ALBANY DIOCESE

CHRIST THE KING
SPIRITUAL LIFE CENTER

About the Episcopal Church*
The Episcopal Church is part of that Church founded by Jesus Christ when He commissioned His disciples to go into all the world with the Gospel. The Episcopal Church today is part of the worldwide Anglican Communion with seventy million members, whose mother is the Church of England. Episcopal is from a Greek word meaning bishops, who govern our Church. The Episcopal Church belongs to the largest Christian body in the English-speaking countries of the world. It is a multi-national, multi-lingual, multi-racial church. But in this diversity there are common essential characteristics. They are these:

1. The Episcopal Church is a Bible Church. We "believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the word of God and to contain all things necessary to salvation." The Bible is the source of our belief and moral standards. As God's word to us, the Bible is the lens through which we view and evaluate all other claims to truth.

2. The Episcopal Church is a Catholic Church. Catholic means that which has been consistently believed and practiced from New Testament times. Our worship and life draw from the rich treasure of almost two thousand years of Christian experience. The Apostles' Creed and Nicene Creed, the ancient statements of the undivided Church based on Biblical truth, are our statements of faith today. We have neither added to nor subtracted from them. The Book of Common Prayer (which enables us to worship together and not just passively participate in the minister's worship) contains the catholic treasure of worship and enables us to use it every time we gather for praise and prayer. The catholic balance of sacrament and word in our worship is evidenced by our frequent celebrations of Holy Communion and our emphasis on Biblical preaching. The rich inheritance of the liturgical year (Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost), of centuries of sacred music, and solemn and festive ceremony are welcomed and encouraged in our Church.

3. The Episcopal Church is a Reformed Church. Much of our distinctiveness was hammered out in the Protestant Reformation in England in the sixteenth century. The word Protestant means "to witness for." The Protestant faith is to witness that "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself." Protestantism is Christ-centered, just as the apostolic faith is Christ-centered. Corporate worship, clarity that we are saved by God's grace and not by our works, giving the laity a voice in church life, and using Scripture to judge and inform the Church all come from our reformed Protestant heritage.

4. The Episcopal Church is a Reverent Church. Worship in the Episcopal Church tends to be quietly reverent and dignified. The Book of Common Prayer is the norm of our services and the vestments worn by our clergy date back to antiquity. These latter are the historical "uniforms" of Christ's ministers. Our uniformity of worship, while allowing for variations, reminds us of the universal nature of the Church. In our worship we are united with past, present and future generations of Christians. Such worship is carried out with a view to the glorification of God, not for our entertainment; thus, Episcopalians are not spectators but participants in worship. Not only do we express ourselves in word but also in gesture. Generally we kneel to pray, we stand to praise, and we sit to be instructed. All other devotional gestures are optional and purely personal. To Episcopalians, worship is the most important thing we do, and ultimately this reality should characterize all that we do in every area of life.

5. The Episcopal Church is a Missionary Church. The Church has been established wherever its members have gone. The first Christian worship service held in North America was from the Book of Common Prayer, led by the champlain of Sir Francis Drake's flagship in 1579 in what is now San Francisco Bay. The first church in the American colonies was an Anglican one founded in Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. The Lord Jesus Christ's call to go into all the world is taken seriously by us!

* Reprinted with permission from Trinity Cathedral, Little Rock, Arkansas.

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