Anglican Church services in America were
first held in 1607 in Jamestown, Va. Except in Maryland and Virginia,
there were few clergymen of the Established Church in the colonies. The
New England Puritans, although they had not actually seceded from the
Church of England, proscribed all that was Anglican. However, in 1686,
when the colonial charter of Massachusetts was revoked, Church of
England clergymen were appointed in that colony. In 1689, King's
Chapel, Boston, was opened, and Trinity Church in New York City was
consecrated. Anglicans were active in establishing institutions of
higher learning in the colonies. In 1693, James Blair, an Anglican
missionary to colonial Virginia, secured the charter for the College of
William and Mary. King's College (now Columbia Univ.) was founded in
1754.
An American Church
During the American Revolution the personal loyalties of the
church's clergy and laity were seriously split, and American
independence brought about the disestablishment of the Anglican Church.
After the Revolution the first objective of American Anglicans was to
organize a native episcopacy and a national church. The new
ecclesiastical body was called the Protestant Episcopal Church, a name
approved in 1789 by the first General Convention of the denomination,
which also adopted a constitution and a revised version of the Book of
Common Prayer. Dr. Samuel Seabury of Connecticut was consecrated bishop
in 1784 by bishops of Scotland, and William White of Pennsylvania and
Samuel Provoost of New York were consecrated bishops in England in
1787. In 1817, General Theological Seminary was organized, and in 1820
the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society was established.
Episcopal churches were founded by settlers in the newly opened
regions of the West. During the Civil War the church was necessarily
disunited, but at the General Conference of 1865 there was a full
reunion. In 1873 a group of clergy and laity withdrew from the main
body, in disagreement over certain sacramental and ritualistic
practices, and formed the Reformed Episcopal Church.
In recent decades the church (renamed the Episcopal Church in 1967)
has been deeply involved in the ecumenical movement and in focusing the
attention of Christians on social issues. Decisions in favor of prayer
book revision and the ordination of women were made by the General
Convention in 1976. In 1989, Barbara Harris of the Massachusetts
diocese was consecrated as the first woman bishop in the Anglican
Communion, and in 1993 Mary McLeod became bishop of Vermont, the first
woman in the United States to head a diocese of the church. The growing
role of women in the church and differences over social issues,
including the church's stand on homosexuality, caused divisiveness in
the 1980s and 1990s. In 1999, the Episcopal Church joined with several
others in establishing full communion with the country's largest
Lutheran denomination. The election by the church in 2003 of its first
openly homosexual bishop threatened to split both the church and the
Anglican Communion.
Source: The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press.