By Mark Michael
For a church dedication, “Church of the Advent” is particularly Episcopalian. The Church Pension Group records 44 Episcopal institutions bearing the name, including one cathedral (in Birmingham, Alabama), 36 parishes and missions, five schools, a preaching station on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, and a retreat house in New Orleans.
The 1891 study On the Dedication of American Churches noted that there were then 20 Episcopal churches so named, one of the more popular choices within a subset of dedications to “events and mysteries” of the faith. The authors, who give their names only as “two laymen of the Diocese of Rhode Island,” describe the popular Episcopal practice of dedicating churches to such occasions as “a custom, unobjectionable in itself, but really Roman.”
While there are certainly many Roman Catholic churches dedicated to the Ascension, the Incarnation, and the Annunciation, I was unable to identify any Catholic Church of the Advent in the United States, though there are numerous Lutheran and Anglican Church in North America congregations with the name, as well as a Western Rite Orthodox church in Atlanta. To be fair to the two laymen, there is only one Anglican Advent Parish in the British Isles, in Cornwall. It takes its name not from the season, but from St. Adwen or Adwenna, a fifth-century Welsh princess, traditionally a patron of sweethearts.
Our first Church of the Advent may have been the one founded in Philadelphia’s Northern Liberties in 1842 (decades later, a Polish-language congregation, but now long closed). The most famous is surely the Anglo-Catholic shrine parish on Boston’s Beacon Hill, which began gathering for worship on the first Sunday of Advent, 1844. It was founded out of a conviction, as an early history says, that “the time seemed to have come to throw off the shackles that had bound [Massachusetts Episcopalians] for so many years to Puritan tradition, and to reaffirm, by a more distinctive teaching and ritual, the Catholic doctrines always held by the Anglican Church.”
Such a program of teaching and ritual continues to define congregations like Advent, Baltimore, and the Advent of the Christ the King, San Francisco, but it hardly applies to the largest of our Advents, the cathedral in Birmingham, a renowned center of evangelical piety and low-church worship, with an average Sunday attendance of 612.
Wherever they gather and however they worship, the people of our Churches of the Advent acclaim our coming King and discern the signs of his presence in the world they serve in his name. May they lead us all in crying out with all creation: “Maranatha — Come, Lord Jesus” (1 Cor. 16:22).
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The Rev. Mark Michael is editor-in-chief of The Living Church. An Episcopal priest, he has reported widely on global Anglicanism, and also writes about church history, liturgy, and pastoral ministry.
