The Bible tells us that the first Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teachings and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42)  They met in homes in the evening for a common meal of fellowship called an agape.  At the end of it they broke the bread and blessed the wine in thankful remembrance of the benefits they had received from Christ’s life and death.  They believed they continued to share in His life.

For the first hundred years of Christian history, the early disciples expected the imminent return of Christ from heaven in glory to judge the world.  Consequently, they made little provision for the future.

By the beginning of the fourth century, Christianity had perhaps become the strongest movement in the Roman Empire.  In 311, Constantine ended the persecution of Christians because he realized that Christianity might do more to unify the Empire if it were allowed to flourish.  During times of persecution, Christians had developed many different understandings of the faith in different parts of the Empire, and the end of persecution brought all these differences into the open.  It was in order to unite the church, that Constantine called the Council of Nicaea in 325.  The council responded by adopting an official creed (The Nicene Creed).  Christians for the first time could find their unity in a statement of belief.

We know Christianity came to England at a very early date, because British bishops attended the council of Nicaea and there they remained throughout Roman rule. However, the Saxons invaded Britain and pushed the church into Wales and Ireland. Pope Gregory I believed Britain was worth saving so he sent Augustine to Canterbury to convert the pagans and reestablish the church in the latter part of the sixth century.

From 500 to 1500, the monasteries, cathedrals, and public churches were major centers of light and learning and teaching.  They taught faithfulness and compassion in a chaotic and generally savage world.  In order to hold on to the faith in such a world and avoid destruction, the Church had to resist change to exalt its own authority in every aspect of life.  The Church had always maintained its unity by educating clergy to teach the faith.  The invention of the printing press and a newly better educated laity made it possible for others to read the Scriptures and to raise questions about the church of the apostles and the church they saw around them.  At the very heart of the Reformation were concerns for unity and power.  It was not only about changes in the church, it was also about a new economic order, the new role of educated lay people, and the authority of secular rulers in conflict with the authority of the Pope.  In the ongoing turmoil of Reformation, the role of bishops as guardians of the faith was sometimes hard to distinguish from their role as representatives of the Pope.

Early on, the Papal authority became increasingly restricted in England due to the continental reformation of the church initiated by Luther, the increasing moral corruption of the Papacy and clergy, and brought to a head by the personal controversy of Henry VIII with the Pope over divorce. Finally in 1534, Parliament declared that the Bishop of Rome had no authority over English Bishops.

Had it not been for the personal quarrel between Henry VIII and the Pope, the English church would have remained under Roman rule.  The separation of England from Rome was political, theological, and was designed to give Henry final authority in England.  The same bishops and priests still ministered the sacraments.  However, the vital importance of the faith and intelligent participation of the laity in worship, as in the early days of the church, was affirmed.  The English church, like the reformed churches of Europe, made it clear that salvation comes through God’s grace and the faith of the believer, not through any human merit, or achievement, or Papal edict.

The theologians of the early church were largely Greek, so it seemed logical for the Church of England, now separated from Rome, to look to the Eastern Church, separated from Rome five centuries earlier.  The Orthodox Church was not just a church controlled by laws and administrators; it also had an intense mystical sense of religion and centered its life around its liturgy.  The Roman Church in the Middle Ages tended to focus its attention on the “words of institution,” the words Jesus used at the Last Supper. The church came to believe that those words were the critical element in the transformation of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.  The Eastern Church, on the other hand, tended to center more attention on the invocation of the Holy Spirit over the gifts.  Therefore, the Episcopal Church has been linked from its very beginning with both the Orthodox and the Roman Church.

In 1579, Sir Francis Drake’s chaplain put ashore and conducted the first Book of Common Prayer Service on American soil.  The earliest American parish was established in Jamestown in 1607.  For the first three hundred years the Episcopal Church, while affirming the episcopate, was perhaps very much protestant dominant in the teachings and workings of the church.

The other part of the story of the nineteenth century is the story of the maturing and development of the church itself during both revolutionary and civil wars, and further into the ante-bellum years.  The church that came to this country might be described as a church still suffering from post-Reformation depression.  It was clearer in some ways about what it was not than about what it was.  An enormous catalyst in the development of a new consciousness was the Oxford Movement, which began in England in the early nineteenth century and set out to reawaken the English church to its Catholic heritage.  It is often assumed that the Episcopal Church’s awareness of its Catholic roots is a result of the Oxford Movement, but the early leaders of that movement were also directly influenced by American church leaders like John Henry Hobart.  Hobart, in turn, reflects the New England experience, which had helped make church members aware of their Catholic heritage.  So the Episcopal Church helped shape the Oxford Movement and the Oxford Movement in turn helped shape the American Episcopal Church.

Into the twentieth century, the generation of women who welcomed home the soldiers after World War II, who went off to chauffeur children to school, Little League, and piano lessons were quickly followed by a new generation of women who wanted to shape careers for themselves outside the home.  Volunteer roles in the church’s life, while they had been an excellent preparation for a larger role, were no longer adequate.  Once change began, it came very rapidly.  In first one diocese and then another, women began to serve on vestries, and in 1970 the first women began to serve as delegates to General Convention.  A mere six years later, in 1976, the General Convention voted to admit women to the priesthood and hundreds now serve throughout the country.  In 1988, the first woman bishop was elected.  In 2003, another movement took place following a similar trend with the first openly gay bishop consecrated in the diocese of New Hampshire. Both the ordination of women and the ordination of those who are openly homo-, bi-, and trans-sexual have contributed to the pressures both religious and political from those liberal and conservative alike. Holding to the traditional standard of orthodox teaching on holy matrimony, lines have been severed between these two camps and by the year 2008 the dioceses of San Joaquin, Pittsburgh, Fort Worth and Quincy officially disaffiliated from The Episcopal Church (TEC). They are currently seeking a wider council and recognition in the Anglican Worldwide Communion.

Presently TEC in the U.S.A. is about 1.5 million Christians but there are approximately 77 million Anglicans worldwide, most of which are in the southern hemisphere (Africa, Asia, South America). These southern primates are in strong opposition to TEC and its liberal movements that threaten traditional marriage and church governance. It is also important to note that Church and State are always closely related, not separated as many presume, and like TEC who has its battle lines drawn, liberal States such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire and California have pushed ahead in legalizing, accepting, or blessing gay marriages, in opposition to conservative regions of the nation, particularly in the south as well. This is not the first, nor the last time, when things such as these threaten to tear us asunder for surely that which does not destroy us will make us stronger. This is history in the making.