Virginia Anglicanism - 1

Of all the American colonies, Virginia was the one where Anglicanism struck both the deepest roots and came nearest to extinction in its 400 years plus history. Anglican worship began with the initial settlement in Jamestown in 1607, and has continued ever since. City/County and Parish were linked and the Church of England was the established Church, the Old Dominion was as well supplied with Anglican Churches as its agrarian economy would allow. However, it was an Anglican Church with a difference. There was no bishops, and it was not until 1628 that the Bishop of London acquired a distant oversight of the Virginia Church. The day-to-day running of the Church devolved to the governor, the burgesses, and the vestries in the parishes who did their best to provide for the physical needs of the Church. Perennially short of clergy, the reader ministry developed extensively in the Virginia Church with these educated laymen leading Morning and Evening Prayer, reading homilies (printed sermons) and in case of necessity burying parishioners, whilst the clergy administered the sacraments and preached.

What this produced was a lay led Anglicanism that flourished after a fashion for 170 years. Anglicanism even managed to weather the Cromwellian regime in Virginia, as the Virginia Burgesses made an accommodation with the Puritan regime in London which kept the Prayer Book in use in the Old Dominion according to its accustomed laws. The late-1600s and the early-1700s saw the Virginia church enter a period of relative prosperity with the Divinity school at William and Mary produce homegrown clergy to supplement the imports from England, though Virginia ordinands such as Devereux Jarrett and James Madison laboured under the disadvantage of having to cross the Atlantic for ordination. The parishes replaced their original buildings with neat red brick structures in the fashionable neo-classical style, and the first tentative steps in establish the Church west of the Blue Ridge were taken in the 1740s with the establishment of Augusta Parish, centred on Staunton.

[Bruton Parish Church, Williamsburg] This progress came to a shuddering halt in 1776 with the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. Comparatively few of the Virginia clergy were Tories, and some, such as the Anglican/Lutheran Peter Muhlenberg saw it as their duty to fight for their rights under the law against the exactions of Crown and Parliament. However, the war marked a turning point in Virginia Church history with Acts of Disestablishment, and Freedom on Religion removing the old Church-State link in the Commonwealth. On the national scale, the remaining Anglican parishes in the newly independent United States organized as the Protestant Episcopal Church, with a constitution that reflected the republican sentiments of the time. In Virginia, the Church initially weathered this storm well, as it retained its old properties, each parish having been endowed with a hundred acres of land as a Glebe farm, to provide an income for the Rector. The new Bishop, James Madison, who was born in Augusta County on the banks of Christians Creek near Staunton, made a fair attempt at continuing the life of Church down to 1803-05 making tours of the remaining parishes in the Commonwealth each summer, and ordaining clergy to fill vacant parishes. The Virginia Church only went into abrupt, even seemingly terminal decline, when by a singular stroke of providence, the Church lost much of its old endowments. Broken in spirit, Madison concentrated on his primary vocation as President of William and Mary, and for seven long years the State Convention of the Protestant Episcopal Church did not meet. The General Convention of 1811 openly lamented the desperate state of the Church in Virginia, but a brighter day was soon to dawn.