Reformed Episcopal Church

Heritage

Founded in New York in December 1873 by George David Cummins, assistant bishop of Kentucky, with a handful of clergy and laity who believed the Episcopal Church's rising ritualism and its hardening view that non-episcopal churches were no churches at all had betrayed the Reformation. Cummins had been publicly rebuked for joining a communion service with Presbyterian and Methodist ministers; he resigned and organized a church on the old evangelical low-church platform. It stayed small and stayed the course for 130 years, and in 2009 became a founding jurisdiction of ACNA.

Theological family

Reformed Anglicanism: the Thirty-Nine Articles read in their plain evangelical sense, justification by faith at the center, and a declaration of principles rejecting the idea that Christ's presence in the supper is corporal or that ministers are priests in a sacrificing sense. Over the twentieth century its worship grew more traditionally liturgical while its doctrine held.

Who decides what

Episcopal, with bishops, synods and a General Council — but bishops understood as ancient and useful order, not as a chain without which a church is unchurched. It remains a distinct jurisdiction inside ACNA with its own bishops and standards.

What a first-time visitor would find

Morning Prayer or Holy Communion from its own Book of Common Prayer, hymns, vestments now common — a service an Episcopalian of 1870 would recognize, with preaching that sounds frankly evangelical. Parishes are typically small and long-rooted.

What it has always cared about

The evangelical reading of the Anglican formularies; the real churchliness of non-episcopal Protestants — it was founded partly to say that out loud; and patient institutional persistence at small scale.

Its gift to the wider church

A living reminder inside Anglicanism that the low-church, Reformation reading of the tradition is not a modern invention — and a bridge: the body that left the Episcopal Church first became one of the seams by which ACNA was stitched together.

Commonly confused with

With the Episcopal Church, from which it separated in 1873; with the Continuing Anglican churches of 1977, whose grievances came a century later and from the opposite, Anglo-Catholic direction; and with ACNA at large, of which it is one distinct jurisdiction.

Range of views inside it

Parishes range from starkly Morning-Prayer Protestant to modestly ceremonial; the historic hostility to ritual has softened into moderation. Doctrine varies little.

Where Reformed Episcopal Church churches are on the map

1 Reformed Episcopal Church congregations appear on The Church Map, across 1 states.

• Pennsylvania — 1