The decline of the Episcopal Church prompts the question: What will become of the Episcopal Church? It’s an interesting question, one whose answer has not been determined and it does not fill me with existential dread. While I have many reasons to question the way the Episcopal Church as a whole or via auxiliary organizations, has focused energy or resources, I also know of too many thriving congregations to believe that all Episcopal churches will disappear. And this is the case even if our structures look far different in the future. Also, while I do not know what will become of the Episcopal Church, I trust that the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church will endure and flourish, and that the gates of hell will not prevail against it.
While not a dread-inducing question, it is a fair one — and worth our consideration. I write this having come away from the General Convention in Louisville as hopeful and positive about the institution of our church as I have ever been. We passed a number of encouraging resolutions. There was, overall, a positive spirit between the deputies, as well as a significant generational change in the three important leadership positions of Presiding Bishop and President and Vice President of the House of Deputies.
I ask in part because of a curious glimpse I received not quite a decade ago of what struck me as an alternative future for our denomination. In my previous parish, one member told me about the denomination she’d grown up in, and it happened to be one I had never heard of before. It was called the Catholic Apostolic Church.[1]
The Catholic Apostolic Church was very much a creature of its time. A pre-millenarian (adventist) group, founded in England and Scotland, it eventually spread to continental Europe and the United States. My parishioner piqued my interest when she described how an itinerant priest — already an old man in her childhood, and one of the last surviving of this church’s clergy — would travel around the nation and visit families belonging to the church, leading worship in their homes, and presiding at Communion. I wondered why he was among the last of their priests, and she said, “Because they stopped ordaining them.”
A bit of context: the Catholic Apostolic Church, also known as the Irvingites or Irvingist church, was the result of a pre-millenarian and charismatic movement that developed in the wake of anxieties prompted by the French Revolution. It began with a series of Bible-study conferences focused on the question of prophecy at Albury, Surrey, hosted by Henry Drummond between 1826 and 1830, and moderated by the Rev. Hugh Boyd M’Neile, vicar of the local parish. Eventually M’Neile’s Reformed skepticism of charismatic gifts, concern about the propriety of women teaching religion (including via prophetic utterances), and concerns that some of the folks involved in the movement were grifters led him to fall out with Drummond and eventually to leave the parish. Drummond, on the other hand, left the Church of England.
Another of Drummond’s clergy friends, Church of Scotland minister Edward Irving, was also influential in the movement and, in 1833, was deposed from the ministry of the Church of Scotland on the charge of Christological heresy. Gradually, as more adherents came together and began worshiping with one another, often having been expelled from their Anglican, dissenting, or Church of Scotland congregations, they needed an identifiable leadership. There were even new members of the church to be found in Germany, a Roman Catholic priest with a commitment to prophecy and charismatic gifts having been excommunicated and later ministering within the Catholic Apostolic Church.
While its structure and origins varied somewhat from other restorationist bodies, one thing the Catholic Apostolic Church shared was eventually organizing around the leadership of Apostles. This is not the place to delve into the varied history of this group — which even attracted the criticism of Dr. Pusey — but instead to note its passing into an interesting historical blip, though one to which the adherents felt extreme commitment.
As I mentioned above, my parishioner told me that the movement had stopped ordaining clergy. After she died, her daughter passed on some of her books to me, including some about the church in which she’d worshiped as a child. Among those items was a poignant letter from an elderly man to my parishioner, part of which read:
There was a restoration of 12 Apostles back in 1835 and they were looking for Jesus Christ’s Second Coming. Word of Prophecy came and stated that they were to seal the members of the congregations in the countries where the Lord’s Work was active. The last Apostle died in 1901. Now we are in a Time of Silence. We wait for Christ’s Second Coming.
I have enclosed some literature that might be of interest to you. Your age is 99, and my age is 84, we both look for Christ Second Coming in Power and Great Glory.
May God bless you and extend your life many more years till Christ comes.
I recognize the longing in the letter. Who has not looked at the world and said, “Maranatha, Come Lord Jesus”? But what could the history of an idiosyncratic religious movement possibly do to illuminate a warning about one potential future for the Episcopal Church?
Shortly after learning about this group from my parishioner, I looked it up online, and to my surprise I found that there is still a vestige of it today. It’s not measured by adherents, but by property and art. With the demise of the movement, members left church properties and finances (the latter of which were to help care for widows of the clergy and advance the Christian religion), and those properties are administered by trustees who lease them out to other community groups and churches, including to Anglicans.
There are at least two groups. The first is the Trustees of the Catholic Apostolic Church. The second is more specific to one of the old Catholic and Apostolic Church properties in Scotland, called the Mansfield Traquair Trust. (Take a look at the church’s beautiful murals.) I also understand that the liturgy of the church was impressive, and there have been references online to amazing music composed for its services. And yet you won’t find an active church body affiliated with the group today. It’s all vestigial.
Call this the future of the Episcopal Church as told by the Ghost of a Christless future. The Episcopal Church still has a choice about what the actual future will look like. The Catholic and Apostolic Church is a movement that earnestly awaited the imminent return of Jesus, and because he did not arrive in the time frame these Christians believed in, they died out, and all that remains are assets, not people.
Ever since I discovered this, the thought nagged at me that if the Episcopal Church disappears, it could look strikingly similar — like a collection of assets without the people and mission they were originally intended to serve. The challenging thing about this is that there are already situations we can point to within the broader life of the Episcopal Church in which once healthy institutions have gone defunct, with only boards and endowments remaining, and decisions have been made that — at least from the outside — appear to avoid the sort of risk-taking and mission-focused decisions that might revitalize moribund institutions.
I do not want to leave the impression that I despair about our future. I remain hopeful and enthusiastic about the future of the Episcopal Church. I know that Christ is Lord of the Church, including our corner of it, and I see far more evidence that this is the case than evidence of the reverse. And yet I do have concerns, especially that, in my opinion, opportunities and resources are already being squandered. If those examples are indicative of our future, then it may well look more like the Catholic and Apostolic Church than we imagine. And if that happens in the Episcopal Church, it won’t be because we ceased operations because we anticipated Christ’s imminent return. It will be because we have moved Christ from the center of our common life here and now.
This summer in Louisville, I saw flashes of hope for an energized future. Presiding Bishop-Elect Sean Rowe seems ready to build on the positive work of Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. If there’s one thing we need to hold tightly from Bishop Curry’s tenure, it will be a continued focus on and refusal to be embarrassed by the Lord of the Church and all creation, Jesus Christ. The alternative is a distinct image: In the distant future, an elderly person remembers attending the Episcopal Church as a child, but all that remains is a property trust that could rent you some beautiful buildings for a wedding or a party.
[1] For a good introduction to the Catholic and Apostolic Church, see Flegg, Columba Graham, ‘Gathered Under Apostles’: A Study of the Catholic Apostolic Church (Oxford, 1992; online edn, Oxford Academic, Oct. 3, 2011), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198263357.001.0001, accessed Sept. 24, 2024.
The Rev. Canon Joseph B. "Jody" Howard is Canon to the Ordinary of the Diocese of Tennessee.