Elephants and kangaroosies, roosies, part 1

St. Mary’s Episcopal Church
Haddon Township, NJ
May 13, 2007

I was pleased to draw the name of St. Mary’s Episcopal Church for my next visit. I have worshipped in a number of Episcopalian churches, and I like their liturgy very much. I checked the St. Mary’s website for meeting times; they have an 8:00 Simple Holy Communion service, and a 10:00 am Holy Communion and music service; I decided to go to the second service. The priest, Father Henry Jansma, studied in England – hey, an English priest! This will be a real Anglican service.

From the website I learned that this church, too, has a slogan: “Come as you are and we’ll grow with you.” (Perhaps I’ve never noticed church slogans before because they are not particularly memorable.)

For my homework before the service, I consulted the Private Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes, Sometime Bishop of Winchester, translated from the Greek and Latin. Bishop Andrewes oversaw the translation of the King James Version of the Bible, which might just make him the person with the most impressive editorial credentials in the history of the English language.
Here’s a lovely example of Bishop Andrewes’ devotions:

Hosanna on the earth
Remember, O Lord,
to crown the year with Thy goodness;
for the eyes of all look towards Thee,
and Thou givest their food in due season.

Thou openest Thine hand,
and fillest all things living with
plenteousness,
And on us, O Lord, vouchsafe
the blessings of heaven and the
dew above,
blessings of fountains and the
deep beneath,
courses of sun, conjunctions of moons
summits of eastern mountains, of the
everlasting hills,
fullness of the earth and of produce
thereof,
good seasons, wholesome weather,
full crops, plenteous fruits,
health of body, peaceful times,
mild government, kind laws,
wise councils, equal judgments,
loyal obedience, vigorous justice,
fertility in resources, fruitfulness in begetting,
ease in bearing, happiness in offspring,
careful nurture, sound training,
that our sons may grow up as the young plants,
our daughters as the polished corners of the temple,
that our garners may be full and plenteous
with all manner of store,
that our sheep may bring forth thousands
and ten thousands in our streets:
that there be no decay,
no leading into captivity
and no complaining in our streets.

I like the way the word plenteousness gets its own line (although that may be an accident of typesetting), and the pairing of “kind laws” and “vigorous justice.” And how particular his enumeration of the blessings of children are, including not only “fruitfulness in begetting,” but also “ease in bearing” – something a woman would think of, but not all men. And how interesting that the sons are compared to plants and the daughters to corners of the temple. It would seem more usual to compare daughters to tender plants and sons to sturdy cornerstones. And how about that final request: “no complaining in our streets”? What a great prayer.

Episcopalians are confusing to me, in part because they have too many names. The entire church (worldwide) is the Anglican Communion. The Episcopal Church is the official name of the Anglican Communion in the United States, although I think other groups outside the US also call themselves Episcopalians. Plus the American group has a second official name, The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America (PECUSA). They also have an unofficial name, Episcopal Church in the United States of America (ECUSA), which is commonly used even though it’s unofficial. And their legal name, under which they incorporated in 1821, is the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America. No one uses that one, except maybe some lawyers.

Lots of people think of Anglicans as Catholics without the pope -- they think of themselves as a “middle way” between Catholicism and Protestantism. (The comedian Robin Williams, himself an Episcopalian, has called the church “Catholicism Lite – same rituals, half the guilt.”) Everyone in churchy circles knows about the denomination’s much-publicized fighting over the ordination of gay priests, and about predictions as to its imminent fracture into two groups: a liberal (pro-gay, pro women priests) faction and a conservative (anti-gay, anti-women priests) faction. Wait – that’s way too simple. There are also plenty of Episcopalians who are fine with women priests, but not with condoning homosexuality. Hmm – what can I learn from Wikipedia?

Episcopalians have ordained women priests since 1976. They’re still arguing about it, too. That argument, which by itself has caused some congregations and dioceses to leave the larger communion, is dwarfed by the more famous controversy about ordaining gay priests. Lots of churchgoers who know nothing else about the Episcopal Church in America know that Gene Robinson is an openly gay priest who was ordained a bishop in the church in 2003.

Reading further back in the denomination’s history, I see that fully three quarters of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Anglican laymen, including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Patrick Henry, and Alexander Hamilton. Anglican clergy, however, tended to side with King George, in part because they had taken solemn oaths to serve the king as part of their ordination vows.

On July 4, 1776, Congress and several states signed laws making it an act of treason to pray for the king and the British Parliament, which was a real problem for some Anglicans. (And if making laws about who you are allowed to pray for doesn’t seem like a blatant violation of at least two articles of the Bill of Rights, what does? Of course, the Bill of Rights didn’t come along until a few years later, so I guess it was okay to make laws like that in 1776.)

Episcopalians nearly went out of business in the United States following independence – nearly 50,000 Episcopalians moved to Canada, where they could be loyal subjects of Great Britain. By 1790 there were only about 10,000 Episcopalians in the states, and they were mighty discouraged. Many churches closed. People predicted the church’s demise.

Well. here I had been assuming that Episcopalians had always been a substantial, wealthy, influential group in the United States – the quintessential WASPS. In reality, they had had a near-death experience following the Revolution. They did manage quite a comeback, though. Today the church has about two million baptized members. Numbers remained rather flat throughout the 1990s, with a small uptick in the early years of the twenty-first century – that’s actually not too bad, compared with how lots of other denominations are doing these days.