Bishops make us Episcopal - Rector's Rambling for November 12, 2017

Two-hundred and thirty-three years ago this Tuesday a very important event happened in the life of what was to become the Episcopal Church USA.

On November 14, 1784, Samuel Seabury was consecrated by three bishops in Scotland as the first bishop for the remnant of the Church of England in the new United States of America.

If you are a big fan of the wildly popular Broadway musical Hamilton, that name is familiar to you.  Samuel Seabury, along with King George, are two of the villains in the play, and in fact Rev. Samuel Seabury, as a priest of the Church of England in the colonies, was an avid loyalist to the King (all priests in the C of E take an oath of allegiance at their ordination).  Seabury wrote pamphlets supporting the king in the colonies, was chaplain to a British regiment, and then after the war, unlike many of his fellow clergy who went back to England or fled to Canada, stayed in the new country and continued his ministry.

During colonial times England did not consecrate a bishop for the Church here, and it was technically a mission field of the Bishop of London.  After the Revolutionary War, groupings of clergy and laity began to form what was to become dioceses, and eventually a national structure that was to become the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States.

Since our Church needed bishops, the clergy in Connecticut elected Seabury to be their first bishop.  The bishops in England refused to consecrate him because he could not take the oath of allegiance to the King.  So Seabury sought his line of apostolic succession from the dissenters that were the Scottish Episcopal Church, and on November 14, 1784, he was made a bishop.

Soon after that the clergy/laity of Pennsylvania and New York elected William White and Samuel Provoost, and they were able to convince the Church of England to ordain them without the Oath to the King, to which they most likely begrudgingly agreed to prevent them from going to Scotland as Seabury did.

November 14 is not Seabury’s Feast Day (the Church has not declared him a saint).  But it is an important day because to be EPISCOPAL you need BISHOPS in Apostolic Order.  In the Bible επίσκοπος (pronounced Episkopos) means Bishop.  We are the Protestant Church with Bishops (Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA).

Photo of the Seabury Consecration window at St. James Church, New London, CT