34. The House of Bishops in 1892
35. Mary Abbot Emery Twing
36. Julia Chester Emery
37. Margaret Theresa Emery
38. Phillips Brooks
39. William Reed Huntington
40. Theodore Roosevelt at the Laying the Foundation of the Washington National Cathedral
41. Kamehameha IV
42. Emma
43. John Joseph Pershing
44. St. Francis Mission
45. George Wharton Pepper with Henry J. Heinz
46. Deaconess Harriet Bedell
47. Li Tim Oi and Joyce Bennett
48. “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You”
49. Christian Living Conferees
50. John Walker
51. All Souls Church, Berkeley, California
52. John Elbridge Hines
53. John Maury Allin
54. The Washington National Cathedral
55. Barbara Harris and David Johnson
56. Harold S. Jones
57. Desmond Tutu and Edmond Browning
58. Edmond Browning’s Institution Service
59. Gluten-free Communion
60. Frank Tracey Griswold
61. V. Gene Robinson
62. Katharine Jefferts Schori
1. A Partial List of Colonial Commissaries
2. The Episcopal Church in the Original Thirteen States
3. Dioceses in States Admitted to the Union 1791–1859
4. Response to the Oxford Movement in the House of Deputies (1844)
5. Ratio of Church Members and Communicants
6. African American Bishops in the Domestic and Overseas Dioceses of the Protestant Episcopal Church
7. Baptized Membership (1986–1996)
8. Women Bishops in the United States
Those who are acquainted with the two prevision editions of this work will see much in it that is familiar. For major portions of the book, the narrative remains unchanged. Yet there are, however, some significant differences. These differences are the results of five factors: incorporation of the insights of new scholarship, the extension of the narrative to include the fifteen years since the publication of the last edition, adoption of some new conventions about terminology, the correction of errors, and the inclusion of information excluded from the earlier edition that subsequent years of teaching have shown to be of interest to students of the history of the Episcopal Church.
Most of the new scholarship that I have sought to incorporate concerns the English Reformation, the institution of slavery, the state of Christianity in the eighteenth century, the American Civil War, and the creation of Anglican Communion in the nineteenth century. In most cases readers will have to refer to the notes to see the new sources on which I have relied.
The years from 1999 to 2014 have been important ones for the Episcopal Church, a period that includes important ecumenical agreements, the election of the first woman as presiding bishop, the consecration of the first openly gay bishop, a major schism, and growing tension in the Anglican Communion. I appreciate the opportunity given to me by Church Publishing to extend the narrative to include these elements.
The two major places in which I have adopted new terminology concern the succession of bishops and the language used to identify members of the colonial Church of England. I have adopted the language used in recent ecumenical discussions and referred to continuity in ordinations running back to the early church as “episcopal succession,” rather than “apostolic tradition” or “apostolic succession.” The latter terms are used in contemporary ecumenical discussions to refer broadly to all that is handed down from the early church—teaching, preaching, worship, ordained ministry, social action—and not just to forms of ministry imparted by the laying on of hands by bishops. I also have referred to the members of the colonial church as members of the “Church of England,” reserving the term Anglican for the mid-nineteenth century and thereafter, when the term was actually in use.
Readers of earlier editions of this book have been generous with their time and have pointed to errors, which I have attempted to correct in this edition. In previous editions, for example, I incorrectly identified the parish of the first candidate for the episcopate elected in Virginia and misunderstood the lay status of Charles Miller of King’s Chapel. I hope that readers of this current edition will be equally kind in pointing to places in which the text can be improved.
Finally, I have included some information in this book of which I was aware at the time of earlier editions but which I doubted would be of general interest. My experience of teaching of the past fifteen years has led to new insights about what information is useful. I have been long aware, for example, that the 1662 English Book of Common Prayer—the edition used for the majority of the colonial period—included a rubrical change that allowed reception of communion by a person who was “ready and desirous” of confirmation but not actually confirmed. That provision made it possible for colonial Anglicans, who lacked any resident bishops, to receive communion. What I was not aware at the time of the last edition was how this piece of information, which I assumed to be widely known, came as a surprise to many, including some who write about the colonial Church of England. In a similar way, I have expanded information about Episcopal canon law, a topic that recent rounds of litigation have apparently made more interesting to current students of the Episcopal Church.
I want to confess to one idiosyncrasy on my part. In the early part of the twenty-first century, it became common for some editors and authors writing about the Episcopal Church to capitalize the initial article (The Episcopal Church). There is no doubt a complicated explanation for this practice of which I am not aware, but lacking that knowledge, I will follow the simple rules of English grammar and leave the article in lowercase within running text.1
Robert W. Prichard
Virginia Theological Seminary
June, 2014
The greater part of a decade has passed since the publication of the first edition of A History of the Episcopal Church. That first edition ended with an optimistic vision of a renewed Episcopal Church that was on the brink of a period of growth and new life. The passage of time has taught me, as it has taught generations of authors before me, that historians do a better job of describing the past than of predicting the future. The second edition, written at the end of the 1990s rather than their beginning, contains a more sober assessment of the last decade of the twentieth century.
I have rewritten the final portion of chapter 10 and have reconfigured and retitled chapter 11. I have included informa tion, such as the