The Episcopal Church is a denomination in the Christian faith which builds its life in community and with love around what is known as “the three-legged stool”. This imagery says that we value tradition, scripture, and reason equally and see each as necessary for us to have a balanced life in faith.
Our individual parish, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church is where we make the love of God real in all that we do, think, say, and wonder about. We orient ourselves around seeing the Good News of Christ showing up in each other and understand our responsibility to share it in all our interactions and encounters with others, especially those considered marginalized, isolated, or oppressed by our society. We are always open to the new life offered to us by our faith, so whereas we value the tradition in our liturgy and in some parts of our belief system, you rarely will hear us say, “well, we’ve always done it that way.” We understand that God’s Holy Spirit directs our hearts and lives through our imagination, creativity, and through collaboration with others. Our lives are shaped by our faith, which is guided by the Holy Spirit, which leads us into the healing grace of Christ, and which shows us the expansive love of God.
Our parish is then joined together in heart (and polity) with other Episcopal Churches in our geographic area, which is called a diocese. We are part of The Episcopal Diocese of the Susquehanna and The Right Reverend Audrey Scanlan is our bishop. We have a faithful and collaborative relationship with our diocese and find it to be mutually supportive. To learn more about our Diocese, please click here.
All the dioceses of the Episcopal Church join together in heart to form the National Episcopal Church. The Most Rev. Sean Rowe is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church is faithful in it’s walk of love, always ready to tackle some challenging social justice issues so that people can be set free from oppression, prejudice, and hatred. To learn more about our National Episcopal Church, please click here.
The National Episcopal Church is then a part of the larger Anglican Communion, which encompasses many different groupings of churches, all rooted in Christ’s love, yet varying in their local context. To learn more about the Anglican Communion, please click here.
This can all sound confusing, causing you to wonder why or how this is all necessary. Or more importantly, how this is played out here in our neighborhood in Shippensburg. Our basic values and areas of commitment of caring for God’s creation, radical hospitality, welcoming the stranger, becoming the beloved community, and worship as our sacred center all stem from our long tradition of showing up to the world with God’s love in our hearts, open to be transformed and to allow our love to transform God’s beautiful but broken world.