If you've ever stepped out of a service with robes, a raised altar, and prayers answered together from a printed page, and into a plain room where the only instrument is the human voice, you've already felt the difference. This post is about what that difference is, and why it's there.
Let’s start with the short answer. The Episcopal Church is the American branch of the Anglican tradition: bishops govern it, the Book of Common Prayer shapes its worship, and its teaching draws on tradition and reason alongside Scripture. A congregation like ours works from a different blueprint. Here at Christians in Honesdale we're simply Christians, taking the New Testament alone as our pattern, with no organization larger than the local congregation and a worship that's deliberately simple. There's real common ground between the two. There are real differences as well. Both deserve a fair hearing.
Two Very Different Starting Points
The Episcopal Church traces its story through the Church of England, which parted ways with Rome in the 1500s and looked for a middle road between Catholic and Protestant. After the American Revolution, Church of England congregations in the new United States could no longer, in good conscience, pray for the English king or answer to bishops under his authority, so they organized as an independent body in 1789: the Episcopal Church. Episcopalians honor Scripture, confess Christ, observe communion most Sundays, and care about reverent, ordered worship. None of that is small, and we won't pretend otherwise.
Our aim runs another direction. We're not trying to carry forward or reform a tradition that grew up over the centuries. We're trying to reach back behind all of them, to the church Jesus promised to build (Matthew 16:18), and to practice what the New Testament describes. Nothing more, nothing less. Restoration rather than reformation. See that one aim clearly, and nearly every difference below falls into place.
Where Final Authority Rests
Episcopal teaching stands on three legs: Scripture first, with tradition and reason alongside it. The Book of Common Prayer molds both worship and doctrine, and the historic creeds are recited in services. It's a thoughtful arrangement, and Episcopalians would tell you Scripture holds the senior seat.
We ask a narrower question: what does Scripture itself say, and does it need any help?
“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work” (2 Timothy 3:16–17).
If Scripture equips God's people for every good work, no prayer book or creed can add authority to it. So we keep none. The Bible is the only standard we hold, and the only one we ask to be measured by.
How Each Church Is Organized
The name “episcopal” comes from the Greek word episkopos, meaning overseer, and it fits. Bishops are the framework of Episcopal organization: congregations belong to dioceses, dioceses answer to bishops, a presiding bishop leads the national church, and the whole body belongs to the worldwide Anglican Communion.
Now open the New Testament, where an overseer is the same man as an elder or a shepherd. Those words describe one local office, not a regional one. Paul sent for the elders of a single congregation and charged those same men to oversee and shepherd the flock among them (Acts 20:17, 28; Titus 1:5–7; 1 Peter 5:2). Nothing bigger ever appears. That's why we belong to no diocese and answer to no office on earth. We're an independent congregation, and Christ alone stands over us:
“And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Ephesians 1:22–23).
What Worship Looks Like in Each
Attend an Episcopal parish and you'll meet the Prayer Book liturgy: written prayers, clergy in vestments, an organ and often a robed choir, the rhythm of the church calendar moving from Advent to Easter, and the Eucharist most Sundays. It's often beautiful. And weekly communion is a point of genuine overlap with us that many churches don't share.
Worship with us is far plainer, on purpose. The whole congregation sings without instruments, because singing is what the New Testament assigns to every voice:
“Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).
Prayers come in everyday words, and the preaching walks straight through the text. No festival calendar sets the shape of our year; every Lord's Day carries the same weight. The members give as they've purposed, and the Lord's Supper is observed every first day of the week, after the early church's example:
“On the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul talked with them” (Acts 20:7).
“To break bread” there most likely refers to the Lord's Supper. We take the supper as a memorial that proclaims the Lord's death until He comes (1 Corinthians 11:26).
Baptism: Who and How
Episcopal churches baptize infants, usually by pouring or sprinkling, as a welcome into the covenant community, and they administer it with real seriousness. Children baptized this way are later confirmed by a bishop as teens or adults, publicly professing for themselves the faith their parents professed for them at the font. We want to say all of that fairly.
We baptize believers, by immersion, for the forgiveness of sins (Acts 2:38). Two things drive that. First, in the New Testament, faith and repentance come before baptism, and an infant can't yet do either. Second, baptism there is a burial:
“We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).
A burial calls for immersion, and a decision calls for a believer.
How to Weigh What You've Read
Not by which sanctuary is lovelier or which service feels most like childhood. The Bereans were commended for checking even an apostle against the Scriptures every day (Acts 17:11), and that's the test we'd ask you to apply to both churches, ours included. One thing to know while you do: we're an independent congregation with no denomination or headquarters behind us, so we speak only for ourselves, and what you've read here is simply our own conviction from the New Testament. Read it for yourself. Take whatever time you need.
Weigh Us in Person
The fastest way to size up a congregation is to open a Bible with it, and we'd be glad to do exactly that with you, question by question, at your pace.
You can schedule a free Bible study.
Read about who we are, or contact us about visiting.
Our schedule:
You'll find us at 416 Main Street, Suite D, in Honesdale, PA 18431. Park behind the building and come in through the rear entrance.