The Episcopal Church (1579 -1792)

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The first recorded worship service using the English Book of Common Prayer on American soil was led by Francis Fletcher, the chaplain of Sir Francis Drake on the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist in 1579. Today, there is a large stone Celtic Cross monument in Golden Gate Park commemorating this event, called the Prayer Book Cross or the Sir Francis Drake Cross. This service took place not long after Sir Francis Drake saw the white cliffs of Point Reyes, which reminded him of the white cliffs of Dover, and called California “Nova Albion.” So, California was New England before New England was New England. However, it was on the east coast that more permanent British settlements were made. The first attempt at a British colony was led by Sir Walter Raleigh at Roanoke, Virginia (which is now located in North Carolina) in 1585. Mysteriously, the settlers disappeared leaving only the somewhat cryptic message “CROATOAN” carved on a tree, but before they disappeared, they baptized the first Native American Manteo as well as the first English child born in the new world, Virginia Dare.

The first permanent settlement was made in 1607 at Jamestown Virginia, where the colonists were ministered to by their chaplain Robert Hunt. Christopher Webber writes, “With a sail for an awning and a plank nailed between two trees for a pulpit, they made themselves a church and planted the seed from which the Episcopal Church grew.” The charter for the Virginia colony granted by King James I commended the settler’s desire “in propagating of Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God, and may in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those Parts, to human Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government.” As this quote demonstrates, during the colonial period of American history, the Native Americans were mostly seen as heathen tribes in need of conversion and their civilization was mostly disregarded. Moreover, the Indians were generally not impressed with the conversion attempts of the “white man.”

The first native convert in Jamestown was the legendary Pocahontas, the daughter of the chief of the area, Powhatan. Although her conversion was widely celebrated, Pocahontas was essentially held hostage and relations with her father Powhatan were dominated by intermittent warfare and rivalry over land. Pocahontas was baptized Rebecca and married John Rolfe on Maundy Thursday April 1, 1613. Later she visited England, where she died of smallpox. Choctaw author Owanah Anderson wrote that it was in the English town of Gravesend that Pocahontas met her end and found her grave.

During the colonial period, no English bishop ever set foot in America; however, the colonies fell under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London, who commissioned commissaries to represent him. One commissary for Virginia was James Blair who secured a charter in 1693 for a college, which he named after England’s sovereigns, William and Mary. If educating colonists was the nobler side of Anglicanism, its darker side in Virginia was its uncritical connection to the institution of slavery. Blacks were brought unwillingly from Africa to support the economic expansion of the new world, particularly the cotton and tobacco cultures. Colonies like Virginia and South Carolina became dependent on slave labor, and the Anglican Church was largely silent on the human tragedy. In fact, Anglicanism in seventeenth-century America was the strongest in the colonies most dependent on slave labor.

Another commissary appointed by the Bishop of London was Thomas Bray who was charged with exploring ways of developing a more ordered Anglican church life in the American colonies. His brief experience in America led him to create the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), whose aim was to promote “a religious, sober and Polite people.” One of the chief objects of the SPG was to preach the Gospel to native Americans.

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Видео The Episcopal Church (1579 -1792) канала Daniel DeForest London