What is the Episcopal Church?

We are a branch of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, ordained by Christ.  Our ministry is to help people, individually and collectively, to live out the Great Commandment:  to love the Lord with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

We are a church, descended from the Church of England, which lives at the confluence of the two mighty streams of historic Western Christianity: the Catholic, and the Reformed, or Protestant.   

• As such, our liturgy is strongly reminiscent of Roman Catholic worship; our theology is heavily influenced by the Protestant reformation.  We have no Pope and no Curia, no body which claims authority to prescribe details of doctrine or belief.  

• We believe that the Bible is the Word of God.  We also believe that the Word is alive, and lives in us in ways that are sometimes different than the ways it lived in our ancestors.

• We are a church which is a welcoming home to seekers, to those who seek to know Jesus and who claim the freedom to understand Him in ways that their own souls can recognize.

• We understand that freedom comes at a price.  Anyone who follows the news knows that we live out our faith in messy ways.  Faithful and prayerful Episcopalians can disagree passionately about what it means to follow Christ.  Currently, we are living through a period of such disagreement about the moral implications of the fact we are of divergent sexual orientations.

We are a fellowship, a group of disciples, who choose to share our lives together around the Altar at which God meets us, feeds us, heals us, and sets us straight; and who then go forth to do the work of Christ in the world around us.

We are, in the wonderful image offered by Saint Augustine, not a club for the holy, but a "hospital for sinners."  We are not perfect people; far from it.  But we believe that God's grace, extended to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ, is far stronger than our weakness.

We are, if you want us to be, your spiritual home.