What if you still believe what you were taught in Sunday School, but your church no longer does?
What if you continue to regard the Bible as the inspired Word of God, but your church says it was written “for another time and place”?
What if your church used to be a religious worship center but now has turned into a political-action committee trying to usher in the Kingdom of God through secular legislation?
In short: What if you’re a Christian, or want to be, but your church isn’t?
Since 1962, the Southern Episcopal Church has been here for you. We continue to uphold the historic principles of Christianity, even while many of the larger mainline churches have embarked upon a post-Christian path of trendy universalism. (To them we say, “You kept the real estate; we kept the faith.”) We believe that Jesus’ Great Commission continues to define the role and mandatory duties of His followers. Truth cannot be changed by the vote of any synod. The church is the Lord’s and not our own.
You don’t have to be Roman to be catholic. Christianity flourished in Britain before the first Vatican missionaries arrived in the sixth century. For most of the first millennium AD, most of the world’s Christians belonged to one undivided catholic (= universal) church. After the East-West schism of 1054, the Roman church fell into a number of errors, excesses and strange innovations that the Reformation eventually sought to correct.
We believe that the English Reformation of the 16th century retained the essentials of Christianity more fully than did its continental Protestant counterparts. Today we maintain the theology and liturgy of traditional Anglicanism, as enhanced for some of us by the Fourteen Theses of the Old Catholic Union (1874) and the Declaration of Utrecht (1889), and find therein a sublime expression of original Christian faith and practice.
Beginning in Tennessee, we have been planting and receiving parishes throughout the United States, Australia and South Africa. The love of Jesus Christ knows no boundaries. We invite you to contact us to find a parish near you or to discuss affiliating an existing parish with us.
‡William Martin Sloane
PRESIDING BISHOPS OF THE SOUTHERN EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE USA:
PB I: The Most Rev. Burnice Hoyle Webster, M.D., 1965-1990 [deceased]
PB II: The Most Rev. Huron Clay Manning, Jr., D.Min., D.R.Ed., 1990-2014
PB III: The Most Rev. William Martin Sloane, LL.M. (Labor), Ph.D., 2014—