I am working on a post that will trace the history and the abuses of the “Abandonment of Communion” canons of The Episcopal Church. In the course of my research, I came across some documents that seem to suggest that we have all been through this before. The occasion was the formation, by a group of “low church” dissenters led by the assistant Bishop of Kentucky, the Rt. Rev. George D. Cummins, of the Reformed Episcopal Church in December 1873. A minister in the Diocese of Pennsylvania, the Rev. Marshall B. Smith, wrote a brave letter to his diocesan, the Rt. Rev. William Bacon Stevens, on June 6, 1874, in response to the address the latter had given at the Diocesan Convention that year. In the letter, the Rev. Smith (who had assisted in the formation of the REC) quotes the following part of his Bishop’s address:
“Since we last met in Convention an event has occurred which is unprecedented in the history of our Church. One of its Bishops has abandoned its communion and transferred, as he declared, the work and office which, by consecration, he received from this Church, to another sphere.
That other sphere has proved to be the establishing of a ‘Reformed Episcopal Church….’
Yes, I think we will all benefit from a careful study of this chapter in our past. Too little is known about this, and it can be understood as having some bearing on current struggles, as well as having possibly sewed some of the seeds of the problems we now face. For many in the Episcopal Church, this is all lost in the mists of time when — in much the same way as the Methodist debacle in an even earlier era — we should have a working knowledge of previous schisms and why they happen.
I am particularly interested in understanding the process used to depose Donald Davies, myself.
Allen Guelzo’s [i]For the Union of Evangelical Christendom: The Irony of the Reformed Episcopalians.[/i] (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994) is a useful point of departure. Interestingly, there were some efforts to reach out to Evangelicals in the Church of England (the global dimension, if you will) but most of the latter did not feel as overwhelmed by Anglo Catholicism as did their American counterparts and they were not buying the new denomination line.
There is one major distinction between the abandonment charges against the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC) and those leveled at those who have united with the Global South. The REC made no claim to be in communion with Canterbury or anyone else in the Anglican Communion, nor was recognized by any of them.
The current crisis is more like that of the Independent Philippine Episcopal Church which went on in the late 1970’s.
The Rev. C.E. Cheney’s arguments struck me as very relevant to the current situation. The Episcopal way of dealing with the three foundations of Christianity–Church, Scripture, and personal faith–has usually veered too much toward Church, with a capital C. Put a party that has decided the Church takes precedence in charge in a democratic society, and one will soon see personal faith and the Church acting in collusion to ignore Scripture. The worst features of both would be combined: the authority of Rome with the do-it-yourself freedom of Universalism and Pentecostalism.
Cummins and Cheney knew that was a recipe for a church in perpetual decline as America grew, but they were too far ahead of the consequences and too out of step with the new direction to be heeded or followed.