Our History
The history of Arizona is intimately bound up with the history of missions. From the travels of Fr. Kino in the 17th century to the establishment of outposts for the Native American peoples in the 19th century and on to the creation of dozens of new congregations in order to meet the explosion of suburban population growth in the 20th century. As we move boldly into the 21st century, we Anglican Christians are again faced with the challenge of meeting the spiritual needs of all--Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, immigrants and Native peoples, children and youth and adults--in one of the fastest growing states in our nation. So come and grow with us in the exciting work to which God has called the Episcopal Church in Arizona.
If asked about the origins of the Episcopal Church, many people will respond with a question, “Didn’t it start because Henry VIII wanted a divorce?” The answer is actually far more fascinating, for ours is a journey with several defining points along the way
Joseph of Arimithea: The birth of the Church in England is shrouded in the mists of legend and mystery. All that is known with certainty is that somehow the Christian faith in its earliest years made its way to the British Isles, the very edge of the Roman Empire. Tales began to circulate many years later that the primary missionary to Britain was none other than Joseph, that member of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem who was a secret disciple of Jesus, and who after the crucifixion provided his own personal tomb for Jesus’s burial. The legends grew even more fantastic, as Joseph was said to have brought with him the Cup of Christ, the chalice allegedly used both at the Last Supper and to catch crops of Jesus’s blood at the Cross. This legendary Cup, eventually known as the Holy Grail, became intertwined with the Arthurian mythos. Although the likelihood is that we will never know the true facts behind the beginnings of Christianity in Britain, what is clear is that the faith came to those Isles early on and developed its own unique character there.
Council of Nicea: When the great persecutions of Christians by Rome were finally at an end, the Emperor Constantine called the bishops and leaders of the Church together to decide various issues. One result of their gathering was the creation of the Christian statement of faith that came to be known as the Nicene Creed, and which is repeated each week by Episcopalians (as well as Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, and many other Christian believers). From throughout the Roman Empire Constantine called these representatives of the Church to Nicea, including from Britain. As Eusebius, the official reporter of the event, later documented, a delegation came from as far as the British Isles, showing that indeed the faith had taken root in those lands, and that the Christian movement there was indeed connected with the worldwide Church. However, that connection appears to become forgotten by the time of the next crucial event in the history of the Church in England.
Augustine of Canterbury: The legend has it that Pope Gregory I, one of only two popes ever to be referred to as “the Great,” was walking through the Roman market when he caught sight of a small group of fair-skinned slaves from a distant land. Asking about them, he is told that they are “Angles” (as in Anglo) and mistakenly agrees that they have the appearance of “angels” and deserve to have the Christian Gospel proclaimed to their homeland. Whatever the specific event is that prompted him, Gregory the Great wasted little time in sending a delegation of missionary monks, led by one named Augustine (named, no doubt, for the famous theologian Augustine of Hippo who lived a century before). When Augustine landed in the small kingdom of Kent, he found that Christianity had already made an impact in the land, with the Queen herself claiming faith in Christ. However, the kind of Christianity he found there in the city of Canterbury was Celtic, not Roman, with practices and beliefs that differed greatly from what he had left behind. In a letter to the Pope, the exasperated and reluctant missionary decried the system he found and asked for advice on how to approach the native believers.
Gregory’s response remains a hallmark example of what would become known as Anglican Christianity: In brief, he urged Augustine not to put obstacles in the path of British believers, but rather to take the best of what he could find in the native Christianity in Britain and synthesize it with the best of what he brought from Rome. Gregory’s wisdom allowed for a middle way between Celtic Christianity on one hand and Roman Christianity on the other, and the Church in Britain further developed its unique flavor. And because of the influence of the monk Augustine, consecrated by Gregory as the first Archbishop of Canterbury, and other monks and nuns like him, the Church in the Isles would also develop a distinctly monastic spirit, with an emphasis on common, participatory prayer.
Henry II & Becket: Few successors of Augustine would become as famous as that first Archbishop of Canterbury, but one arose in the High Middle Ages whose legend would actually eclipse that of Gregory’s reluctant missionary, and whose death would inspire Christian pilgrims for centuries to come to visit the great cathedral in Canterbury. His name was Thomas á Becket. Close friend to Henry II, Becket was promoted quickly by the king from a humble but scholarly monk to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Henry, however, did not count on the new Archbishop taking quite seriously his role as head of the Church in England. The two old friends soon became political foes as archbishop fought monarch against what he believed to be Henry’s unfair and spiritually ill-advised policies. By unhappy coincidence, four of Henry’s most loyal knights are alleged to have heard their king bemoan the interferences of his one-time friend: “Oh, if only someone would rid me of that meddlesome monk!” The die was cast. The knights went off to find Becket in Canterbury Cathedral and there slew him with the sword. Such a thing had never been heard of in all of Christian Europe, and the king paid a high price in public repentance and a dreadful reputation.
More importantly, the now-martyred Archbishop set a precedence for the Church to be the conscience of the nation and bold prophet over against any king or government that does not do right by the people. Such a role has been played out again and again throughout the centuries, including South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s bold stance against apartheid and call for the release of then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela. In our own nation, Presiding Bishop Edmund Browning, when asked by then-President and long-time Episcopalian George H. W. Bush to stay and pray with him in the White House on the eve of the first Gulf War in the early 1990s, instead informed the President that he was unable to do so, as he would be leading demonstrations against the war outside the White House gates. Such moves by Anglican leaders, whether popular with everyone in the Church or not, have placed them in the company of that steadfast and impassioned Archbishop, Thomas á Becket.
Henry VIII & the Break from Rome: Both the Church and the English nation looked very different by the time Henry VIII came to the throne. In this now-prosperous and powerful nation, the younger son Henry watched as Arthur, his older brother and heir to the throne, became sick and died, thereby leaving to Henry both the throne and the widow-queen, Catherine of Aragon. Henry, who previously saw his destiny in the Church as a theologian, was very loyal to the Roman Catholic Church, and agreed to marry his late brother’s wife only after receiving a papal dispensation, since the marriage was forbidden by a passage in Holy Scripture. King Henry even wrote a rebuttal against the great Protestant Reformer, Martin Luther, entitled “In Defense of the Seven Sacraments.” This earned Henry from the Pope the title “Defender of the Faith,” a hereditary title passed down from monarch to monarch to the present.
Henry’s subsequent story is well known: How every pregnancy of Catherine’s ended in miscarriages or stillbirths; how the only surviving child was a daughter, Mary, in an age when the heir to the throne was understood only in male terms; how Henry felt cursed by God for marrying his brother’s widow, no matter what the Pope had said; how at the same time he fell in love with the enticing Anne Bolyn and sought a papal annulment of his first marriage in order to marry his now-mistress; how the Pope refused such a move on account of strong influence from the Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and nephew of Catherine of Aragon; of how Henry the faithful Catholic king broke from the Church in Rome and turned the Church in England into the Church of England. Henry VIII’s story is one of mixed motivations, of lust and political expediency combined with a seemingly very real sense of what the Church should and should not be.
Anyone who knows even a little about the Episcopal Church will say that Henry’s break with Rome was the pivotal moment in Anglican history. Certainly, many changes came as a result of his break. The monasteries, once thriving centers of spirituality now devolved into sites of corruption, were dissolved by Henry and their wealth taken. The clergy, until then celibate, were allowed to marry and have children. Most visible to the people was the change of the language of the liturgy from Latin to English. Yes, the changes in the Church as a result of Henry were great … but it still looked like a Roman Church despite the alterations. The primary change was not theological, but political.
Thus, it might be more accurate to speak of Henry’s break from Rome as the moment of conception of Anglicanism, not its full birth. Time would have to pass, a hard period of gestation during which many loyal English subjects would die for “religious reasons” as the pendulum swung from the extreme Protestantism of Henry’s son, Edward VI, to the extreme Catholicism of Henry’s first daughter, Mary. For Anglican Christianity, the fullness of time would come with the reign of Henry’s second daughter, Elizabeth I.
Elizabeth I & the Via Media: People were tired of the repression, tired of the killings, tired of not knowing whether they should be good Protestants or good Catholics. Henry’s and Edward’s Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, had composed the first and second versions of the Book of Common Prayer, a masterpiece of English literature. Mary had subsequently banned the Prayer Book, and imprisoned and executed Cranmer, while returning the Church to its Roman ways. Elizabeth saw all this as she ascended the English throne following Mary’s death. Elizabeth witnessed firsthand the dreadful results of being ruled by extremes … and so she offered a different way, a “middle way.” This concept of the via media was fleshed out by theologian Richard Hooker, who expressed the beauty of a form of Christianity that avoided the two extremes of the day while borrowing the best from both.
The via media was in many ways the obvious consequence of Gregory the Great’s ideas for British Christianity centuries before, but what it created in its fullest form was something unique in Elizabeth’s time and since: A Christian faith that places more emphasis on what we have in common than on our differences, that does not demand uniformity in all things but rather allows for disagreement. Elizabeth called for a new revision of the Book of Common Prayer that carried forth the best of her father’s reforms while avoiding the extreme intolerances that Henry and Edward and Mary provoked. In short, Elizabeth’s reign is marked not only as a golden age for England, but as the birth of a truly special form of Christianity that borrows the best from both Catholicism and Protestantism while avoiding the dangers of either in the extreme.
After the Revolution: All that has been said already speaks of the Church of England, one may say, but what about the origin of the Episcopal Church in the United States? The answer is that latter cannot be understood apart from the former, for until the American Revolution the Church in America was indeed the Church of England. George Washington worshipped in Church of England parishes in Virginia, Patrick Henry proclaimed “Give me liberty of give me Death!” in a Church of England parish in New England, John Wesley promoted his Methodist reforms in the colonies while remaining loyal both to the Church of England and to the mother country. Interestingly, though Wesley was firmly against the Revolution, it was the nascent Methodist Church that became the new nation’s most prominent denomination after American independence.
The Chur
