SPEAKER_00: Well, good morning, everybody.
SPEAKER_00: Welcome to a lot of different things happening at one time.
SPEAKER_00: So if you are interested in being confirmed or uh reaffirming your confirmation vows or being received in the Episcopal Church, this is for you.
SPEAKER_00: If you're interested in just revisiting what it means to be an Episcopalian, this is for you.
SPEAKER_00: If you just have time to waste, and this is good to waste, this is for you.
SPEAKER_00: And so I just want to uh suggest to you it really meant to be good time for everybody, so please make it worth your while.
SPEAKER_00: So if you have questions, always just go ahead and grip them out and we'll we'll do our best.
SPEAKER_00: Nick has been so kind as to serve alongside me and trying to walk through what it means to be an Episcopalian in quick, easy steps because that's all the time we have.
SPEAKER_00: Um but what I would love to do is start with prayer and then have another introduction, and then today our goal is to talk about a brief history of how the Episcopal Church sort of came to be, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00: Okay?
SPEAKER_00: The Lord be with you.
SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_00: God, we ask that you would confirm in each of us the faith that we hold dear, that you would order our steps as we would walk faithfully, more faithfully with you, that you would answer the questions of our heads so that our hearts may follow more closely.
SPEAKER_00: And God, we ask that all this following, all of this study and learning would be directed into making the world a better place as you imagine it in heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: So the landscape for the day, again, is the sort of the history of the church beginning in uh really short, uh, getting all the way through the English Reformations and a little bit toward the present.
SPEAKER_00: And Nick's gonna start us off with that.
SPEAKER_02: Okay, I'll begin by uh doing a little explanation.
SPEAKER_02: We're trying to cram 2,000 years of history into 40 minutes.
SPEAKER_02: 40 minutes.
SPEAKER_02: So bear with me.
SPEAKER_02: We're gonna skip over a lot of stuff, we're gonna leave out a lot of details, and we're gonna oversimplify some things.
SPEAKER_02: So uh bear with us.
SPEAKER_02: Well, what is an Episcopal?
SPEAKER_02: Well, it's more than being a member of St.
SPEAKER_02: Thomas the Apostle Church.
SPEAKER_02: It's part of being the Diocese of Texas, which has nearly 80,000 members, 150 missionary outposts, which are places like this and uh other missions.
SPEAKER_02: Um it's led by Bishop Andy Doyle.
SPEAKER_02: Uh he's assisted by other bishops, uh you can see in our prayer.
SPEAKER_02: Um but the Diocese of Texas is not alone.
SPEAKER_02: The Diocese of Texas is part of the Worldwide Anglican Communion, and uh it's one of the world's larger Christian bodies, and it has tens of millions of members in more than 165 countries around the world.
SPEAKER_02: Uh and we'll learn a lot more about the structure and so on later, as we in a later session.
SPEAKER_02: Um but why is it called Anglican?
SPEAKER_02: And uh, well, that's because all these churches around the world are somehow connected with and and derived from the Church of England and uh and are in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury.
SPEAKER_02: Um now, what is the Church of England and when did it get started?
SPEAKER_02: There is a beautiful legend that Joseph of Aramathea fled the Holy Land and went to the um went to England, England's happy shores.
SPEAKER_02: And this is the basis for all of the legends of King Arthur, his knights of the round table searching for the Holy Grail, because Joseph is believed to have been in this story uh carrying the grail and the spear also that pierced Christ's side.
SPEAKER_02: It's a lovely legend, and uh we have no evidence either to prove it or disprove it.
SPEAKER_02: Uh but it is certainly true that uh Christianity arrived in England very early.
SPEAKER_02: Sometime in the second century there's archaeological evidence for this.
SPEAKER_02: And so um it's really shrouded in mystery when the church uh or Christianity began in England.
SPEAKER_02: The uh one of the first things that happened of interest was in 306 A.D.
SPEAKER_02: Um Constantine, subsequently known as Constantine the Great, was proclaimed Emperor of Rome, the Roman Empire, at least at that point the Western Empire, um, in York.
SPEAKER_02: And in fact, if you uh go to York uh outside the Minster, there is a statue of Constantine the Great.
SPEAKER_02: And this is the same Constantine who called the uh Council of Nicaea in the year 325.
SPEAKER_02: We said the Nicene Queen, which the first version of which was written in Nicaea and put together in Nicaea.
SPEAKER_02: By the way, thank you for taking notes.
SPEAKER_02: You're perfectly welcome to, but also be aware of the fact there will be no test at the end of this, and there will be no test at the Pearley Gates.
SPEAKER_02: When you meet St.
SPEAKER_02: Peter, it ain't what you know, it's who you know.
SPEAKER_02: And uh, if you haven't guessed, that's Jesus of Nazareth.
SPEAKER_02: Um, anyhow, one of the things interesting in in the uh Council of Nicaea is that two British bishops attended.
SPEAKER_02: So Nicaea is somewhere in in today's Turkey, and um so it they came a long way, and Constantine paid for it.
SPEAKER_02: I got to deal quickly with a calumny.
SPEAKER_02: People claim that Constantine was not really Christian seriously because he was um baptized on his deathbed.
SPEAKER_02: And it turns out this is a really common practice in those days because baptism washed away all your sins.
SPEAKER_02: So, what better time when you're not gonna be able to commit many more sins?
SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that that was a fairly common practice in those days.
SPEAKER_02: Obviously, we've passed on from that.
SPEAKER_02: Uh sometime in the mid-late 400s, uh a boy was kidnapped from the west coast of England and uh taken to be a slave in Ireland.
SPEAKER_02: And after 16 years of slavery, he escaped back to England.
SPEAKER_02: He decided that the people who had enslaved him needed to be uh hear the word of Christ, and so he went to France to get educated, went back to uh Ireland, and um today we know him a long period of evangelism.
SPEAKER_02: He lived to about 80, um, and today we know him as St.
SPEAKER_02: Patrick.
SPEAKER_02: So if any of you get um can remember that St.
SPEAKER_02: Patrick was in fact a Briton, not Irish to begin with.
SPEAKER_02: Uh about the 600, the the favor was returned when St.
SPEAKER_02: Columba, an Irish uh monk, came along with about 40 Irish monks and established a community on the island of Iona on the west coast of Scotland.
SPEAKER_02: And the purpose of this was to spread learning, to maintain learning there, and to spread learning and the faith through northern England and Scotland.
SPEAKER_02: So uh we have this back and forth.
SPEAKER_02: Now, about the same time, 600 roughly, uh Pope Gregory the Great saw some blondes in the slave market, and he asked who they were, and he was told these aren't these are Angles, as an Anglo-Saxon.
SPEAKER_02: And he said, they aren't angles, they're angels.
SPEAKER_02: And uh as a result, he sent Saint Augustine and a number of monks.
SPEAKER_02: This is not the same Augustine as Hippo, who wrote all the books and so on.
SPEAKER_02: Um, so it's useful to keep those two separate, uh, although sometimes confused.
SPEAKER_02: Um and uh Augustine founded a monastery, he was welcomed by the King of Kent, which was then not a duchy but a uh kingdom.
SPEAKER_02: He founded a monastery and a cathedral his cathedral at Canterbury, and he was the first Archbishop of Canterbury.
SPEAKER_02: Now, if you read the records and the stories, uh he had problems with the Christians who were already there.
SPEAKER_02: They had fights about when uh Easter should be celebrated and how a monk should cut his hair and so on.
SPEAKER_02: It was an interesting story, and Loss goes into it.
SPEAKER_02: But we're gonna skip over all that and go to the uh late 1400s and 1455.
SPEAKER_02: And at that point uh began the War of the Roses.
SPEAKER_02: The War of the Roses was a battle that lasted 30 years, and basically it was one house or one set of descendants of the king and versus another set of descendants of the king.
SPEAKER_02: They both thought they had their the right to be king.
SPEAKER_02: And uh they fought for some 30 years, and it ended in in 1485 when Henry Tudor uh killed, or his troops killed Richard III.
SPEAKER_02: You remember a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.
SPEAKER_02: That's the Richard III we're talking about here.
SPEAKER_02: Uh and at that point uh Henry became King of England.
SPEAKER_02: Now it must be emphasized uh Henry VII had a very poor claim to the throne.
SPEAKER_02: If you look at the history and so on, it was confused.
SPEAKER_02: But um he did have two sons.
SPEAKER_02: First, the eldest son was named Arthur, and the younger son Henry.
SPEAKER_02: And Arthur was obviously going to be king, and Henry was educated for the church, which in those days was no small thing.
SPEAKER_02: Remember, the church owned a third of the property in England, and most of the or a good size chunk of the best farmland in England, which was um clarified we're still talking the Catholic Church is what we're still talking about.
SPEAKER_04: The Roman Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_02: Or the Church Universal, but but Augustine um was a Roman Catholic, we'd call him today.
SPEAKER_04: Right.
SPEAKER_02: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: So under under the under the Pope.
SPEAKER_00: Right.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, that's the same.
SPEAKER_00: He was sent there by the Pope.
SPEAKER_04: Well, who actually established the Roman Catholic Church?
SPEAKER_00: Um do you want me to feel that?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: If you want to?
SPEAKER_00: There was a big split in Christianity in 1056.
SPEAKER_00: It's sometimes called the Great Schism, that's not accurate.
SPEAKER_00: It's just the schism between Western Christianity, which was seated in Rome, and Eastern, which we now call Orthodox, which was seated in Constantinople.
SPEAKER_00: The reason that these churches split, actually, was that there was sort of a power battle between who was most important.
SPEAKER_00: Was it the Pope, the Bishop of Rome, or was it the Patriarch, the Bishop of Constantinople?
SPEAKER_00: And ultimately what happened is the Pope in Rome changed the Nicene Creed without calling a council.
SPEAKER_00: And it was a power play.
SPEAKER_00: So what we now say, when we say the Nicene Creed, we say who proceed from the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
SPEAKER_00: That's called the Filiocae in Latin.
SPEAKER_00: That's the word and the Son.
SPEAKER_00: The Pope in Rome said that's how we're going to say it.
SPEAKER_00: But there was no council.
SPEAKER_00: So it was one bishop saying, I can change the creed without an ecumenical council.
SPEAKER_00: And what happened is the essentially the patriarch in Constantinople said that's no good.
SPEAKER_00: The Bishop of Rome excommunicated him.
SPEAKER_00: He excommunicated him in return, and that's where the Orthodox Church came from.
SPEAKER_00: So that's really in since 1056 is when we have the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
SPEAKER_00: The Roman Church is centered in Rome.
SPEAKER_00: They also disagreed about icons versus statuaries.
SPEAKER_00: So in the Eastern traditions, there's the painted icons, but they would consider sculptures to be idols.
SPEAKER_00: In the Roman Church, consider there are many more sculptures, but they consider icons to be idols.
SPEAKER_00: So that's been a big split between the two.
unknown: Okay.
SPEAKER_04: So now that now that we're at Henry, we're working under the Roman Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_02: That's right.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: We're now under the Roman Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_02: And anyhow, Henry VII uh married his older son to Catherine of Aragon.
SPEAKER_02: Um, in part because you remember this is about the same time that the Spanish treasure ships are coming over in Catherine.
SPEAKER_02: Um Spain at that point was very powerful and very rich.
SPEAKER_02: Henry, on the other hand, as I said, was educated for the church.
SPEAKER_02: Now, most people picture Henry VIII as that great bloated figure we see in Holbein's painting of him in his later years.
SPEAKER_02: And that, I mean, I'm not gonna argue with Holbein, but that's not the way he looked for much of his life.
SPEAKER_02: In his early days, he was an athlete, he was a poet, a scholar of considerable uh learning.
SPEAKER_02: Uh the story goes that when he was uh king, he would essentially flip a coin to the privy council meeting and decide whether he was gonna hold the council meeting in Greek or in Latin.
SPEAKER_02: So anyway, uh he was uh he's a musician as well, and uh he was considered the most uh eligible bachelor in in Europe at that time.
SPEAKER_02: Well, in any event, Arthur died without an heir, and uh Henry VII still needed Catherine's money.
SPEAKER_02: Uh so they sought a papal dispensation for Arthur, I mean for Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon, to marry her brother's, her brother, or brother-in-law, excuse me.
SPEAKER_02: Um and uh the two nations being powerful, they got their wish.
SPEAKER_02: The uh Pope uh allowed the the marriage to go forward between Henry and Catherine of Aragon.
SPEAKER_02: Um unfortunately this only produced one child, uh Mary.
SPEAKER_02: And um in those days, you've got to remember, kings led their forces into battle.
SPEAKER_02: You you can actually see in the in the um Tower of London uh the various battle suits of Henry VIII, including one that goes like that.
SPEAKER_02: Very impressive.
SPEAKER_02: Um and of course, Henry's father had won the throne by knocking off the other king in battle, King Richard III.
SPEAKER_02: So uh this was beginning to bother Henry.
SPEAKER_00: Can I add one thing?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, um, which is that Henry VIII made the argument he could marry Catherine based on Leviticus.
SPEAKER_00: It's called leverite marriage.
SPEAKER_00: If your brother dies without producing an heir, it's your duty to marry your brother's widow to produce a child that will replace your brother.
SPEAKER_00: So the child won't be your son, it'll be your older brother.
SPEAKER_00: And uh that was the argument that they made, and many people don't know this.
SPEAKER_00: Uh Catherine actually had a number of, I think the awful word, but the word we would get is deformed children.
SPEAKER_00: So she had some stillbursts that that looked ghastly.
SPEAKER_00: Henry probably believed he was doing the right thing, but when he saw these children, thought God had cursed the marriage.
SPEAKER_02: And uh he claimed, went back at this point to remember uh John the Baptist got into trouble with Herod and Herodias because Herodias had married um her brother-in-law.
SPEAKER_02: So uh there are biblical stories that go each way.
SPEAKER_02: Anyhow, Henry, now Henry VIII was desperate for a male heir.
SPEAKER_02: And uh there were there had never been a ruling queen in England's history.
SPEAKER_02: So he dismissed Catherine, sent her off to a palace uh uh uh uh far away, and took up with the charming um Anne Boleyn, uh much younger.
SPEAKER_02: Um and he sought a divorce, a proper divorce from Catherine on legal grounds.
SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately, at that point in the game, uh that marriage and that divorce fell into papal politics and European politics, and very complicated, and I could spend a whole session talking about that.
SPEAKER_02: We don't have time.
SPEAKER_02: So um they had applied, it had been for the divorce from Catherine, and uh it got very complicated and delayed and delayed, but it became urgent when Anne Boleyn became pregnant, and so uh even urgent.
SPEAKER_02: And so in uh 1532 um it was also necessary that that child, uh if a son, be born legitimate, not outside of marriage.
SPEAKER_02: So that's why Henry was desperate to get divorced and then married to Catherine Boleyn.
SPEAKER_02: Anne Boleyn, excuse me.
SPEAKER_02: Um and in September of 1533, um uh excuse me, Anne Boleyn bore a child.
SPEAKER_02: Unfortunately for Henry, it was a female, uh, and named Elizabeth.
SPEAKER_02: In 1534, Henry declared himself to be the supreme head of the Church of England and no longer connected with, separated from the Church of Rome.
SPEAKER_02: Uh and still he had no male heir.
SPEAKER_02: And later in life uh he married uh Jane Seymour and produced a son who became Edward VI.
SPEAKER_02: Um but still Henry still had problems.
SPEAKER_02: He had some long-lasting wounds from his days jousting, and uh there is a strong suspicion that Henry had suffered a concussion, got knocked off his horse jousting.
SPEAKER_02: So um uh some of the things that he did later in life may be as much due to that as other things that have been attributed there.
SPEAKER_02: One of the ironies of all this is that in 1521, Henry, still a Roman Catholic, wrote a book opposing in great patail Martin Luther.
SPEAKER_02: And it was done so well that the Pope at that time awarded Henry the honor of being defender of the faith.
SPEAKER_02: That's why you see FD today on the coins around the head of Queen Elizabeth II.
SPEAKER_02: Well, Henry died, and uh I should first add uh in 1538, uh Henry had an English Bible put in every church in England, a Bible written in English, and this was the first time this was legal.
SPEAKER_02: In fact, only a couple of years earlier, Henry had had uh Wycliffe uh burned at the stake for writing an English Bible.
SPEAKER_02: Curious.
SPEAKER_02: Um and in 1549, Henry and Thomas Cranmer wrote the Book of Common Prayer, which was the first Book of Common Prayer from which our own Book of Common Prayer is descended.
SPEAKER_02: Um after Henry's death, he was succeeded by Edward, a weekly child, who died young.
SPEAKER_02: He was surrounded by Protestants and issued a new prayer book in 1552, which was much more Protestant.
SPEAKER_02: Well, at that point, England needed a peace and B a ruler.
SPEAKER_02: And so the thing fell on Henry's eldest daughter, Mary.
SPEAKER_02: Well, now Mary had been raised by Catherine of Aragon and priests, and so she wanted to return Britain to uh Roman Catholicism, and uh brought in priests, brought in uh all the changes that go back to that.
SPEAKER_02: Um she, in addition, married Philip of Spain and essentially had England as her dowry, giving England to Spain.
SPEAKER_02: So uh that developed some tension between the two, and that's why there was an armada in 1588, but another long story.
SPEAKER_02: Anyhow, Mary became bloody Mary because she uh executed a number of people, including Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and other bishops.
SPEAKER_02: Um, so she became um bloody Mary at that point.
SPEAKER_02: She died without children, and so um again there they got to look for a successor, and they picked on uh Henry's daughter by Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth, and she restored the kingdom to Protestantism, and her goal really at that point was to have peace in her kingdom, to restore peace and unity and end the strife.
SPEAKER_02: Uh her one of her comments was she did not wish to look into the hearts of her subjects.
SPEAKER_02: Uh she did not insist on unity of belief, but chiefly that the subjects worshipped.
SPEAKER_02: Together.
SPEAKER_02: And so that's why we don't have any Westminster catechism in this church.
SPEAKER_02: We have the creeds and the uh the two the three creeds actually, the apostles, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, which you can find in the historical documents of the church.
SPEAKER_02: You've got to realize that what a key issue during all this Reformation period was what happens during the Eucharist.
SPEAKER_02: When Mike blesses or consecrates the wine, does it actually become transubstantiated into the blood of Christ?
SPEAKER_02: Or is the service a memorial service, remembering Christ's death and resurrection?
SPEAKER_02: And Elizabeth came up with a quatrain that I think beautifully summarized the Anglican position.
SPEAKER_02: Twas the Lord that spake it, he took the bread and break it, and what the Lord doth make it for that, for that I believe and take it.
SPEAKER_02: In other words, she allowed for the mystery.
SPEAKER_02: And that's what we tend to do.
SPEAKER_02: And you see that today we don't use the words of administration very often, but there is an older form that begins the body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is given for thee, preserve thy body and soul and everlasting life.
SPEAKER_02: And the next line is take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee and be thankful.
SPEAKER_02: So what we're trying to do is play both ends against the middle or find the middle ground that uh satisfies everyone.
SPEAKER_02: Um anyway, Elizabeth, uh, after whom Virginia was named, had no offspring, no children, and no husband ever.
SPEAKER_02: And so uh her she was succeeded by um James Stewart, who was James VI of Scotland, and beautifully this occurred without warfare.
SPEAKER_02: It was a deal that was worked out before she died.
SPEAKER_02: And um let me just be sure.
SPEAKER_02: Oh, the main thing to remember about King James I, he was sixth of Scotland, first of England, James I of England, is that he is the man who created or ordered, created, paid for the creation of the King James version of the Bible, which has been a strong point in the English language, the foundation of the English language for at least another 200 years after that.
SPEAKER_02: Um, from there we got to move on to the middle of the 1600s.
SPEAKER_02: Um there were those who felt that we had um kept too much of the bath water when we threw out the baby of Roman Catholicism, and um they wanted to purify the church, uh the reminders of papal authority and and the connection with Rome.
SPEAKER_02: Um they banned Christmas, they removed altar cloths, uh hangings, and all the pomp and ceremony that, or much of the pomp and ceremony, and fancy dress for the clergy.
SPEAKER_02: Mike would have been ridden out of town on a rail if he'd showed up at one of their churches.
SPEAKER_02: Tarred and feathered, actually, really, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Uh with fancy dress.
SPEAKER_02: Um for them, they wanted to focus on the word of God.
SPEAKER_02: The Holy Scripture was what was tantamount, I mean, was the focus of the church and worship as they believe.
SPEAKER_02: And so anything that distracted from that distracted people from paying attention to the word of God.
SPEAKER_02: Um during this time there was a bishop, archbishop actually, uh, named Hooker, and he enunciated what I think is uh what is generally accepted as the core definition of uh Anglicanism in the Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_02: We sit on a three-legged stool: scripture, tradition, and reason.
SPEAKER_02: And all things must be consistent with Holy Scripture, but it must be interpreted by tradition and reason.
SPEAKER_02: Tradition, remember, you can look at it uh as democracy in time.
SPEAKER_02: It's the people of the past talking to us.
SPEAKER_02: Um skipping around, skipping to the um New World.
SPEAKER_02: Um, in 1603 was born Roger Williams.
SPEAKER_02: He was a Puritan uh minister, theologian, and author who founded uh Providence Plantations, which now is became the colony of Rhode Island and now uh Rhode Island.
SPEAKER_02: Um he was a staunch advocate for religious freedom, the separation of church and state, and fair dealings with the American uh Indians, and he was one of the first abolitionists.
SPEAKER_02: Well, now we since we're in America, let's skip forward to 1776 and all that.
SPEAKER_02: Uh the American Revolution forced the separation of the American Church from the English church, because not only was the king the head of the Church of England, but the prayer book was full of references to the king and prayers for the king.
SPEAKER_02: And this didn't sit well for the Protestants who had just been fighting the king.
SPEAKER_02: So uh the colony had no bishops and uh few priests, and of course you need a bishop to ordain priests, and so priests had to go to uh in colonial times take the dangerous trip over to England to get uh ordained and then the dangerous trip back, and not many people wanted to do that.
SPEAKER_02: So eventually the American church selected a man named uh Samuel Seabury to go to England to be consecrated bishop.
SPEAKER_02: Well, when he got to London, he discovered that bishops uh needed to swear allegiance to the king.
SPEAKER_02: And this made life a little tricky.
SPEAKER_02: Now you remember if you if you go back to your Shakespeare, bishops owned large people, large territories they owned, had authority over large groups of numbers of people whom they could call on to come and serve them in battle.
SPEAKER_02: And so if you go back and look, for example, at Richard III Shakespeare's play, they had battling bishops in those days, seriously.
SPEAKER_02: So uh it was important after that for the king to have authority over the bishops.
SPEAKER_02: Um Samuel Seabury couldn't be consecrated in London.
SPEAKER_02: He discovered he could be consecrated bishop in Scotland, and that's why you see a cross of St.
SPEAKER_02: Andrews quartered in the Episcopal Shield, that blue X in the upper left-hand corner.
SPEAKER_00: Um can I add one word while you're sipping?
SPEAKER_00: Sure.
SPEAKER_00: It's also where the phrase the Scottish Rite comes from.
SPEAKER_00: The English Rite and the Scottish Rite were actually very different.
SPEAKER_00: The English Rite focused on the Lord's table, the Scottish Rite focused on the altar.
SPEAKER_00: So when uh so the first prayer book had to have the Scottish Rite, is what the Scottish bishops insisted.
SPEAKER_00: So don't think about those guys with the green fezes and the little cars.
SPEAKER_00: Those are actually shriners anyway.
SPEAKER_00: But the yeah, the Scottish Rite, though, is is the Eucharist, which is really more Catholic than it is Anglican.
SPEAKER_00: We ended up somewhere in the middle.
SPEAKER_00: Anglo-Catholic is it's one of the monarchers you'll you'll you'll hear.
SPEAKER_00: Um, but again, it's much more phrase on sacrifice altar than the Anglican prayer book at the time was, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00: That was, I think, at least two words.
SPEAKER_00: Never mind.
SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
SPEAKER_00: Um Anglo-Catholic is gonna yeah, you're right, you're right.
SPEAKER_02: Um anyhow, you're um subsequently uh William White went to London and they changed the rules.
SPEAKER_02: Um and so he was consecrated bishop in England, and there were other bishops, so that then you could have a real American church that ordained its own priests and could consecrate its own bishops.
SPEAKER_02: The first American Book of Common Prayer was put out in 1789, the same year as the Constitution, and it was much like the 1662 prayer book, but it omitted uh references to the king and the royal family for obvious reasons.
SPEAKER_02: It's worth mentioning in this time.
SPEAKER_02: Uh in 1794, uh a fellow named Epsilon Jones uh founded the first black Episcopal congregation, and in 1802 he was the first African American to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_02: 1802.
SPEAKER_02: So we uh and he is listed in the Episcopal calendar of uh saints, and we remember him liturgically on February 13th, the day of his uh birth.
SPEAKER_02: One of the neat things uh we keep moving ahead, um, interesting things about the Episcopal Church, um, you've heard of Southern Baptists.
SPEAKER_02: Well, the Southern Baptists got separated um during the war between the states, uh, civil war or whatever you want to call it, uh, and never got back together again.
SPEAKER_02: In the Episcopal Church, they continued um to be in connection, in communion, and in fact, in the uh conventions in the north, they had seats for the southern bishops and southern delegations.
SPEAKER_02: So they really were making an effort to keep the church unified.
SPEAKER_02: Now we're gonna drop back again and drift back across the ocean and talk about the early um 1720s, 30s, and 40s when a couple of guys, uh John and Charles Wesley, were being educated in Oxford, England, and they formed a little group of um they called the Holy Club.
SPEAKER_02: And these guys were uh developed practices of fasting and prayer and regular Eucharists, and eventually, because it was so ordered, they got called the Methodists because they had a method.
SPEAKER_02: And uh the group added social services to their activities.
SPEAKER_02: Um they visited prisoners in Oxford, they taught them to read, paid their debts, uh, tried to find employment for them, and so on.
SPEAKER_02: Um John and brother Charles went to Georgia to evangelize the Native Americans there.
SPEAKER_02: He was unsuccessful, but on his way he was met some uh Moravians and developed a lot of his theology and and thinking around the Moravians.
SPEAKER_02: Um he didn't start ordaining um followers to the ministry until uh 1784.
SPEAKER_02: And even then he ordained um priest, clergy in his own church rather reluctantly.
SPEAKER_02: He was uh not happy to do that as I understand it, but was forced into it because Anglican bishops, English bishop, wouldn't ordain them.
SPEAKER_02: So, again, a good deal of politics in there, but um we also know uh Samuel Wesley as one of the authors of several of the books, uh hymns in our uh hymnal.
SPEAKER_02: About the same period or a bit later, 1830s, members also of Oxford University began to share uh the belief that we had thrown too much uh of our Catholic heritage out in the Reformation.
SPEAKER_02: And um by cat the um the uh they understood Catholic as a church which was faithful to the teachings of the early and undivided church.
SPEAKER_02: They believed the Church of England was such a church, and so they believed that uh we needed to mimic more the early church and what it was uh trying to do and its uh evangelism and uh celebration of uh the good news of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_02: One of the most famous leaders of this was John Henry Newman, um, who wrote a lot of stuff, um, and many of those things ended up in tracts, what they call tracts that were handed out in churches and so on, and they were called tractarians.
SPEAKER_02: Eventually uh Newman became a Roman Catholic, actually became a cardinal, and became um a cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church and wrote some ideas uh that uh a lot of books supporting his shift in his conscience.
SPEAKER_02: And so uh it's interesting um to read some of those and to see what his his changes were, but again, sort of believing that the traditions that we had and um the things beyond simply the word were part of our worship and could be part of our worship without distracting us from the word and perhaps emphasizing uh our hanging on to the word.
SPEAKER_02: And so uh it is you will hear the terms high church and low church and mid-church or broad church.
SPEAKER_02: Well, Newman and the um uh uh Oxford group, the Oxford movement, were high church.
SPEAKER_02: They organized a very um ritual-filled service.
SPEAKER_02: Low churchers uh believed uh in keeping life simple and uh without interference between the the uh word and the hearers of the word, and that uh things could we can be distracted from um the word by the uh all the uh smells and bells, so to speak.
SPEAKER_02: And uh you take it as you like.
SPEAKER_02: Um in any event, um I think uh let's stop there for the time being and see if anybody's got questions about that.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, ma'am.
unknown: Well, I don't have a question about that.
SPEAKER_01: What I'm curious about is the current relationship between the Church of America and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
SPEAKER_02: Well, we're gonna go into that um in another session later, but briefly we salute the Archbishop of Canterbury as our spiritual leader.
SPEAKER_02: He's the guy who calls together all the bishops, Anglican bishops in the world to meet um every decade.
SPEAKER_02: Um the last one was in um 2018.
SPEAKER_02: And but he is a spiritual leader, he has no authority in the United States, other than being a spiritual leader.
SPEAKER_02: In the United States, we have a presiding bishop who calls together our trinal conventions, and that uh gentleman is known as Michael Curry, and he is perhaps most famous for his um sermon at the marriage of uh Henry and Meghan Marble.
SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah.
SPEAKER_02: Uh thank you.
SPEAKER_02: Senior moments here, um, which, if you haven't heard it, it was an amazing, amazing sermon.
SPEAKER_02: Um he said he was given five minutes.
SPEAKER_02: He took twelve or fifteen.
SPEAKER_02: But who was gonna uh take him down?
SPEAKER_02: Now, uh it should be said that while he is the presiding bishop and calls and presides over the national convention that we hold in the church every three years, he has no authority in the diocese of Texas or any other diocese for that matter.
SPEAKER_02: Uh in this diocese, Andy Doyle, our elected bishop, uh, is basically the boss.
SPEAKER_02: He's his boss.
SPEAKER_02: And uh that's why you see, if you look at the the uh our bulletins, you can see Andy Doyle at the top of the list, uh, who's in this church.
SPEAKER_02: It is believed that Andy Doyle, and we'll go into this in more detail, uh, is in direct succession with the from the apostles, and he actually has on his wall a list of the various bishops in consecration back to Saint Peter.
SPEAKER_02: So when the bishop lays his hands on your head, in a sense, you are having physical contact with Jesus Christ and Saint Peter and the uh apostles of the early church.
SPEAKER_02: That's what we call an apostolic succession.
SPEAKER_00: We'll hear more about that uh in a later session, but um since you asked that's can I speak one other word to that just really fast, which is that we're called the Anglican Communion, and of course there are different heads of churches like Michael Curry, who's our representative head, not our actual head.
SPEAKER_00: What we ended up doing in the Episcopal Church is sort of the separation between federal and state rights.
SPEAKER_00: We came out really heavy in states' rights.
SPEAKER_00: So we really have a federalist system, every bishop is autonomous in her or his diocese, so the bishop of San Diego has no jurisdiction over the bishop of Texas.
SPEAKER_00: The Bishop of San Diego could forbid marriage between interracial couples, and that's his well, that's her prerogative.
SPEAKER_00: And if she does that, all the priests have to do it.
SPEAKER_00: And there's no speaking to that at the national convention.
SPEAKER_00: The other thing that's really interesting is sometimes you'll hear, oh, like there's that Anglican church in Pasadena.
SPEAKER_00: There's actually no Anglican church in America that's in communion, in the Anglican communion.
SPEAKER_00: The way that works, if it's an Anglican church, they have an African bishop as their bishop.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00: Uh what that means is usually somebody in Rwanda or perhaps somebody in Kenya is the bishop of these Anglican priests in America.
SPEAKER_00: The only church in America in communion, in the Anglican Communion, is the Episcopal Church of the United States.
SPEAKER_00: So they're essentially foreign bishops over these Anglican churches.
SPEAKER_00: It's a strange thing because it you know, part of the reason we had the Reformation was absentee bishops.
SPEAKER_00: But what's happened is we now have absentee bishops in Anglican churches.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you're interested in that.
SPEAKER_01: Well that's part of my interest in why has that become the case?
SPEAKER_00: It yeah, I I'll speak to it really briefly.
SPEAKER_00: It came the case because of two things the ordination of women, which happened in 1976, and ordination of women did not happen because there was a general convention and we decided it was a good idea.
SPEAKER_00: It happened because a couple of bishops ordained some women, and then they had to deal with it.
SPEAKER_00: And so they did it, and then they talked about it.
SPEAKER_00: And maybe that one went okay.
SPEAKER_00: We're ahead of the rest of the world on that.
SPEAKER_00: We preceded England in doing that.
SPEAKER_00: Certainly they didn't do that in Africa.
SPEAKER_00: Um the straw that really caused all the tension was the ordination of openly gay Gene Robinson to the episcopate.
SPEAKER_00: So Gene Robinson was ordained, he's an openly gay man, was ordained, or consecrated rather, in New Hampshire without asking the church's permission.
SPEAKER_00: The diocese of New Hampshire just did it.
SPEAKER_00: And then the national church had to decide what to do with that.
SPEAKER_00: They couldn't unconsecrate him.
SPEAKER_00: He'd been consecrate, you can't unconsecrate somebody.
SPEAKER_00: That's in our theology.
SPEAKER_00: So was he going to be a one-off and the national church was going to forbid it as if they could, because remember, every diocese is independent.
SPEAKER_00: So that's put us at great tension with the rest of the Anglican communion because we're so far ahead of the rest of the world that that's been the tension.
SPEAKER_00: And if you heard the Anglican Communion kind of censored us in 2018, and it's because of that.
SPEAKER_00: We've moved so far ahead of Africa.
SPEAKER_00: We're a little ahead of England, but we're way ahead of Africa.
SPEAKER_00: And the the place where the church is growing the fastest is Africa, not England or the United States.
SPEAKER_02: A few years ago, the average Episcopalian was a 22-year-old black woman living in Africa.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: So of the tens of millions of Anglicans, a lot of them are there in Africa.
SPEAKER_02: And so their bishops are able to represent a lot of people, and there are a lot of them, because uh bishops need to be able to travel around and see folks and um bless and confirm and uh and the like.
SPEAKER_02: And so there are a lot of African bishops.
SPEAKER_02: Uh, and as a result, they carry a lot of weight in these uh uh once-a-decade uh Lambeth uh conferences.
SPEAKER_02: And the other thing that that irritated the Anglican Anglican church was the fact we changed prayer books.
SPEAKER_02: And we'll go into that a lot more in in detail, but um
SPEAKER_04: Like totally not in this conversation, but you brought up the Methodist, the development of the Methodist.
SPEAKER_04: Was that out of the Anglican church in England?
SPEAKER_04: Okay, now are they still connected then?
SPEAKER_00: John Methodist John Wesley died an Anglican priest.
SPEAKER_04: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: So he he never was a Methodist.
SPEAKER_03: Right.
SPEAKER_00: The Methodist church came after Wesley because he'd ordained people to the priesthood during his life because no bishops would do it.
SPEAKER_00: And the real difference between us and the Methodists is John Wesley was a romantic, so you know we went for the Great Awakenings happened during Romanticism.
SPEAKER_00: And what they did is they said there's scripture, tradition, and reason, but they added a fourth idea which is experience.
SPEAKER_00: When Richard Hooker said there's reason, he included experience, but because John Wesley was a romantic, he created it as a separate category, and it's called the quadrilateral.
SPEAKER_00: If you look at the United Methodist Book of Worship, it's surprisingly close to our prayer book.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know very many Methodist churches that are that high.
SPEAKER_00: But the book of worship has got some beautiful liturgy in it.
SPEAKER_00: The baptismal song we sing when we baptize comes out of that.
SPEAKER_00: I actually pinch from that a lot because it's very, very thoughtful and very rooted.
SPEAKER_00: The curious thing is that the way the Methodists govern themselves is very like the Church of England.
SPEAKER_00: People are appointed, they're moved at the will of the bishop.
SPEAKER_00: We don't actually work that way.
SPEAKER_00: We chose the Federalist system that has states rights, like a rector is not appointed by the bishop.
SPEAKER_00: A rector comes tenured, and the bishop cannot move me.
SPEAKER_00: The bishop cannot cannot uh what do I want to say, cannot deflock me.
SPEAKER_00: The bishop cannot um censor me for being a heretic.
SPEAKER_00: The bishop has to call an ecclesiastical court to try me.
SPEAKER_00: In the Methodist church, it works very differently.
SPEAKER_02: But speaking of that though, as we search for a rector, we have to submit a list of candidates to the bishop, and the bishop vets that list and blesses it, and uh also blesses the final choice on that list.
SPEAKER_02: So it's not the bishop has some involvement in the church.
SPEAKER_00: It's called checks and balances.
SPEAKER_00: That's what we learned in the Federalist system, right?
SPEAKER_00: There's checks and balances.
SPEAKER_02: So um anything else that uh say we covered an awful lot in a very short period of time, and I'm I'm amazed uh we're that we're this close to being on time.
SPEAKER_02: Uh so uh we could add a lot of details to this.
SPEAKER_02: Um I could go back and and cover some of the things I skipped because I thought we were gonna be long.
SPEAKER_02: Uh it's uh one of the things that uh is interesting, or at least I found interesting, was um there was a period of time when the Puritans took over.
SPEAKER_02: They actually were uh there was a civil war in England, and the Puritans beat the uh Cavaliers.
SPEAKER_02: The roundheads were the Puritans, and the Cavaliers were those who supported uh King uh Charles I.
SPEAKER_02: Charles I lost the battle and his head.
SPEAKER_02: Uh and yeah, he was subsequently executed.
SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh you can read about that.
SPEAKER_02: Samuel Pete's diary describes it, and uh it's uh realizing that at that point kings rule by divine right.
SPEAKER_02: Go back and read St.
SPEAKER_02: Paul, and Paul says obey the civil authorities.
SPEAKER_02: So a regicide uh was a real crime against um divinity, if you will, as they as they looked at it.
SPEAKER_02: And um they uh there was a lot of discomfort with that.
SPEAKER_02: Um eventually Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell died, and his son tried to take over the protectorate, which is what it was called.
SPEAKER_02: That didn't work real well, and so Charles II came back from France and was uh greeted with enthusiasm because a lot of people still like to have Christmas and and uh other things, and uh he established the um church again as the Anglican church.
SPEAKER_02: And in fact, the the prayer book that was written at that time in 1688 is basically the official prayer book of the church in England today, and um it is uh again descended from uh Thomas Cranmer's book of 1549 and has many of the same words, but it has some differences as well.
SPEAKER_02: But but kings at that point, remember, ruled by divine right.
SPEAKER_02: God had pointed his finger at Charles and said, Thou art my active agent in England at this time.
SPEAKER_02: And so it was a serious business.
SPEAKER_02: Uh and that's what got Charles James the Third into trouble because he tried to rule by divine right, and uh the um people there said, uh, I don't think so.
SPEAKER_02: And we threw out uh a king before we can throw you out.
SPEAKER_02: And he because he tried, James III tried to re-establish Roman Catholicism in England, and um the English weren't gonna have that.
SPEAKER_02: Um so he was sort of fled town, and they had to go and get um William of Orange and his wife Mary, William and Mary, to come and and uh be kings of England.
SPEAKER_02: And it's actually the uh line was traced through the wife Mary from the uh Scots.
SPEAKER_02: But um, by the way, there is um one thing to remember, um there are several people named Mary in the period of the Reformation, and uh it's wise not to get say Mary Queen of Scots confused with Buddy Mary the Queen, and so on and so forth.
SPEAKER_02: So um just be sensitive to that if you as you start to read history, there are uh different Marys running around or were.
SPEAKER_00: Um maybe one just concluding thought, and Nick, thank you for bringing us really up to speed.
SPEAKER_00: Nick's really shared his gifts with us.
SPEAKER_00: Nick's went to Iona School for Ministry for three years and is a licensed uh lay liturgist and catechist, the only one at St.
SPEAKER_00: Thomas.
SPEAKER_00: So really thank you, because Nick has crammed a lot of study into 40 minutes, but if there's one thing to leave you with, it's that the Anglican tradition has swung back and forth between smells and bells, Catholicism, altar sacrifice, and Puritanism, Protestantism.
SPEAKER_00: So remember, we're called the Protestant Episcopal Church of America.
SPEAKER_00: That's our name, the Protestant Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_00: And essentially what Elizabeth I did is said, we're going to be the middle way between extreme Protestantism and extreme Catholicism, and uh and uh a wise Bishop Westerhof says, we're united in our worship, not in our doctrine.
SPEAKER_00: And essentially that's what Elizabeth instituted.
SPEAKER_00: And so if you've been to other episcopal churches, you will find remarkable variety.
SPEAKER_00: There are episcopal churches that say the Hail Mary on Sundays after the Eucharist.
SPEAKER_00: Yep.
SPEAKER_00: You can you can go to um Smoky Mary's in New York City, and uh, you know, on Groundhog's Day, if you can see the Thurfir Shadow, it's going to be uh six more weeks of winter because there's so much smoke in that place.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, they they blow it up, really.
SPEAKER_00: Um you can go actually across the length of St.
SPEAKER_00: Christopher's and have a praise and worship band instead of an organ.
SPEAKER_00: So you can go all over the place, and that's actually what Elizabeth gave us.
SPEAKER_00: Uh theoretically, you'll hear the same scriptures read on any given Sunday, you'll hear the same Eucharistic prayers on every given Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: Clergy may vest slightly differently, they may call their minister Mr.
SPEAKER_00: or Ms.
SPEAKER_00: instead of father.
SPEAKER_00: Uh so there's a lot of variety built in from the time of Elizabeth going forward, and that was intentional, not just to stop fighting, but the theology was unity is not defined by uniformity.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, sorry.
SPEAKER_04: My question about you.
SPEAKER_04: Are you dictating what you're giving the freedom to start incense, let's say?
SPEAKER_04: You know, that that's your choice.
SPEAKER_04: So I'm glad you asked that.
SPEAKER_04: I like it because I'm an ex-Roman Catholic.
SPEAKER_00: Here's the real the real truth.
SPEAKER_00: Um the word rector means the one who is right.
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
SPEAKER_00: This is right.
SPEAKER_00: Like to rect is right.
SPEAKER_00: And so if you're ever in doubt about what liturgical practices should happen here, the rector is always right.
SPEAKER_00: This this is built into our rules.
SPEAKER_00: It is.
SPEAKER_00: The truth is, Andy Doyle owns the deed to this property, but he cannot be in 146 places on any given Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: So what he's done is I am his supervisor in absentia.
SPEAKER_00: Which which means not only is the property his and he can ban anybody he wants off his property, I get to do that in his honor.
SPEAKER_00: And the interesting thing about the prayer book is there are rubrics, but some people say rubrics are suggestions.
SPEAKER_00: Some people say rubrics are rules, some people say the suggestion.
SPEAKER_00: Who's right?
SPEAKER_00: The rector.
SPEAKER_00: Now, the bishop can order the rector to do such and such.
SPEAKER_00: And if the rector doesn't do it, then it gets really interesting what happens.
SPEAKER_00: Because remember, uh a bishop cannot condemn a rector for heresy.
SPEAKER_00: There has to be a court.
SPEAKER_00: These are the checks and balances that we've built in.
SPEAKER_00: It's sort of like the rector is the governor, if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_02: That actually is my understanding was the rector derives from the guy who steers the boat, who controls the rudder.
SPEAKER_02: And uh it's it's analogous or similar.
SPEAKER_00: You'll find really interesting things as we talk about this.
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, there's only a couple of rules about what goes on the Lord's table, clean linen.
SPEAKER_00: The rector can pick any color she or he wants.
SPEAKER_00: You could say, oh, it's supposed to be green.
SPEAKER_00: I could put black on there if I want to.
SPEAKER_00: Not there's no rule on that.
SPEAKER_00: The principal colors are gold and white, principal, but it's up to the rector.
SPEAKER_00: So if you, and this is interesting, if you go to a funeral in the Caribbean, it'll probably be black and not white.
SPEAKER_00: Because that's been the tradition as a color of mourning instead of just white.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that makes sense.
SPEAKER_00: That's part of the variety.
SPEAKER_00: So your next rector could bring in a praise and worship band and screens.
SPEAKER_00: I think that would be a bad fit for this place.
SPEAKER_02: Uh you know, I do.
SPEAKER_02: But there are there's more than than um, for example, Good Shepherd and Friends would have a prayer and praise band.
SPEAKER_00: And and St.
SPEAKER_00: Christopher's does too.
SPEAKER_00: And again, their next rector may do away with that, and that can happen.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_02: No, it it must be said that there are occasions when the bishop can kind of intervene and make strong suggestions.
SPEAKER_02: And I think at some point in our past, uh bishop made a strong suggestion to a rector that it was time to retire.
SPEAKER_02: And we didn't see much more of him after that.
SPEAKER_02: Uh, a couple of months uh after that.
SPEAKER_02: A bishop in uh one instance has strongly suggested and provided a job for another rector who wasn't getting along very well with his congregation, and so the rector took that job, and uh the that congregation is in searching for a new uh rector.
SPEAKER_02: So it's um again a delicate checks and balances and interaction as it goes there.
SPEAKER_00: But if you ever wonder, and this happens sometimes, a church will call a rector and it's not a great fit.
SPEAKER_00: And that's really it.
SPEAKER_00: It takes two to tango, it's not a good fit.
SPEAKER_00: And you see, well, why does the bishop allow that to happen?
SPEAKER_00: The bishop can't do anything.
SPEAKER_00: We come in tenured.
SPEAKER_00: So once the bishop says it's okay, the only way we can get removed is if we steal money, if we sleep with the sheep, as it were, or commit some kind of crime like a DUI, we can't do our job, that's it.
SPEAKER_00: We'll talk about that more in four weeks when we talk about polity.
SPEAKER_00: Um yeah, but huge thanks to you, Nick.
SPEAKER_00: And next we want to talk about Anglican use of scripture, how we use the Bible, and uh we'll catch up a little bit more on modern, a little bit of modern as we do that, and and bring questions, comments, or concerns, please.
SPEAKER_02: And that was one of the great gifts of the Anglican church to the English language was the Bible in English.
SPEAKER_02: Uh Henry VIII, 1538, or a Bible.
SPEAKER_02: Uh obviously not the King James Version, but a Bible in every church.
SPEAKER_02: So, um something else I was gonna add the best I can.
SPEAKER_00: We'll have next week.