"Appoint over this business..." Part II

Today’s Dispatch picks up where last week’s–available here–left off. In the wake of a wonderful 213th Annual Meeting and the election of new wardens, members of vestry, diocesan delegates, and foundation commissioners, we continue to reflect on the spiritual significance of leadership and church administration.

Fast forward from Jerusalem in A.D. 33 to the newly independent United States of America in A.D. 1789. The social and political upheaval of the American Revolution caused particular institutional difficulties for members of the Church of England dwelling in the former colonies. An ecclesiastical structure acknowledging the British monarch as the Supreme Governor of the Church on earth was neither feasible nor desirable in a democratic republic. Furthermore, the fact that the entire North American continent was considered a missionary district of the Diocese of London and no validly consecrated Anglican bishop had ever set foot on American soil meant that now-independent American parishes would very soon face a critical shortage of ordained ministers. What would become the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States needed to develop an appropriately American polity even as it maintained historic faith and order as Anglican Christians had received and practiced them.

Happily there were some inherited structures in place to help give shape to the fledgling Church. The Church of England was (and is) divided into administrative units of provinces, dioceses, and parishes. (While Church nerds might find a discussion of the unique status of cathedrals and “Royal Peculiars” within this framework diverting, I will leave that for another time.) Each parish covers a specific geographical area, and each parish church intends to serve the spiritual needs of all those living within the boundaries of the parish. The right to appoint a priest to serve a parish belongs to the patron of the parish, which might be the Crown, the bishop of the diocese, an institution such as an Oxford or Cambridge college, or to an individual. Parish clergy serve under the pastoral direction and supervision of rural or area deans, archdeacons, and, ultimately, the bishop of the diocese, and bishops serve under the archbishop of each of the two provinces.

Intricacies of ecclesiastical administration and appointments notwithstanding, the mission of the Church at the parish level is always sustained and advanced by lay Christians working and serving together in local communities. The maintenance or improvement of the church building, care for suffering and struggling people within the parish bounds, and service to the wider world continue whoever the incumbent priest may be.

In recognition of this fact, matters of parochial governance both sacred and secular had long been administered in England by assemblies of parishioners gathering from time to time in the room where the priest vested for services–a space called “the vestry.” Gradually the name of this room came to be applied also to the body meeting within it, and the concept of a parish vestry entrusted with responsibility for the preservation of church property and the care of much of what we would now call the social services of each local community was well-established in the Church of England by the time Anglican colonists arrived in North America. They carried the concept with them to these shores.

That the Church of England had, for a variety of reasons, failed to establish the episcopate in the American colonies proved providential for the growth and confidence of American vestries. Before the Revolution, the lack of bishops on this side of the Atlantic meant that the first century-and-a-half of Anglican life in America relied upon a strong and independent-minded tradition of lay leadership. Since ordination required an expensive and arduous trip back to England to receive the laying on of hands by a bishop, clergy were relatively scarce. Vestries began to assume responsibility for securing their own ministers directly rather than waiting on the distant Bishop of London to appoint them.

This tradition of strong vestries stood the American Church in good stead after the Revolution. While the civic functions of vestries were steadily stripped away as the Church was disestablished in the various states of the new republic, a vestry’s responsibility for overseeing parish finances, maintaining ecclesiastical property, and electing a priest to serve their “cure of souls” was confirmed by national and diocesan canons. An annual meeting of members of the parish coming together to review the work of the clergy and vestry each year and to elect new wardens and members of vestry to represent them and take responsibility for the good of the parish became the established and canonical norm.

Thus the particular polity of the Episcopal Church began to take shape. When at last the episcopate arrived in America after the consecration of the Connecticut priest Samuel Seabury by bishops of the Episcopal Church of Scotland, the principle that American rectors (and deans) would be called by the locally-elected vestry was a determined feature of the American ecclesiastical landscape. The parishes of the Church gathered themselves into dioceses led by bishops. New parishes were planted–Trinity Church in Columbia being the first in South Carolina to be established after the Revolution, in 1812. New provinces were established, not ruled by archbishops but represented by a gathering of clergy and lay people. And the General Convention of the Episcopal Church incorporated itself as a bicameral legislature, not unlike the American Congress, to administer a Church stretching across a continent.

And the particular responsibility that vestries bear for the maintenance of the physical property and financial well-being of the parish continues to this day. Trinity is blessed with an unusually deep bench of talented, capable, and dedicated lay leaders to serve as wardens and vestry members. Join me in prayer today for those who have just completed their term of service, and those who have just begun. Pray, too, that you might discern how God is calling you to serve him and his Church in the days ahead.