The Diocese of Maryland is one of the nine original dioceses of the Episcopal Church and traces its roots to 1608 when Captain John Smith oversaw the first Christian worship in the upper Chesapeake Bay.[1] In 1692, a law passed by the province's general assembly established the Church of England and the colony, which was divided into ten counties, was divided into 30 parishes (See List of the original 30 Anglican parishes in the Province of Maryland). Sometimes the parish church was centrally located; other times multiple churches or chapels served distant population centers within the parish.
In 1789, the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America was founded. The diocese's first bishop, Thomas John Claggett (1743-1816), was the first American bishop of the Episcopal Church consecrated in the country, in 1792 at Trinity Church facing historic Wall Street in New York City. Among notable historical events in the diocese is the first African-American Episcopal congregations in the South, St. James' Church, at Lafayette Square, in west Baltimore. Another first among Maryland's bishops was the election of John Gardner Murray as Presiding Bishop. He was the first elected primate of the Episcopal Church; for his predecessors, the senior member of the House of Bishops, automatically assumed the position.
On March 29, 2008, Eugene Taylor Sutton was elected as the 14th bishop of the diocese;[3] the first African-American to serve in that capacity was consecrated June 28, 2008. In 2014, Heather Cook was the first woman elected to become a bishop in the diocese and she was consecrated as suffragan to Sutton.[4] However, she was placed on administrative leave at the end of 2014 after involvement in a traffic fatality in north Baltimore.[5] Cook was charged with drunk driving, texting while driving, and leaving the scene of the crime, in addition to vehicular manslaughter.[6] On January 22, 2015, the standing committee of the diocese requested that Cook resign her position.[7] This was followed by the Presiding Bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, placing formal restrictions on Cook preventing her from presenting herself as an ordained minister of the Episcopal Church.[8] On May 1, 2015, Jefferts Schori announced that both she and the Diocese of Maryland had accepted Cook's resignation as a bishop and as an employee of the diocese. Moreover, both parties reached an accord where Cook received a "Sentence of Disposition" which stripped Cook of her ordained status.[9]
The arms of the diocese were designed by Pierre de Chaignon la Rose and were officially adopted at the 133rd diocesan convention in 1916. They consist of a counterchanged Cross of St George, representing the ancestral Church of England; a canton of Lord Baltimore's arms, representing Maryland; and a pheon or arrowhead, taken from the arms of Bishop Claggett.[10]
The Episcopal Church in North Texas was a diocese of the Episcopal Church from 1982 to its merger with the Diocese of Texas in 2022. The diocese included a geographic area of 24 counties in the north central part of Texas. As of 2021, it includes 13 churches, including a number of other congregations in the process of reorganization. The jurisdiction was the site of a major schism in 2008. This schism was the result of the diocese's bishop, Jack Iker, leading the majority of clergy and parishes to join the Anglican Church of North America as the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth. The Episcopal Church diocese is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas. It announced on April 22, 2022, that it would seek reunion with the Episcopal Diocese of Texas. The merger was finalized by the 80th General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America on July 11, 2022.
The Anglican Diocese of Quincy is a member of the Anglican Church in North America and is made up of 32 congregations, principally in Illinois but also in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Texas, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Hawai'i, Colorado, Tennessee, and Florida in the United States. The diocese was a founding member of the Anglican Church in North America in 2009.
Katharine Jefferts Schori is the former Presiding Bishop and Primate of the Episcopal Church of the United States. Previously elected as the 9th Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada, she was the first woman elected as a primate in the Anglican Communion. Jefferts Schori was elected at the 75th General Convention on June 18, 2006, and invested at Washington National Cathedral on November 4, 2006, and continued until November 1, 2015, when Michael Bruce Curry was invested in the position. She took part in her first General Convention of the Episcopal Church as Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church in July 2009.
The Episcopal Diocese of Nevada is the diocese of the Episcopal Church in the USA comprising the entire State of Nevada. The eleventh and current bishop of the Diocese, The Rt. Rev. Elizabeth Bonforte Gardner, was ordained and consecrated by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry at Christ Church Episcopal in Las Vegas on March 5, 2022. On October 8, 2021, the Reverend Gardner was elected bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada.
Jerry Alban Lamb is a retired American bishop. He was the sixth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California.
The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh is a diocese in the Episcopal Church in the United States of America. Geographically, it encompasses 11 counties in Western Pennsylvania. It was formed in 1865 by dividing the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. The diocesan cathedral is Trinity Cathedral in downtown Pittsburgh. The Rt. Rev. Ketlen A. Solak was consecrated and seated as its current bishop in autumn 2021.
In the United States, the history of the Episcopal Church has its origins in the Church of England, a church which stresses its continuity with the ancient Western church and claims to maintain apostolic succession. Its close links to the Crown led to its reorganization on an independent basis in the 1780s. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was characterized sociologically by a disproportionately large number of high status Americans as well as English immigrants; for example, more than a quarter of all presidents of the United States have been Episcopalians. Although it was not among the leading participants of the abolitionist movement in the early 19th century, by the early 20th century its social engagement had increased to the point that it was an important participant in the Social Gospel movement, though it never provided much support for the Prohibitionist movement. Like other mainline churches in the United States, its membership decreased from the 1960s. This was also a period in which the church took a more open attitude on the role of women and toward homosexuality, while engaging in liturgical revision parallel to that of the Roman Catholic Church in the post Vatican II era.
The Anglican realignment is a movement among some Anglicans to align themselves under new or alternative oversight within or outside the Anglican Communion. This movement is primarily active in parts of the Episcopal Church in the United States and the Anglican Church of Canada. Two of the major events that contributed to the movement were the 2002 decision of the Diocese of New Westminster in Canada to authorise a rite of blessing for same-sex unions, and the nomination of two openly gay priests in 2003 to become bishops. Jeffrey John, an openly gay priest with a long-time partner, was appointed to be the next Bishop of Reading in the Church of England and the General Convention of the Episcopal Church ratified the election of Gene Robinson, an openly gay non-celibate man, as Bishop of New Hampshire. Jeffrey John ultimately declined the appointment due to pressure.
Thomas John Claggett was the first bishop of the newly formed American Episcopal Church to be consecrated on American soil and the first bishop of the recently established (1780) Diocese of Maryland.
Eugene Taylor Sutton is an American Episcopal clergyman currently serving as the 14th Episcopal Bishop of Maryland.
The Episcopal Church, based in the United States with additional dioceses elsewhere, is a member church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. It is a mainline Protestant denomination and is divided into nine provinces. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church is Michael Bruce Curry, the first African American bishop to serve in that position.
The Diocese of Quincy was a diocese of the Episcopal Church in western Illinois from 1877 to 2013. The cathedral seat was originally in Quincy, Illinois but was moved to St. Paul's Cathedral in Peoria in 1963. In order to avoid confusion with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Peoria, the diocese retained the name of the location of its original "home" city, Quincy, where its cathedral seat was St. John's.
The Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth is a diocese of the Anglican Church in North America. The diocese comprises 56 congregations and its headquarters are in Fort Worth, Texas.
The ordination of women in the Anglican Communion has been increasingly common in certain provinces since the 1970s. Several provinces, however, and certain dioceses within otherwise ordaining provinces, continue to ordain only men. Disputes over the ordination of women have contributed to the establishment and growth of progressive tendencies, such as the Anglican realignment and Continuing Anglican movements.
Mary Douglas Glasspool is an assistant bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of New York. She previously served as a suffragan bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles from 2010 to 2016. She is the first avowed lesbian to be consecrated a bishop in the Anglican Communion.
William Carl "Bill" Frey was an American Episcopal bishop. He served as missionary bishop of the Episcopal Church for the Episcopal Diocese of Guatemala and later as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado. He was an Evangelical and was considered a moderate theological conservative. He supported women's ordination but opposed active homosexuality.
Heather Elizabeth Cook is a deposed bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States. She was a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of Maryland until her resignation from the position in 2015. In September 2015, she pleaded guilty to vehicular manslaughter, having killed Tom Palermo while driving under the influence of alcohol and fleeing the scene twice, and was sentenced a month later to seven years in prison. She was deposed from ministry and therefore unable to perform public ministry; however, her ordinations cannot be undone according to Anglican sacramental theology.
St. James Episcopal Church Lafayette Square, or St. James African Episcopal Church, founded in 1824, is a historic Episcopal church now located at 1024 W. Lafayette Avenue in the Lafayette Square Historic District of Baltimore, Maryland.
Dan Thomas Edwards is a retired diocesan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Nevada.
Edwin Funsten Gulick Jr., known as Ted Gulick, was the seventh bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Kentucky, and since 2011 has served as assistant bishop in the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, with special responsibility for pastoral ministry.
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