USA "Anglican" vs. USA "Episcopal"

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Tis_Bearself

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I noticed there was a new church in my USA hometown called Hometown Anglican Church. This is a bit weird to me since we already have had a big Hometown Episcopal Church for many decades.

On top of that, the new Hometown Anglican Church is sharing the church building of the Hometown Lutheran Church that has also been there for many decades. I figured maybe the Lutherans were facing attendance declines and decided to rent or share their church in order to keep the lights on. The Lutheran church is still active in there and having its own regular services, based on their sign and website.

I went to the website of Hometown Anglican Church to find out what they were all about and found a lot of very vague statements about how they were “a mission church based on the Gospel” (aren’t we all?)

What does it mean when a church in the USA calls itself “Anglican” rather than “Episcopal” and are the Lutherans involved in this at all beyond just renting space?
 
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Given the nature of the Episcopal Church’s faith … voyage of the last 40 years or so, select groups and individuals have split off from it, over time, and gone in various directions. One prominent direction is to become what is collectively referred to as Continuing Anglican Churches, or the Continuum. This group is a collection of autocephalous Churches (under such names as as the Anglican Church in America, The Anglican Province of Christ the King, the Diocese of the Holy Cross, the Anglican Province of America, and sundry others. These people originally were a unity (that is, their ancestors were) back in 1979, when the formal exit from the Episcopalian circus began in earnest. Following their fissiparous nature, they split in to other groups, all being collectively known as Continuing Anglicans. And now some are reassembling again. It’s interesting to watch.

Such groups (the individual parishes, that is) may not have the financial wherewithal to purchase or build their own places of worship. It is very common in such cases for sympathetic churches in the area to provide refuge. That is what seems to be happening here. Just Christian sympathy and brotherhood.

There are other things that one might mean, to say “Anglican” rather than Episcopal, in this context. That is, the Continuing Churches do not exhaust the topic. But you may be fairly sure that any such church or group of churches using Anglican as an identifier is a refugee from the current state of the Episcopal Church, in some form.

I am suspect “Hometown” is not the actual name, perhaps. If so, I couldn’t research it to add any particular details.
 
Thanks. Yes, “Hometown” is a fake name. We are not supposed to name real churches, clergy, etc. on this forum unless it’s already public knowledge (such as a news article). Plus, I’m not really keen on announcing where I live to the universe.

I remembered you saying something about Anglican is not Episcopal in the past when I saw the big new banner on this Lutheran church announcing the coming of the Anglican church.
 
There have been various groups which have split from the US Episcopal Church/UK Church of England since the 1970’s. This is probably one of those groups. Some Episcopalians have gone Catholic or Orthodox, some to other Protestant churches, some to these continuing Anglican groups. I am afraid, however, that most who have left the Episcopal Church have simply stopped attending any church.

Read about the 1977 Congress of St. Louis and the Affirmation of St. Louis which was a key moment in the breakup of the Episcopal Church:


http://www.anglicanpck.org/about/The-Affirmation-of-St-Louis-FCC-Annotated.pdf
 
FWIW there is also a mix of congregations under the Episcopal banner. Just in my area there is a church that offers 2 traditional services on Sunday as well as a contemplative candlelight piano and acoustic guitar service on Saturday night and a contemporary service with a band on late Sunday mornings. Something for everyone as their priest says. And yet another church that considers itself Anglo-Catholic complete with adoration but which remains with TEC on issues such as abortion and marriage.
 
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The Episcopal Church is falling out of favor with the others in the Anglican communion. I heard rumors that they had fallen out of communion with the other Anglican churches (were forced out), but one Episcopalian I know on another forum insists that this isn’t so. Instead, they claim, they have lost their voting privileges for a certain amount of time due to the rampant unorthodoxy it’s been promoting. This may be why you’re seeing two different churches.
 
Loss of some privileges in some respects, in the Anglican Communion,for three years, some impaired communion with some of the more orthodox of independent jurisdictions which collectively constitute the Communion, yes. That latter is done Church to Church, not as an act of the Communion.

The 2 noted churches are probably the result of the split in the Episcopal Church discussed above.
 
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Was Anglican for a bit. They love being labeled something different because they feel the episcopal Church has flown off a cliff on matters of morality.
 
This is probably a stupid question, but why was the church in USA named Episcopal anyway instead of just being a US branch of the Anglican church?
 
to make it seem less British, I think. Americans like being unique, and having an official British state religion so common makes us uncomfortable, with us being a rebellious child of Britannia and all
 
After the American Revolution, few in the US wanted to belong to the Church of England. So, they regrouped as the Protestant Episcopal Church.
 
Tis_Bearself said:
This is probably a stupid question, but why was the church in USA named Episcopal anyway instead of just being a US branch of the Anglican church?
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This was done as a public relations measure. After the Revolution, it would have been very unpatriotic to be a member of the “Church of England” of which the British monarch is supreme governor (the term “Anglican” was not yet in common use–no one called themselves “Anglican” or their religion “Anglicanism”). So, they renamed their church the “Protestant Episcopal Church.”

The term “Protestant Episcopal” was familiar to everyone. The British had been designating the Church of England the “Protestant Episcopal Church” in government documents already (see for example, here and here). And the Anglican church in Scotland is called the “Scottish Episcopal Church” and historically has also designated itself “Protestant Episcopal” (as seen in this Scottish catechism from the 1800s).

In the context of Anglo-American religion, the term “Protestant Episcopal” as a description for Anglicanism makes perfect sense. The Church of England was a Protestant church that retained episcopacy, while the national Church of Scotland turned to presbyterian polity and English dissenters favored either presbyterian or congregational polity.

In America, the situation was very similar. Basically, the only other denomination to have bishops in America were the Methodists (they officially split from Anglicanism during the Revolution) and they named their church the “Methodist Episcopal Church” (which today is part of the heritage of the United Methodist Church).
 
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In my “hometown” there are a couple of “Anglo-Catholic” churches which are not affiliated with the local Episcopal diocese. I’m not sure what their affiliation is, but they tend to be more conservative with very formal worship services. They have their own church buildings and call their services Masses, but they are definitely not part of the local Catholic Diocese. There must be several break-away groups with some sort of affiliation with each other wither in the US.
 
Sy_Noe said:
FWIW there is also a mix of congregations under the Episcopal banner. Just in my area there is a church that offers 2 traditional services on Sunday as well as a contemplative candlelight piano and acoustic guitar service on Saturday night and a contemporary service with a band on late Sunday mornings. Something for everyone as their priest says. And yet another church that considers itself Anglo-Catholic complete with adoration but which remains with TEC on issues such as abortion and marriage.
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In my area there are TEC congregations that identify publicly as “Anglo-Catholic”. Some individual parishes have themselves 2 very different worship services on Sunday morning - “traditional” Low or High, and a non-traditional, or contemporary. So there is still diversity in worship.

But we also formerly had TEC parishes that very publicly advertised themselves as different - or “We don’t go with the Flow” - on doctrinal or social issues. That I don’t see anymore. ACNA absorbed what was the largest parish in the TEC diocese. There are also a couple tiny ACNA and Continuing congregations now in rural areas. But within the TEC locally if there are still any parishes that are traditional in non worship ways, they are quiet about it.

So I would guess there is less diversity, other than worship style.
 
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