The Standing Committee

Origins   

By the Reverend Samuel M. Garrett

By 1784, following the peace between Great Britain and the United States, the remnants of Church of England separate parishes could no longer count themselves as parishes of the Church of England, or on their former contact with the mother Church as before.  Many were no longer functioning in New England (except for Connecticut) and in the South, where opposition to Great Britain during the war, and the Church of  England  relation to our churches there, had been particularly strong.  Most of the clergy in New England (including Connecticut) and a lesser minority in the southern states, had been loyal to the British Crown.  This was also true in the so-called middle states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, but two leading parishes in New York City (Trinity Church) and Philadelphia (Christ Church) had important leaders among clergy and laity; and also in Maryland (where the parishes had been "established" (supported by government) in colonial times there was concerned leadership among clergy and laity. By 1784 there had emerged a concern in these states that the former Church of England parishes could be brought into a further union as "state churches" (our term, "dioceses") and also as a national body to replace the "long nursing care" of the mother Church.

            Meetings in New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland began to emerge in 1784, with recalling colonial meetings from time to time before the Revolution, to petition the British government for a colonial bishop, or for supporting a society to care for the widows and orphans of deceased clergy in the colonies: in this latter project laity met with clergy.  Laymen also had been active in the parish vestries, particularly in large, wealthy, and surviving parishes in New York and Philadelphia.  However, there was no longer the traditional superstructure of these parishes to be depended upon: no Crown in Parliament, no Venerable Society (the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel), and no bishops for these Episcopal parishes in America.

            And so the leadership acted.  A meeting of the "Widows and Orphans Society," clergy and laymen, took place at New Brunswick. New Jersey, from which went out a call for a hoped-for larger gathering to get the organization of the parishes started, to take place in New York City in October.  In the meantime the Episcopal parishes in Maryland had received recognition as a religious denomination, the "Protestant Episcopal Church in the State of Maryland," under the leadership of the Reverend William Smith, formerly of Philadelphia, now settled in the neighboring state, and several prominent laymen connected with the Maryland state government.  Similar plans and meetings had taken place in Philadelphia under the direction of Christ Church's rector, the Reverend William White, who had supported the Revolution, and was a friend of Benjamin Franklin (not an Episcopalian!).  At the formal meeting in Philadelphia to organize the "state church" in Pennsylvania, at which sixteen Pennsylvania parishes, twenty-one laymen, and three Philadelphia clergy were present, a Standing Committee was established, consisting of clergy and laymen, to act as a committee of correspondence with churches in other states to further the forming of an Episcopal Church constitution.  This seems to have been the first appearance of the standing committee on the Episcopal Church scene; one recalls, however, that "committees of correspondence" were a common feature of communication between the then colonies as the Revolution was getting under way.

            The six principles of organization drawn up at the Philadelphia meeting to organize that "state church," are worth noting:  the Episcopal Church to be independent of any foreign authority; the Church will have power to regulate its own affairs; its doctrines will be those of the Gospel according to the teaching of the Church of England; a succession of the ministry of bishops, priests, and deacons to be maintained; clergy and laity alike to make the laws of the Church; and no powers are to delegated to the higher body which the parishes themselves can conveniently exercise through their own clergy and vestries.  The Pennsylvania meeting thus described was soon followed by the Episcopal Church in Maryland, including the calling of a standing committee.  It is interesting to note that the first standing committees, based on the six principles stated, is an older institution of the Episcopal Church than that of the episcopate itself.

            The various inter-state organizations of the Episcopal churches in the middle and eventually the southern states moved along quite regularly during the 1780's:  the New York meeting in October, 1784, the Philadelphia "general convention" in September, 1785, the first "triennial" general convention at Philadelphia and Wilmington in 1786.  These soon represent the "state churches" (dioceses) of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina; the churches in North Carolina and Georgia were still too feeble to take any significant part in the coming together of the national Episcopal Church.

            But New England, under the leadership of ten of the fourteen Connecticut clergy, proceeded in early 1783 (before the peace treaty had come into effect) to meet in some secrecy to choose a candidate to be consecrated as their bishop.  This action illustrates the contrasting "High Church" outlook prevalent in the Episcopal clergy of New England (in contrast to New England Congregationalism): that church organization ought only to proceed under the oversight of a bishop, and a bishop, therefore, supported by his clergy ought properly to act.  Their candidate was the Reverend Samuel Seabury, a New York clergyman in colonial times, and during the war loyal to the Crown, and chaplain to one of the loyalist regiments.  Since Seabury was unable to obtain Episcopal consecration from the Church of England bishops, owing to the requirement of the oaths to the Crown which a bishop in Connecticut, albeit a loyalist, could not take and yet serve in an American state.  After a long wait, Seabury was finally able to go to Scotland in the fall of 1784, to receive Episcopal consecration from three bishops of the Scottish Episcopal Church, which did not require the oaths to the Crown (the Established Church of Scotland being Presbyterian).  This took place on November 14, 1784; Seabury, now a Bishop, returned to America in the spring of 1785, and met his clergy (only) in convocation, not a convention.  This done, the "state church" of Connecticut could be organized, and parishes in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire, for reasons of convenience and neighbourhood, came under the Bishop of Connecticut's oversight.  For various reasons, however, the New England clergy did not join with the churches organized further south, partly for "churchmanship" reasons, as well as an unfriendly attitude toward Seabury on the part of the rector of Trinity Church, New York City, Samuel Provoost (who had supported the American cause in the Revolution, before being rector in New York City).  The principal point of disagreement between the New England churches and those further south was Bishop Seabury's opposition to the active place of the laity in the church's constitution and structure which the southern (New York and the rest) churches had provided in their organizations: the standing committees and the state church and diocesan conventions.  The High Church tradition tended to maintain the primacy of bishops and clergy over the laity. An emphasis not unknown today.

            By the spring of 1787, however, bishops for New York and Pennsylvania (Provoost and White, respectively) had been obtained from the Church of England bishops, an Act of Parliament allowing them to dispense with the oaths of Supremacy which had prevented Seabury's consecration by them in 1783/4.  But both Bishop White and Bishop Seabury wanted one Episcopal Church in the United States, and the Boston rector, Samuel Park was able to further this by helping Seabury to join the others.  The result came about in 1789, when the New England clergy agreed to accept the Constitution and Canons of the General Convention meeting that year (including the standing committees) with their lay representation, even though Connecticut itself maintained its "clergy only" provision for its own convocations and standing committee for some time after.  It is interesting that the Constitution of the Episcopal Church in more recent times (1997) does not specify that both clergy and laity sit on standing committees in Article IV dealing with that question.  This reflects the provision of the Constitution drawn up in 1789: Connecticut did not admit laymen to its conventions (convocations) until 1792.

            And so, what is the result of all this?  The Constitution and Canons today spell out the role of the standing committees in the dioceses (formerly, "state churches") of the Episcopal Church: there is to be a standing committee for each diocese, elected by the diocesan convention according to that diocese's own provisions, to be the Bishop's council of advice.  It is useful to look at the index of the Constitution and Canons for a convenient listing of standing committee functions; I shall try simply to sum up the story here.

            The overall concern in the Church on the part of the laity goes back to the early days reflected in the layman/patron who supported the parish for which he provided land, a building, and thus the right to choose the clergyman; in the English Reformation it was the crown in parliament which spoke for the role of laymen in support and oversight of the Church's life in the parish; this concern crossed the Atlantic Ocean with the supplying of vestries made up of laymen in the colonial parishes, and after; and remembering this laity's place in church life prompted the laity's part in the life of the newly organized Episcopal parishes in the new nation, the United States of America.  The standing committee in the Episcopal Church bears witness to this story, made up as it is of four clergy and four members of the laity.  This also is a realization of the laity's concern for the Church's "temporalities," the property and the carrying out of the parish's purpose for the people.

            It follows, therefore, that the standing committees are also concerned that the Church's functions are carried out by its ordained ministers, deacons, priests, and even bishops.  It is right that consents to ordinations in each diocese are expected to come from the standing committee, and approval of elections to the episcopate in the whole church also rest on a majority of consents to such elections from bishops with jurisdiction and the diocesan standing committees, or (if the calendar dictates) by the General Convention when such elections occur close to its meetings. 

            Two further provisions of the Constitution and Canons state that the standing committees are to serve as the council of advice for each diocesan bishop, and as a corollary to that provision, that the standing committee in a diocese is to serve as the ecclesiastical authority when there is no bishop, or the bishop is unable to carry on that ministry.

            And so, for all of these reasons, both of origin and result, I find that the standing committee is, with the bishop, the significant authority in the Episcopal Church.  A number of other bodies have come into existence since the Episcopal Church in the United States was formed:  councils, corporations, commissions, and the like, but I submit that all are dependent on the standing committee, particularly in its lay capacity and are subject to its authority in its relation to the chief pastor, the bishop.