The Episcopal Tradition and All That Led to It
A dignified history for an occasionally dignified church
We’ve talked a little about the past of St. John’s, but what about the faith tradition we belong to? Where did the Episcopal Church come from? If you’re interested in the answers to these questions, read on as we take a journey into the past…
Christianity was first introduced to the British Isles by way of the Roman Empire. A few distinctive practices ended up developing among the Christians here after the end of Roman rule. The main differences included a differing way of calculating the date of Easter, as well as a focus on monasticism.
In the 5th to 7th centuries, Britain saw the arrival of a number of Germanic-speaking peoples such as the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. (“England” is named after the first of these groups. It’s Angle Land!). These new settlers were not believers in Christianity; they, like many of the Romano-British residents, were polytheists: believers in many gods.
In the year 596, Pope Gregory the Great (the pope who theorized Jesus’ disciple Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, a belief that became accepted in Christianity for quite some time and has only more recently been challenged) tasked a group of missionaries led by Augustine of Canterbury to introduce Christianity to the Kingdom of Kent, one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. As it happens, the King of Kent was married to a Frankish princess named Bertha, who was a Christian. Some historians believe that the request for missionaries came from Kent, with Queen Bertha’s influence, while others believe the Pope took the initiative of his own accord. Whatever the case, King Æthelberht welcomed the missionaries with open arms, converting to Christianity and supporting their mission. Augustine became the “Archbishop of Canterbury”, the first in a lineage that continues to this very day with the Most Reverend Justin Welby. Along with missionaries from Ireland and those sent by the Franks (another Germanic people who had already converted to Christianity), they helped spread Christianity among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
Religion is an ever-changing and evolving thing, however. In the 14th century, John Wycliffe - a scholastic philosopher and clergyperson who taught at the University of Oxford - developed and promoted a number of theological ideas that would anticipate the later Protestant Reformation. Perhaps most well-known is his advocacy for translating the Bible into the common vernacular, but Wycliffe was also critical of the wealth of the Church and the privileged status of the clergy, among other things. This made him a controversial figure in the England of his day, but also earned him a following, derogatorily referred to by their opponents as “Lollards”. For these and other reasons, Wycliffe is sometimes known as the “morning star of the Reformation”.
The 16th century was a time of religious reform and consolidation for much of Western Europe. The Catholic Church saw changes, and new expressions of faith appeared. England was no exception. When the king of the time, Henry VIII, was denied a marriage annulment (his wife, Catherine of Aragon, was aunt to the Habsburg emperor - A man in a position to make things very difficult for the Pope), he responded by declaring the English Church’s independence from Rome. Many thinkers in England, including his appointed archbishop - Thomas Cranmer - had taken an interest in the new religious ideas spreading from the continent. Although reforms were minimal during King Henry’s lifetime, the succession of his son Edward VI to the throne saw the state church - under Cranmer’s guidance - assume a distinctly Reformed Protestant character. Cranmer wrote the prayer book that forms the basis of our liturgy today, as well as the forty-two articles (later trimmed to 39) that acted as the Church of England’s confession of faith.
King Edward was succeeded by his sister, the devout Queen Mary I (unflatteringly referred to as “Bloody Mary” by her opponents), who sought to return England to the Catholic faith. Thomas Cranmer was among those executed for his beliefs during Mary’s reign, but he would ultimately be vindicated: Mary was succeeded by Queen Elizabeth I, whose Parliament sought to reconcile opposing factions and returned the realm to the Protestant faith, albeit with allowances designed to accommodate her Catholic subjects. It was here that the 39 Articles of Religion were ratified, and what would later be called Anglicanism was born.
Fast forward a century or two, and we have a bunch of English colonies in the Americas. So of course there were congregations of the Church of England there, though they had no bishops of their own. Local churches came to be governed by elected councils of laypeople, known as vestries. This loose, decentralized form of leadership worked for a while… Until those darn colonists went and demanded their freedom. The fact that we today live in the United States is testament to their success.
With ties to the mother church (loose though they had been) cut off, the scattered remnants of the Church of England in the new country were left to pick up the pieces. Congregations came together to form regional conferences called “dioceses”, but each of these conferences had different ideas about the way things should be done. It was only in 1789 that they were able to set aside their differences and unite as a single national body - And so the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America was born (though most dioceses lacked bishops, and those that did exist were little more than glorified parish ministers, until partway through the 19th century). This spirit of not being able to agree on anything still goes strong for us today, which we’re actually pretty chill about. You believe what you believe, I’ll do the same, and maybe we can learn a thing or two from each other. Makes church discussion groups a lot less boring, let me tell you. The denomination’s structure was based on the fledgling US government, with a multi-tier representative democracy where laypeople and ordained ministers share power at every level of leadership (locally, regionally, and nationally).
In 1867, we got together with other church bodies descended from the Church of England, and formed a loose association we call the “Anglican Communion”. Anglicanism has no central authority or even an official legal existence. Each member denomination is independent of the others, chooses its own leadership, and has its own way of doing things: beliefs, practices, and even prayers - But there are still identifiable commonalities that speak to our shared history.