Episcopal Church of the United States of America

The episcopal Church of the United States of America ( Episcopal Church ), founded in 1789, is the name which her autonomy compared to England during the war of independence of the colonies took the church American Anglican to show.

It is divided into 9 provinces and 110 dioceses (100 dioceses in the United States, plus 10 dioceses apart from the United States: United States Virgin Islands, Haiti, Taiwan, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador (2x), Honduras, Puerto Rico and Venezuela). Moreover, the Church has a convention joining together the American Churches of Europe.

The Church counts approximately 2,3 million members in the United States. Nearly the quarter of the US presidents leave its rows.

The complete name of the Church is “Company domestic and foreign missionary of the episcopal Church of the United States of America” ( The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society off the Episcopal Protestant Church in the United States off America ), but this one is seldom used.

The seat of the Church is with New York, but its Primat officiates in the national Cathédrale of Washington. General conventions, they, are not attached to a precise place. It is the bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori which directs the Church today (2007). It is the first woman bishop to be governed the destinies of the Church.

As much other churches Anglicans, the episcopal Church maintains the close links with the evangelic Église Lutheran, the Église old woman-catholic and, until the Ordination woman-priests, with the orthodoxe church.

The establishment of the episcopal Church in the world was rather chaotic because the higher authorities of the church wanted to send only pastors to problem in the foreign missions. It has 100 domestic synods and 11 abroad.

The Colonial Church

The Church épiscopalienne is the heiress of the colonial church Anglican. The Anglicanism, religion of State, never managed during the colonial period to control the whole of the population of the various American colonies. The situation of this colonial church very different and was contrasted besides depending on the states. It was before all the religion of official British Empire and that of the classes more of the colonists. It however counted practitioners in all the classes of the company. It also developed a work of mission near the Indians and the black slaves, with contrasted results.

The War of Independence

The Colonial Church was also divided by the conflict and the fight for independence. However its direct links, as a religion of State, with the British crown were worth to him strong criticisms within the movement revolutionists, even if george Washington and Thomas Jefferson were Anglicans. This attitude was accentuated more especially as a majority of the clergy was honest towards the King of England. The Church lost the major part of its clergy, its places of worship were in ruin and its tarnished reputation.

Schismatic tensions

Serious tensions burst between liberals and conservatives after the dedication to the episcopate of a gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in 2003. The preserving minority entered an alliance with other Churches Anglicans of preserving or fundamentalist tendency, in particular to Africa where bishops as Peter Akinola engaged a true anti-liberal crusade. It is a question for the American conservatives of being based on the preserving forces of the world Anglicanism to be made recognize like the true representatives of the North-American Anglicanism, and of creating a new Church which would be recognized like true representing Anglicanism in the United States, supplanting the official Church épiscopalienne.

All indicates, in 2007, that this scenario dreamed by the conservatives is dedicated to the failure. The episcopal Church of the United States remains for the official authorities of the world Anglicanism, the first of which the archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the only Church legitimate Anglican in the United States.

External bond

Official site

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