The Episcopal Church - An Historical Reflection

At one time the Episcopal Church was a leading and reliable denomination in the United States. It came into separate existence from the Church of England following the success of the American Revolutionary War. Like the new nation the organization of the national denomination paralleled structures like those set up in the United States government.

Like the Congress with two houses, one the Senate, the other the House of Representatives, the Episcopal Church's governing body, the General Convention, would be comprised of two houses, one the House of Bishops, the other the House of Deputies, comprised of clergy and laity representatives. The Episcopal Church also set up an executive, the Presiding Bishop, a kind of President rather than an Archbishop and with limited powers, and the church has its equivalent to the Supreme Court, the Ecclesiastical Court.

The American Revolutionary War saw the loss of a significant number of members of the colonial Church of England as those with sympathies to the British Crown, Tories, left the colonies for Canada or to return to the British Isles. The Anglicans who remained were very sympathetic to the American experiment and the democratic institutions the new nation would inaugurate.

Until the establishing of the Episcopal Church after the Revolution, bishops had not been appointed by the English hierarchy and so there were no bishops in America, which posed some significant challenges during the colonial period and just after the Revolutionary for a church that relies on bishops in important ways. Persons desiring to be confirmed or to be ordained as clergy had to travel across the Atlantic to England in order to be confirmed or ordained by a bishop of the Church of England. The oversight of the Church of England in the colonies fell under the auspices of the Bishop of London.

After the Revolution, the new church would need bishops in order to be a complete church in line with Anglican understanding and in order to function appropriately and efficiently. Given that an Episcopal style church had not stood on its own apart from attachment to a monarchy or to the Papacy of the Roman Catholic Church, the situation the American Anglicans posed for the Church of England was a novel one.

The bishops in England were quite uncertain how to respond. To be ordained in the Church of England, whether as a deacon, a priest, or a bishop, meant one seeking ordination had to subscribe to an oath of allegiance to the British king. This was hardly something an American Anglican would or could do having just thrown off the king's claim on them politically in the War. To establish a hierarchy of bishops for the new Episcopal Church another way had to be found and was. The man chosen to be the first of at least the needed three for the new church, Samuel Seabury, from Connecticut, was able to arrange for bishops of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, an Anglican Church constitutionally separate from the Church of England, to ordain him.

Once this ordination had taken place and it was clear the intent was for the Church of England to continue in America now as the separate Episcopal Church, the English bishops found a way to ordain the next several bishops the new church needed in order to establish its episcopal hierarchy.

Thus, what would in time be called the Anglican Communion was born. The American Episcopal Church being the first province to exist entirely separate the British Isles, from the Church of England, its hierarchy, and the British monarch who was and is the head of the Church of England.

Yet, though separate constitutionally and nationally, the new Episcopal Church was a genuine Anglican Church by means of its desire to be linked to the Archbishop of Canterbury through a tie of respect and affection to which the Archbishop reciprocated by recognition of the Episcopal Church as a sister church of the Church of England, through holding to a pattern of worship provided by the Book of Common Prayer, through the maintenance of the threefold office of bishop, priest, and deacon, and through adoption of the Articles of Religion. The Book of Common Prayer and the Articles of Religion were of necessity modified to fit the circumstances of being an American Church and not an English Church. So, for example, the prayers for the King of England were dropped and a prayer added for the President of the United States. Other similar modifications were made to fit the new circumstances. In time the Articles of Religion were not required to be subscribed to even in their American version and became historical documents only showing where the understanding of the church had been at one time on certain issues.

The faith and spiritual life of the members of the new American Episcopal Church were essentially classical Anglican orthodoxy as it had come to be defined from the English Reformation period forward. It was a creedal and biblical and Protestant faith. Its shape had been influenced by the sixteenth century Reformation and in particular the influence of John Calvin and Martin Bucer were notable but the Church of England did not become Calvinistic or Reformed Protestant, as this was known on the European continent or in Scotland [in the Church of Scotland, the Presbyterian Church]. Queen Elizabeth the first and her ministers [political and ecclesiastical] worked to insure that the Church of England maintained a carefully orchestrated and somewhat precarious balance between Protestant elements and those Catholic elements believed to be able to be maintained in keeping with general Protestant principles. The Church of England was meant, as the established Church, the Church of the English People and their monarch, to be the church of all the English.

To be such it had to be created to embrace as many of the Queen's subjects as possible, from the Puritan left and the Roman Catholic right. The Church of England was not able to reach out to the furthest extremes left or right, so could not actually embrace committed radical Puritans or committed Roman Catholics but it could endeavor to embrace a wide and comprehensive group of English men and women in between those extemes.

The arrangement was hoped to bring religious peace and stability to the nation and thus not be a further distraction for the monarchy and the Parliamentary government. The defense of this arrangement was articulated by a minister of the Church of England, Richard Hooker, in a dense work known as the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The effort was only partially successful as Protestant extremists and Roman Catholics continued to pose difficulty and a certain amount of unrest in society until the Reformed Acts of the mid-nineteenth century which gave full recognition to Protestants outside the church meeting in chapels and to the Roman Catholics who continued to exist despite sometimes fierce opposition by monarch, state, and established church.

Essentially the faith and spiritual life of English Christians in the established church was formed on the basis of scripture teaching and moral instruction. Preaching, as typical to a Protestant ecclesiastical organization, was given a significant place of importance. Sermons tended to be lengthy discourses on Scripture or moral themes, the former being emphasized by those Anglicans who followed more closely the reformed evangelical theology of the English Reformation period under the leadership of persons like Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, and Hugh Latimer and then Matthew Parker in the time of Elizabeth I. The moralizing sermons tended to come from those established Anglicans that emerged in greater numbers after the Restoration and who followed and developed the trends begun by William Laud and others.

The theology of both tended to be scholastic, creedal, and biblical, with some foundation in the theology of the early church and the early church fathers. It was as orthodox as it could be without being either Roman Catholic or being in the manner of the Orthodox Churches of the East, yet whether high or low church in its liturgical sympathies, it was none the less a Protestant Church, where the authority resided locally and had to accord in its actions, practices and beliefs with the Bible understood as containing the word of God written. This life and orientation to Christianity was carried over into the new world and into the Episcopal Church by its first members and founders.

Given the somewhat devastating effects the Revolutionary War had had on the colonial Anglican Church, the first several decades of the existence of the Episcopal Church was faced with the need to get well established and organized in the new and emerging nation. Some areas of the new nation had a strong Anglican presence, such as parts of New York, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, and especially so in places like Virginia and South Carolina.

Yet the regions of Anglican strength posed differences for the new church to reckon with. In the south the Anglicans tended to be more low church, evangelical in their approach and understanding and a highly lay oriented church rather mistrusting of giving too much power to any of the clergy, and especially bishops. In the north the Anglicans had tendencies more to the high church orientation with less emphasis on evangelism and more on social witness and outreach, and were willing to trust clergy a bit more than what was the case in the south.

Yet for both northern and southern Episcopalians, as the Anglicans would come to be called in America, the experience of a church overseen by monarchs and bishops and clergy generally had not been a positive one. The result was, in an emerging and democratic nation, representative in its arrangements, the new Episcopal Church would have to have and know a strong lay presence in its government and so accordingly the structures established gave considerable power to lay Episcopalians.

As we have seen they comprised half of the House of Deputies in the church's General Convention and they were given votes to assist diocesan clergy in electing the diocesan bishop. In Virginia the diocese was set up with its budget beyond the control and reach of the Bishop of Virginia, a reality that continues to this day. It would be an Episcopal Church, a church with Bishops, but one very much intent on limiting the authority and reach of any ecclesiastical prelate.

American expansion became the occasion of the growth of the Episcopal Church alongside the growth of the nation. The Episcopal Church responded in various ways to the challenge. And despite its having been a church that had come from aristocratic roots as the established church in England and was still something of an aristocratic institution, particularly in the south, and was undoubtedly a very cultured church, the most cultured of the American churches and denominations of its day, the early Episcopal Church did display a rather remarkable missionary and evangelical spirit.

A once common remark said regarding the evangelization of the American frontier that the Baptists arrived on foot, the Methodists came on horseback, and the Episcopalians waited until the invention of the Pullman train car. While that remark may have some limited truth, at least at regards the social perception of the different American denominations of the time, it is not actually very accurate of the Episcopalians response to the growing nation and the need to grow the church and to insure America would be a Christian nation, the latter meaning all the churches in America would have to play a role in evangelizing the American people including the Episcopal Church.

Episcopalians began to rise to the challenge. In the late eighteenth century and through most of the nineteenth century American Episcopalians were engaged in considerable efforts of evangelism, church growth, church expansion, and at one point in the mid nineteenth century was one of the fastest growing churches in the United States.

Both Anglican evangelicals and high church Anglicans, whether old style high church or the new Anglo-Catholic version, were all involved in efforts to evangelize and grow and expand the church. Persons exemplifying this evangelical and missionary spirit from different "wings" of the church were Philander Chase, one time bishop of Ohio and then Illinois, and James Lloyd Breck. They evangelized people, conducted preaching missions which were evangelistic in their character, founded churches, founded educational institutions [such as Kenyon College and Nashotah House respectively], and called and trained persons as clergy and missionaries to assist in the expansionist efforts.

Concurrent to these efforts other perspectives were beginning to take hold in parts of the Episcopal Church and in American Christianity. A new theological orientation or perspective was gradually being introduced that was labeled as liberal and often aimed at social reforms and less focused on personal salvation of individuals. Slowly certain aspects of the Church's traditional teaching came to be questioned and doubted and by some abandoned.

In the late nineteenth century these developments were to pose real distress for Anglican evangelicals in the Episcopal Church. Some ceased to be Christians let alone Episcopalians, others embraced various forms of "liberal" evangelicalism, some moved from evangelicalism to Anglo-Catholicism, and even a few to the Roman Catholic Church, but many left the Episcopal Church and formed the Reformed Episcopal Church.

And the problems for the Anglican evangelicals were not merely so-called liberal theology but also the introduction of liturgical changes that accompanied the rise of Anglo-Catholicism [the movement that grows up out of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement in the Church of England]. Ritualism was a hot issue for Anglican evangelicals and for many Episcopalians no matter what their orientation in the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth century.

At times the response of official Episcopalianism, i.e. bishops in particular, and sometimes conventions, could be very harsh and legalistic. Clergy could be charged for too zealously preaching the gospel in the evangelical style or for placing of candles or flowers on the holy table, increasing called the altar. The Great Awakening and the rise of Methodism in the mid to late eighteenth century had already drained off of the colonial Anglican Church and subsequent Episcopal Church a significant number of persons that were more evangelically oriented in their theology, worship, and church life. The Anglican evangelicals often saw themselves - rightly or wrongly - as an embattled and persecuted minority. The result was that by the early twentieth century most of the evangelical and missionary spirit of the Anglican evangelicals had been lost in the Episcopal Church.

Then in the twentieth century Anglo-Catholicism gradually grew in its acceptance and over the course of the century became more and more fused together with ever increasing liberal perspectives in theology. Concurrently the Episcopal Church which had grown to a quite satisfactory size was overtaken by a sense of comfort and place which meant that the evangelical and missionary spirit of previous decades was not deemed as important or definitive of Episcopal life in America.

Increasingly, missionary spirit and energy gave way to social outreach with less and less religious or spiritual components to it and the commitment grew to be one of realizing the application of a social gospel that would focus on making society more egalitarian, more democratic, more just, more fair, more prosperous for everyone. In the period before the 1960s the Episcopal Church could often be caricatured as the Republican Party at prayer, at least in the northern United States [the conservative Democratic Party at prayer in the south].

With the arrival of the 1960s and the social turmoil that came with the period, a significant portion of the Episcopal Church became radicalized and in the north much of it came to be caricatured as the Democratic Party at prayer in that many northern Episcopalians had adopted the liberal social agenda of the period and the Democrats.

Yet, the Episcopal Church paid a price, following a special convention in South Bend, Indiana, at which the church decided to pay reparations for American discrimination against blacks, the Episcopal Church experienced its first modern [twentieth century] fall in membership.

This would be followed by a gradual drifting away of members until the church in the 1970s undertook two other radical changes: the revision of the Book of Common Prayer and the ordination of women. Another significant loss of members ensued over a considerable period of time when these changes became institutionalized.

Increasingly the Episcopal Church saw itself as a prophetic voice in America and in Christianity. Concurrent to the revision of the prayer book and the implementation of women's ordination, quietly in the Episcopal Church bishops began to ordain relatively open homosexual persons to the ministries of deacon and priests and seminaries and seminary professors began to teach and then endorse homosexuality as a legitimate Christian lifestyle.

The 1970s also saw the start of a reemergence of Anglican evangelicalism in the Episcopal Church, signified most notably by the establishment of the Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry at Sewickley, then Ambridge, Pennsylvania. Thus the stage was set for the current crisis in the American province of the Anglican Communion.

Today the Episcopal Church appears to be a church looking for an identity, looking to find and have a place within the culture, and looking to decide its real mission and raison d'etre. Statistically it has shrunk to where it is almost of an inconsequential size in the larger scheme of things, except for the fact that a significant number of the culture's social leaders are still affiliated with the Episcopal Church.

The church continues at present at least to still have far more influence and effect that what its actual size would warrant were it a different denomination in America. Persons who advocate the changes in the Episcopal Church, from prayer book revision, to women's ordination, to the embracing of homosexuality, have said these are all great evangelistic opportunities for the church.

To date, however, the potential of these to contribute to the church's growth - if they are of any real consequence or importance in that regard - have not been realized. The church continues to decline in size and continues to be an aging denomination with most of its membership fifty years old or older, and few young adults, youth or children are coming into the church. Either the leadership and membership of the Episcopal Church have not taken real advantage of this supposed evangelistic opportunity or they have been very mistaken about its potential in this regard.

Meanwhile Americans who do respond to the message of Christianity seem to be responding to the way it is being presented elsewhere, whether its in the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Churches [which are beginning to come alive and effective in America in terms of outreach and evangelism], or any number of more evangelically-oriented Protestant type churches. Even in the Episcopal Church the only churches to have grown significantly with but a few exceptions across the church have been those of an Anglican evangelical orientation. At the same time due to the current crisis the Episcopal Church appears to be starting to hemorrhage these and once again the presence of Anglican evangelicals in the Episcopal Church could become negligible.

What was once an American Church that had a rough start and yet overcame the considerable obstacles it faced, grew dramatically, came to a place of prominence and important and real effect in the culture, now seems to be facing the worst crisis of its history; it is a crisis unlike anything it has known previously. It shows at present remarkable signs of being a highly dysfunctional institution, not good at managing conflict, and not good at passing on whatever is its spiritual inspiration and good news. Is the Episcopal Church a dying church? Will the Episcopal Church eventually emerge healthy and vigorous with a solid identity from its current crisis? What will the Episcopal Church look like in the next few years? Who will be members of it? What will be its relationship to the rest of the Anglican Communion which is said at present to be in question? Where does the Episcopal Church go from where it finds itself at present?

In June, in Columbus, Ohio, the Episcopal Church holds again its triennial General Convention. Facing the church's leadership at this convention are issues of momentous importance, issues that will decide the direction if not the fate of the Episcopal Church for a long time. Those interested in Christianity in particular and in religion in general in America will be watching and waiting to see what the Episcopalians decide.

Copyright 2006, Bruce A. Flickinger

Very interesting!

But as I moved toward my chrismation I felt worried. I could see that Orthodoxy was preserving the faith just fine - for now. But it had no visible means of *enforcing* that faith. The Orthodox hierarchy doesn’t have the kind of power that high-ranking clergy do in other churches. There isn’t even a world-wide governing board to hold all the various Orthodox bodies together. On the ground it looked pretty ad hoc, especially in America, where waves of immigrants have set up parallel administrative bodies.
And there didn’t even seem to be an Orthodox *catechism,* for goodness’ sake. It seemed like the faith was supposed to be learned almost by osmosis, by living it. How could that work? If a church with an infallible pope and a magisterium could have as much rioting in the pews as the Catholics did, what hope did the Orthodox have?

Hm. No catechism? There must at least be a converts' class?

The following fifteen years have been devastating to the peace of most American churches. People who have lived through these battles are battered and worn. And yet - unbelievably enough — Orthodoxy has remained untouched. It’s as if the contemporary American furor is just a tiny blip in history, and not our concern. We still don’t have demands for gay marriage, or nuns agitating for women in the priesthood. We don’t see theological revision or liturgical innovation. The biggest controversy today would be the painful wrangle among Greek Orthodox about their charter - yet, when it comes to theological and moral issues, people on both sides there still believe the same things. That’s what being Orthodox means: holding a common faith. All the "big questions" were settled over a millennium ago, and no one is inclined to revise them.
How can we resist the cultural tides this way? I have a theory. I think it’s because you can only change something if you have the authority to change it. You have to be in a position of power, enabled to explain and define the faith anew; or you can battle noisily against those in that position, and make it awkward for them to use their power. In any case, faith is understood as something eternally under construction, responding to the challenges of each new generation.
But in the Orthodox Church, nobody has that kind of power. The church is too decentralized for that. Even those who are our leaders are a different kind of leader. Orthodoxy is less of an institution (like, say, the Episcopal Church) and more of a spiritual path (like Buddhism). It’s a treasury of wisdom about how to grow in union with God — theosis.
And that wisdom works, so people don’t itch to change it. It doesn’t need to be adapted to a new generation, because God is still making the same basic model of human being he has from the beginning. Practictioners of the way don’t find it irksome or boring; they just want to get into it deeper. For us, authority is not located in a person or an organization, but in the faith itself - what other Orthodox before us have believed.
Every question is settled by asking, What did previous generations believe? And since previous generations asked the same thing, the snowball just keeps getting larger. Against that weight of accumulated witness, a notion that blew in on the cultural breeze doesn’t stand a chance.

Very interesting. And there may be a lot to this -- my limited observation of ECUSA is that the innovations came primarily from well up the hierarchy, well out of view of the average parishioner.

Thank you!

"Targeted"? I'm not so sure; I think it came primarily from within. I know that among those in my diocese pushing it in this direction were a number who I knew personally -- some were friends from my own high school youth group and all were lifelong, if not cradle, Episcopalians. But they were also California liberals...

K. has talked before about the self-enforcement mechanisms within Orthodoxy, with examples. It works -- but you need the essential underpinnings, which I think include (NOT in any order):
- Scripture
- the focus on/practice of theosis
- the study of the Fathers
- integrating the beliefs passed on down
- a study of the heresies ("there are no new heresies"...)
- fluency in Koinonia Greek
...

(I'm kidding about the last -- whatever the term really represents. K., I have been ill all weekend and my brain is quickly turning to mush, so please feel free to correct/add to my mis/understanding.)

Several of these elements were absent from (P)ECUSA, at least from its general membership, from at least the 1960s when (in my experience) "positive social change" entered the scene as ECUSA's developing prime directive.

"fluency in Koinonia Greek"

That would be "koine" Greek. Koinonia means community. Other than that you did good. You know, as Mathews-Greene found out, it does seem to work. Her comments about "issues" in Orthodoxy are on the money. There just isn't any way to really "change" things in Orthodoxy, except by a Gr4eat Council. One has been in the "planning stages" for the past 100 years or so and there's no date or agenda in sight yet. My suspicion is that if we see such a council in our lifetime it will be a Great Council with the Latin Church about reunion and I can assure you none of us will live long enough to see if any union which may come out of such a council will prove to be a true or false union.

For us, "positive social change" is what it has always been, advancement in theosis toward a unity with the uncreated energies of God, in other words, a fulfillment of our created purpose. To the extent that anyone, anyone, can attain this, creation around that person is itself transformed into its original state. All creation has been distorted by sin, but in the presence of one who has become luminous in theosis, the lion really does lie down with the lamb.

But probably the fact underneath this is that *some* Baptists and other evangelicals do not baptize thrice in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but rather baptize once in the name of Jesus.

Really? You must have visited some very strange Baptist and "other evangelical" churches. I haven't been in or heard of any that didn't follow Matthew 28:19: "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit"

Regretfully, I would guess that you have the same problem that the Orthodox guide had. That is, you heard rumors from others and believed them without investigating. You really need to learn more about non-Orthodox Christianity before blindly believing what an ignorant person tells you.

Well, I would not have made the statement that the person doing the tour did, so I really don't have the same problem. If no Baptist church baptizes in the name of Jesus alone, then I stand corrected. I thought there were some small offshoots that did.

I do know that there are some churches that do this, but wouldn't for the life of me be able to identify exactly which denominations they would be, and thus wouldn't have said anything at all in that situation.

Regardless, in those cases, anyone entering the Orthodox Church from one of those bodies must always be received by baptism. My point was that the guy probably got his wires crossed because of being aware of a reception from one of those bodies, and it appears that he added insult to injury by wrongly identifying as "Baptist" the denomination from which the person came.

In general, I would put my knowledge about Baptist beliefs up against the average Baptist seminary professor's knowledge about Eastern Orthodoxy any day. Enlightenment and education are always a good thing, in both directions, and I'm always happy to learn more, as I just did. :-)

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