St. Mary's in the Hills

The Episcopal Church

The Episcopal Church is a part of Christ's Church, and, as such, it has had a continuous an unbroken existence since the founding of the Church by Christ.

The Episcopal Church is a part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, one of the greatest branches of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. It arrived on American shores as the Church of England, brought along by the early colonists and settlers. Following the War of Independence it adopted the name of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America -- also known as the Episcopal Church -- and it made such modifications in its liturgy and practices as seemed necessary to life in the new nation and in newer times.

We know, from the presence of its bishops at the Council of Arles, that the Church in England has had an individual and continuous life since A.D. 314. The first missionaries from Gaul came to the British Isles prior to that time so the popular assertion that the English Church was founded by King Henry VIII has no real basis in fact. Resistance to the increasing domination of the Roman pontiff and to usurpation of ecclesiastical and political authority had existed since the seventh century. Under Henry, finally, the nation and the Church were able to renounce papal supremacy and to eliminate abuses which had crept into the doctrine and discipline of the Church during the medieval centuries of papal influence.

Under Queen Mary, Henry's elder daughter, the English Church reverted briefly to papal authority; but with Elizabeth I as queen, it gained complete freedom from all Roman claims and has remained free ever since -- a Church profoundly influenced and revitalized by the great religious movements of the Reclamation but whose essential worship, ministry, and doctrine continued to be what they had always been in the historic Church of Christ.

Thus, the Church remains both Catholic and apostolic -- Catholic and standing for the wholeness of the faith and life of the Christian community, apostolic because it continues in unbroken succession from the time of the Apostles. Return to Contents