The Episcopal Church

Heritage

Colonial Anglicanism reorganized after the Revolution: Samuel Seabury was consecrated in Scotland in 1784, the first General Convention adopted a constitution and an American Book of Common Prayer in 1789, and the church grew with the nation — chaplain to much of its leadership class, builder of its most familiar sacred architecture. Its recent history includes the ordination of women (regularized 1976), the 1979 Prayer Book, and the departures that formed the Continuing churches (1977) and the ACNA (2009).

Theological family

Anglican: catholic in order and sacrament, reformed in confession, deliberately broad in theological range — the "via media." The creeds, the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, and the historic episcopate are the non-negotiables; much else is intentionally roomy.

Who decides what

Episcopal, as the name says: bishops in dioceses, but governed synodically — a General Convention of bishops, clergy and laity together, and vestries of laypeople running parishes. Laity hold real power at every level, which surprises people who expect a hierarchy.

What a first-time visitor would find

Liturgical worship from the Book of Common Prayer: processions, vestments, the church year in color, Scripture read on a lectionary, the Eucharist most Sundays. From incense-rich Anglo-catholic parishes to spare low-church ones, the Prayer Book holds it together. A visitor can follow everything from the book in the pew.

What it has always cared about

Common prayer as the bearer of common faith; sacramental life; educated clergy and choral music (the American choral tradition lives disproportionately here); public service — hospitals, schools, and a long bench of national leaders; and in recent decades, full inclusion of women and LGBT members in every order of ministry, at real cost in departures.

Its gift to the wider church

The Book of Common Prayer itself — phrases every American has heard ("to have and to hold," "earth to earth, ashes to ashes") entered the language through it, and traditions with no bishop and no liturgy still reach for it at weddings and funerals. Through the Prayer Book the Episcopal Church has been the wider church's teacher of dignified public speech to God.

Commonly confused with

With the Anglican Church in North America and the Continuing Anglican jurisdictions — all Anglican in heritage, no longer in the same body, and in impaired communion. "Episcopal" in a church name almost always means this body; AME and CME churches carry "Episcopal" meaning their governance, in the Methodist family.

Range of views inside it

Wide by design: Anglo-catholic, broad-church and evangelical wings; real internal disagreement on how far inclusion and revision should go, even after the departures. Individual parishes differ more than outsiders expect.

Where The Episcopal Church churches are on the map

2,136 The Episcopal Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 51 states.

• New York — 185
• Virginia — 159
• Pennsylvania — 142
• California — 124
• Texas — 123
• Connecticut — 120
• Washington — 110
• North Carolina — 84
• Maryland — 69
• Florida — 63

Moments this body was part of

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.