Consecration of Samuel Seabury, First Anglican Bishop in North America, 1784 | For All the Saints

Source: Consecration of Samuel Seabury, First Anglican Bishop in North America, 1784 | For All the Saints

Today is the commemoration of Samuel Seabury, first Anglican Bishop consecrated for North America, and specifically for the then-nascent United States of America, and its brand-new Episcopal Church. It is also known, for this reason, as "The Bestowal of the American Episcopate."

From the linked post in the For All Saints blog:

"After a year of negotiation, Seabury found it impossible to obtain episcopal orders from the Church of England because, as an American citizen, he could not swear allegiance to the Crown... Seabury then turned to the Non-Juring bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church, and on the twenty-fourth of November 1784, in Aberdeen, he was consecrated by the bishop and the bishop coadjutor of Aberdeen and the bishop of Ross and Caithness, in the presence of a number of clergy and laity.

"Seabury played a decisive role in the development of the American Book of Common Prayer, when he kept his promise, made in a concordat with the Scottish bishops, to move the American Church to adopt the Scottish form for the celebration of the Holy Communion, with the restoration of the epiclesis, the prayer for the Holy Spirit, to the eucharistic prayer, as well as the prayer of oblation after the Words of Institution and the epiclesis, which had disappeared from the prayer of consecration in English Prayer Books after the first (1549) version."

These are features which – notwithstanding my respect for the UK's 1662 Book of Common Prayer – I particularly cherish in our American Prayer Book (1789, 1879, 1928), and so I am very grateful for Seabury for this gift.