks in this family

• The Episcopal Church — episcopal — 6,353 US congregations (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020)
• Anglican Church in North America — episcopal — 873 US congregations (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020)
• Reformed Episcopal Church — episcopal — 114 US congregations (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020)
• Anglican Catholic Church — episcopal — 71 US congregations (RCMS 2020 (ARDA national table), 2020)
• United Episcopal Church of North America — episcopal
• Anglican jurisdiction unspecified — episcopal
• Church of South India congregations in the US — episcopal
• Anglican Province of America — episcopal
• Anglican Church in America — episcopal
• Anglican Province of Christ the King — episcopal

Moments that formed this family

• 1607 — The church comes ashore at Jamestown

  The first permanent English settlement in America raised a rough timber church within weeks of landing, and chaplain Robert Hunt led the colony in communion under a sail stretched between trees. The Church of England became the established church of Virginia and the seedbed of what is now the Episcopal Church.

• 1734–1743 — The Great Awakening

  Revival broke out under Jonathan Edwards in Northampton in 1734, and George Whitefield's preaching tours from 1739 turned it into the first shared spiritual event the colonies ever had — Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Baptists and Anglicans swept up together, tens of thousands in open fields. Church membership, new colleges, and a common evangelical vocabulary followed.

  Before the colonies were a country they had a revival in common. The Awakening gave people of different churches one story to tell each other.

• 1784 — Methodism organizes at the Christmas Conference

  Some sixty preachers met at Lovely Lane Chapel in Baltimore in December 1784 and organized the Methodist Episcopal Church, with Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke as its first superintendents. Asbury rode an estimated quarter-million miles on horseback; within two generations Methodism was the largest movement in America.

• 1784–1789 — The Episcopal Church stands on its own

  The Revolution severed American Anglicans from the Crown, and the church rebuilt itself as the Protestant Episcopal Church: Samuel Seabury was consecrated a bishop by Scottish bishops in 1784, and the first General Convention adopted a constitution and an American Book of Common Prayer in 1789.

• 1816 — The American Bible Society

  Delegates from dozens of local Bible societies — Presbyterian, Episcopal, Reformed, Baptist, Methodist, Quaker — founded the American Bible Society in New York in 1816 with a single object: Scripture for everyone, without doctrinal note or comment. It became one of the longest-running cooperative ventures in American church history.

  The traditions found they could not share a pulpit, but they could share a Book — and they have, for two centuries.

• 1824 — The American Sunday School Union

  Laymen from a half-dozen denominations founded the American Sunday School Union at Philadelphia in 1824, and its 1830 "Mississippi Valley Enterprise" resolved to plant a Sunday school in every western settlement — thousands of them, many becoming congregations of whatever denomination arrived next. For decades it was the largest publisher of children's literature in America.

  Before most denominations could reach the frontier, an interdenominational society taught its children to read Scripture — and handed the resulting congregations to whoever came.

• 1960–1977 — The charismatic renewal crosses every border

  When Episcopal rector Dennis Bennett told his Van Nuys congregation in 1960 that he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, Pentecostal experience jumped the denominational fence — into Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and, from the 1967 Duquesne weekend, Catholic life. The 1977 Kansas City conference drew some fifty thousand charismatics, roughly half of them Catholic, worshiping in one stadium.

  A renewal that began at a segregated-out revival in 1906 ended up praying in every tradition's sanctuary — the most border-crossing spiritual movement in American history.

• 1962–1965 — Vatican II opens the ecumenical era

  The Second Vatican Council transformed Catholic relations with other Christians: its Decree on Ecumenism spoke of other believers as separated brothers and sisters, commended shared prayer, and launched formal dialogues with Lutherans, Anglicans, Orthodox, Methodists and Reformed churches that continue today. In America, Catholics and Protestants began praying, studying and serving together in ways illegal to imagine a generation earlier.

  The largest church in the country turned toward the others and called them family. Almost every unity story after 1965 runs partly through this door.

• 1965–1978 — A Bible in common: the NIV

  Begun by initiative of the Christian Reformed Church and the National Association of Evangelicals, the Committee on Bible Translation drew scholars from dozens of denominations across the English-speaking world; the New International Version they produced in 1978 became the best-selling modern English Bible, read each Sunday in Baptist, Pentecostal, Presbyterian and non-denominational pulpits alike.

  Traditions that share no bishop and no assembly now share sentences — the same words, memorized across every border in this taxonomy.

• 1971 — The common songbook

  From Maranatha! Music in the Jesus Movement, through the hymns of Keith and Kristyn Getty, to the catalogs of Hillsong, Bethel and Elevation: American congregations of nearly every tradition now draw Sunday music from one shared, living repertoire. A Baptist church, a Catholic youth group, a Pentecostal storefront and a Methodist chapel can all sing the same three songs in the same week without anyone planning it.

  The traditions never merged their pulpits — but they have very nearly merged their singing, and singing is how most people carry their faith through the week.

• 1974 — Lausanne: American missions joins a world table

  Billy Graham and John Stott convened 2,700 evangelical leaders from 150 nations at Lausanne, Switzerland in 1974. American denominations and agencies — long the senders — sat as partners with the global church, and the Lausanne Covenant became the shared missions charter across denominational lines, holding evangelism and social concern together.

  The missionary movement America helped send out came back as a worldwide family — and the American church discovered it was one member among many.

• 1977–1978 — The Congress of St. Louis and Continuing Anglicanism

  After the Episcopal Church's 1976 decisions on the prayer book and the ordination of women, nearly two thousand Anglicans met at St. Louis in 1977 and issued the Affirmation of St. Louis; the Continuing Anglican jurisdictions organized the following year, keeping the 1928 Book of Common Prayer. The movement fragmented into several jurisdictions — and four of the principal ones entered full communion with one another in 2017.

  Even a fragmenting movement can mend: the four main Continuing jurisdictions restored full communion among themselves in 2017, forty years after St. Louis.

• 1996 — Alpha crosses the Atlantic

  The Alpha course — a dinner-table introduction to Christianity from Holy Trinity Brompton, an Anglican parish in London — spread through the US from the mid-1990s into tens of thousands of congregations: Catholic parishes run it, as do Baptist, Pentecostal, Lutheran and non-denominational churches, largely unaltered.

  A single Anglican parish's supper course became common property of nearly every tradition in this taxonomy — proof that the traditions will gladly borrow from each other when the gift is good.

• 1997–2009 — The healing documents

  On Reformation Day 1999 at Augsburg, the Catholic Church and the Lutheran World Federation signed the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, declaring that the sixteenth century's church-dividing condemnations on justification no longer apply — the World Methodist Council joined in 2006, and Reformed and Anglican bodies have since associated themselves with it. In the same years American churches signed full-communion agreements in a lattice: ELCA with the Presbyterians, Reformed and UCC (1997), with the Moravians (1999), with the Episcopal Church (2001), and with the United Methodists (2009).

  The argument that broke Western Christianity in 1517 was declared, by its own heirs, no longer church-dividing. Unity here arrived not as merger but as mutual recognition — churches remaining themselves and calling each other true.

• 2009 — The Anglican realignment

  After years of dispute within the Episcopal Church over Scripture and sexuality, departing dioceses and congregations — joined by missionary jurisdictions planted by African and Southern Cone provinces — formed the Anglican Church in North America at Bedford, Texas in 2009. The realignment inverted the old missionary map: provinces once evangelized from the West planted churches in America.

  Painful as the split is, it carries a remarkable fact: the global South church now sends missionaries here. The mission field and the missionary have traded places.

• 2009–2016 — Repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery

  One after another — the Episcopal Church (2009), the United Church of Christ, the Presbyterians, the ELCA (2016), and others — American denominations formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery, the centuries-old legal theology used to justify the seizure of Native lands, and began reckoning publicly with their own missions' entanglement in it, including the boarding schools.

  Repentance became something traditions did in each other's sight — each repudiation citing the others, a chain of confession running across the mainline.