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Home > Museum Shop > Books & Media > The Episcopal Church in Virginia, 1607–2007
  The Episcopal Church in Virginia, 1607–2007
By Edward L. Bond and Joan R. Gundersen
Price: $25.00
Writing years later, Captain John Smith described one of the Virginia colonists' earliest worship spaces as having seats of unhewn trees and an awning fashioned from an old sail. In this makeshift church the settlers heard the Word preached; there they confessed their sins and received absolution; there they partook in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper; and there they added their "Amens" in assent to the petitions found in the liturgies of the Book of Common Prayer. Alone on the edge of a continent, worried about their survival, their chances of making it back to England, and their next meal, thankful they were once again on solid land, Jamestown's first settlers found solace, meaning, hope, and strength in their reformed religion.
Generations of Anglicans and Episcopalians would do the same, turning to the church in times of sadness and in times of joy. This history will trace the church's accomplishments, failures, and conflicts throughout its four centuries in Virginia. The church has experienced disestablishment, the evangelical revival, crises over slavery and secession, missionary expansion after the Civil War, desegregation, the ordination of women, and ongoing disputes over how inclusive it should be. Beneath what historians tend to see as those larger stories, however, are the millions of men and women who found in the church a meaningful way to worship God and a place to work out their salvation.
The church approached the four-hundredth anniversary of its presence in Virginia much like its first arrival—searching for an identity.
In the centuries since 1607, it has known many manifestations: established state church and voluntary association; the church of the majority of people living in British North America and the church of a small minority of Protestant Americans; as part of the British empire, the United States, and the Confederacy. The chief symbol of the church's identity, the Book of Common Prayer, has been used throughout the diocese, at marriages, funerals, and baptisms, on more than twenty thousand different Sundays—in rural parishes outside Lynchburg, urban parishes in the state's capital, at the seminary in Alexandria, in suburban parishes on the Peninsula. In all those places and more, the church is still much like it was in John Smith's day, composed of individuals who continue to work out their salvation within a church struggling to define the legacy of the English Reformation.
Edward L. Bond is editor of Anglican and Episcopal History and teaches at Alabama A&M University. Joan R. Gundersen is a historical consultant and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
196 pages, hardcover, ISBN 9780945015284, Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, 2007
What's related:
• See The Story of Virginia online exhibition
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