Tale of Two Churches

By Mark Tooley
6.30.09

Arguably the Episcopal and Methodist Churches have been America's historically most influential. Numerous American elites, including many of the Founders, were and are Episcopalian, making it often the de facto "established" church. And Methodism became America's largest church in the 19th century, creating the evangelical populist ethos that robustly survives today, if now mostly among other denominations.



Like other Mainline denominations, Episcopal and Methodist seminaries succumbed to theological liberalism early in the 20th century, reaching radical crescendos in the 1960s, when both churches began numerically to decline, a decline that continues until this day.

But the two denominations now seem set on different trajectories, as vividly illustrated by very recent events. Last week, the newly formed Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) convened its first provincial assembly, bringing into one denomination an estimated 100,000 regular worshipers and 700 congregations. Most of these Anglicans have left the Episcopal Church since 2003, when Gene Robinson became the first openly homosexual Episcopal bishop.

"There is a great Reformation if the Christian Church underway," ACNA's new Archbishop Robert Duncan told the ACNA audience last week in Bedford, Texas. "We North American Anglicans are very much in the midst of it. While much of mainline Protestantism is finding itself adrift from its moorings (submission to the Word of God), just like Western Anglicanism, there is an ever-growing stream of North American Protestantism that has re-embraced Scripture's authority (just as we have)."

 the rest