United Episcopal Church of North America

Heritage

Organized in 1981 within the Continuing movement that followed the 1977 Congress of St. Louis, and shaped from the start by a lower, more classically Protestant churchmanship than its Anglo-Catholic siblings. It holds the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles, and understands itself as continuing the ordinary parish religion of the old Episcopal Church — Morning Prayer, hymns, and sermon — rather than any party within it. It remains one of the smallest Continuing jurisdictions, on cordial terms with the others.

Theological family

Classical Prayer Book Anglicanism: the creeds, the Articles, the two dominical sacraments honored with the old books' reserve — a central-to-low reading of the same inheritance its sister churches read catholically.

Who decides what

Episcopal: a presiding bishop and a small college of bishops over a compact family of parishes and missions.

What a first-time visitor would find

A 1928 Prayer Book service — as likely Morning Prayer as Holy Communion — with hymns and restrained ceremony, usually in a small congregation.

What it has always cared about

The 1928 Prayer Book as common prayer for ordinary parishes; the conviction that the old central churchmanship deserved continuing as much as the high; contentment with smallness.

Its gift to the wider church

It preserves within the Continuing movement the low-and-central voice of classical Anglicanism — a reminder that the 1977 protest was broader than one party.

Commonly confused with

With the other Continuing jurisdictions, from which it differs mainly in churchmanship; and with the Reformed Episcopal Church, a much older low-church separation with its own prayer book.

Range of views inside it

Little formal range; parishes differ in the balance of Morning Prayer and Communion and in music.

Moments this body was part of

• 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.