Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: How many members does the Reformed Episcopal Church have?
As of 2016, the REC reports 108 parishes and missions in the United States and three in Canada, and also has churches in Croatia, Cuba, Germany, and Serbia. In 2009, the Reformed Episcopal Church reported 13,600 members.
The seminary further describes itself as Evangelical, Catholic, Reformed, Ecumenical and Episcopal, defining the terms this way:The seminary's first location was at the corner of 43rd and Chestnut streets in West Philadelphia alongside the magnificent Christ Memorial Church (pictured at right.) Currently the seminary is in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. It consists of three buildings, including one dorm house for students. Also resident on campus are the offices of the Reformed Episcopal diocese of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic and it's Committee on Young People's Work.
In the words of Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, confessional evangelicalism refers to "that movement of Christian believers who seek a constant convictional continuity with the theological formulas of the Protestant Reformation". While approving of the evangelical distinctions proposed by Bebbington, confessional evangelicals believe that authentic evangelicalism requires more concrete definition in order to protect the movement from theological liberalism and from heresy. According to confessional evangelicals, subscription to the ecumenical creeds and to the Reformation-era confessions of faith (such as the confessions of the Reformed churches) provides such protection. Confessional evangelicals are represented by conservative Presbyterian churches (emphasizing the Westminster Confession), certain Baptist churches that emphasize historic Baptist confessions such as the Second London Confession, evangelical Anglicans who emphasize the Thirty-Nine Articles (such as in the Anglican Diocese of Sydney, Australia), and some confessional Lutherans with pietistic convictions.
The founding of the Reformed Episcopal Church followed an 1873 controversy about ecumenical activity. In October of that year, Bishop Cummins joined with Dean Smith of Canterbury, William Augustus Muhlenberg, and some non-Anglican ministers at an ecumenical conference of the Evangelical Alliance for the United States of America. During the conference, held in New York City, Cummins, Smith and the non-Episcopalian ministers presided at joint services of Holy Communion without using any version of the "Book of Common Prayer". Retired missionary bishop, William Tozer, who was visiting New York at the time, criticized Smith and implicitly Cummins for participating in the rite. Tozer's criticism appeared in a letter published by the New York "Tribune" on October 6, 1873.
However, a minority interpret biblical passages differently and argue that homosexuality can be seen as morally acceptable. This approach has been taken by a number of denominations in North America, notably the United Church of Canada (2.8 million members), the United Church of Christ (1.1 million members), the Moravian Church (825,000 members), the Anglican Episcopal church, the Anglican Church of Canada (800,000 members), the Liberal Catholic Church, Friends General Conference, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) (1.9 million members), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (3.9 million members) and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada. Relatively many denominations had taken this approach in Europe including united, reformed and Lutheran churches: the Evangelical Church in Germany (24.5 million members), Church of Sweden (6.6 million members), Church of Norway, Church of Denmark, Protestant Church of the Netherlands (3.9 million members), Church of Iceland, United Protestant Church in Belgium, United Protestant Church of France, Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches, Methodist Church of Great Britain (330,000 members) and Church of Scotland.
Cummins Memorial Theological Seminary, located in Summerville, South Carolina, near Charleston, is named for Bishop George Cummins, the founder of the Reformed Episcopal Church. The seminary which is conservative, evangelical, biblical and Anglican was founded in the later part of the nineteenth century as a rogative college, meaning it was located wherever the Bishop of the Southeast took up residence. Colonel Stevens from the Citadel was the first bishop. The founding bishop was Bishop David Cummins. In 1912, the Diocese of the Southeast purchased property for a permanent campus. Its motto is to "enter to learn and depart to serve". Its purpose is to equip generations of Church leaders for excellence in ministry and service with the theological foundation and skills to meet the spiritual, emotional and physical needs of communities through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
The Diocese of the Southeast is a Reformed Episcopal Church diocese and as such an Anglican Church in North America founding diocese. The diocese comprises 32 parishes, 30 in South Carolina and 2 in Georgia, in the United States. Its headquarters are located in Summerville, South Carolina. The current Bishop Ordinary is Alphonza Gadsden and the Bishop Suffragan was William White, who become Bishop Coadjutor on 10 January 2014.
Ray R. Sutton is the current Presiding Bishop. This church continues apostolic succession through George D. Cummins who left the Episcopal Church, USA in the 19th century.
At the local level, there are 6,447 Episcopal congregations, each of which elects a vestry or bishop's committee. Subject to the approval of its diocesan bishop, the vestry of each parish elects a priest, called the rector, who has spiritual jurisdiction in the parish and selects assistant clergy, both deacons and priests. (There is a difference between vestry and clergy elections – clergy are ordained members usually selected from outside the parish, whereas any member in good standing of a parish is eligible to serve on the vestry.) The diocesan bishop, however, appoints the clergy for all missions and may choose to do so for non-self-supporting parishes.
Evangelical Friends regard Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Saviour, and have similar religious beliefs to other evangelical Christians. They believe in, and hold a high regard for, the penal substitution of the atonement of Christ on the Cross at Calvary, biblical infallibility, and the need for every person to personally experience a relationship with God. They believe that the purpose of the Evangelical Friends Church is to evangelise the unsaved people of the world, to spiritually transform them through God's love and through social service to others. Evangelical Friends regard the Bible as the infallible and self-authenticating Word of God. The statement of faith of Evangelical Friends International is comparable to the statement of faith of other Evangelical churches. Evangelical Friends who are members of Evangelical Friends International are mainly located in the U.S., Central America, and Asia. Beginning in the 1880s, some Friends began using outward sacraments in their Sunday services, first in Evangelical Friends Church–Eastern Region (then known as Ohio Yearly Meeting [Damascus]). Friends Church–Southwest Region has also approved the practice of using the outward sacraments in their Sunday services. In places where Evangelical Friends are engaged in missionary work, such as in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, adult baptism by immersion in water is carried out. This practice differs from most other Quaker branches of the Religious Society of Friends. , EFCI claims to represent more than 140,000 Friends, roughly 39% of the total number of Friends worldwide.
Based on the numbers of adherents, the Eastern Orthodox Church (also known as Eastern Orthodoxy) is the second largest Christian communion in the world after the Roman Catholic Church. The most common estimates of the number of Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide is approximately 200–260 million. The numerous Protestant groups in the world, if taken all together, outnumber the Eastern Orthodox, but they differ theologically and do not form a single communion.
After the English Reformation, Roman Catholic worship was illegal in England for nearly 250 years until 1791, and it grew slowly thereafter in comparison to West Sussex, where many large estates were owned by gentry who secretly kept the faith over many generations. Ill-feeling towards Catholics apparently persisted well into the 19th century in Battle, where the 1886 Church of Our Lady Immaculate and St Michael was set well back from the street (in the garden of its presbytery) and does not have an ecclesiastical appearance. In the early 20th century, bolder architectural statements were made with the Gothic Revival church at Bexhill-on-Sea and the elaborate Italian Romanesque-style church at Rye, both of which are listed buildings. Most of the other Roman Catholic churches in Rother district are simple mid-20th-century buildings, sometimes with distinguishing architectural features such as a modernistic portico-style entrance at Sidley, dalle de verre glass at Burwash and a Mediterranean-style blank-arcaded tower at Little Common.
The National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc., more commonly known as the National Baptist Convention (NBC USA or NBC), is the largest predominantly African-American Christian denomination in the United States. It is headquartered at the Baptist World Center in Nashville, Tennessee and affiliated with the Baptist World Alliance. The denomination claims approximately 31,000 congregations and reports having an estimated 7.5 million members.
Much of the early growth of the Diocese of Tennessee occurred in plantation regions, mainly centered in the hilly, fertile tobacco-growing region south of Nashville and in the cotton-producing lands of the Mississippi River region in southwestern Tennessee, the church being imported by Anglican loyalists from Virginia and North Carolina. It was not until after the American Civil War that the Episcopal church penetrated much of East Tennessee, and well into the 20th century before many other towns elsewhere in the state got their own churches. The University of the South, located on the Cumberland Plateau in Sewanee, Tennessee, however, helped the fledgling diocese in matters of clergy development. As with much of American Protestantism during the period after World War II, the Episcopal Church flourished in newly-developing suburban areas, a large number of the new churches being missions founded by long-established in-town parishes.
The REC is a founding member of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), and its four U.S. dioceses are member dioceses of ACNA. REC and ACNA are not members of the Anglican Communion. REC is in communion with the Free Church of England, the Church of Nigeria, and the Anglican Province of America.
Arising in Wolfstein about the middle of the 16th century, under the pledge-lords Schwickard von Sickingen's (1549-1562) and Georg Johannes I's (Palatinate-Veldenz, 1543-1592) influence, were a Reformed community and a Lutheran one alongside each other. The former belonged (along with Kreimbach, Rothselberg and Rutsweiler) to the parish of Zweikirchen with the chapel of ease on Wassergasse while the latter, to avoid disputes with the former, established its own chapel in Wolfstein. The clergyman's seat changed between Wolfstein, Roßbach and Eßweiler. This chapel was, on the occasion of the union of the Reformed and Lutheran faiths, sold in 1818, and the proceeds were used to build a rectory ("Haus Adam", 1822).
The Catholic Church in Germany () or Roman-Catholic Church in Germany () is part of the worldwide Catholic Church in communion with the Pope, assisted by the Roman Curia, and of the German bishops. The current "speaker" (i.e., the chairperson) of the episcopal conference is Cardinal Reinhard Marx, metropolitan Archbishop of Archdiocese of Munich and Freising. It is divided into 27 dioceses, 7 of them with the rank of metropolitan sees. All the archbishops and bishops are members of the Conference of German Bishops. Due to a church tax compulsory for those who register civilly as Catholics, it is the wealthiest part of the Catholic Church in Europe.
Words truly spoken, indeed. What the City of Fall River was destined to become, God alone knew then. But with a retrospective glance over the dim and musty pages of local church history covering more than four decades of time, what do we find today as matters of common knowledge of which Catholics one and all may well feel proud? Fall River, an Episcopal See, under the wise guidance of Right Reverend Daniel F. Feehan as the successor of the late lamented Right Reverend William Stang, its first Bishop; 23 Catholic churches where, in addition to the English tongue, the worshippers are representatives of the French, Portuguese, Polish, Italian, and Syrian nationalities; a city with a population of rising 128,000 and more than 80 per cent of them Catholics; a Catholic, Honorable John W. Cummings as President of the Fall River Bar Association and a Past President of the Massachusetts State Bar Association; A Catholic, Honorable Hugo A. Dubuque, as a Justice of the Superior Court of Massachusetts; a Catholic, Honorable Edward F. Hanify as Justice of the Second District Court of Bristol County; A Catholic, Honorable Edmond P. Talbot, as Mayor of the city; a Catholic, Hector L.Belisle, as Superintendent of Schools; a Catholic, Martin Feeney, as Chief of Police; a Catholic, Jeremiah F. Sullivan, as Chief of the Fire Department; Catholics as heads of several of the other important bureaus in City Hall; two Catholics, Honorable John T. Coughlin and Honorable Thomas F. Higgins, former mayors and present members of this parish; a Catholic, and likewise a parishioner, Michael J. Orpen, Esquire, as clerk of the Second District Court of Bristol, and a Catholic, Honorable Frank M. Silvia, as one of its Special Justices; Catholic Church, fraternal and charitable organizations seemingly without number; Catholic laymen as leaders in the industrial, business and social pursuits of the municipality. Fall River has certainly taken its place in the sun as one of the bright sparkling centers of Catholicity in these United States!
The PRC was founded in 1924 as a result of a controversy regarding common grace in the Christian Reformed Church. At that time the Christian Reformed Church had adopted three doctrinal points on the subject of common grace. Reverends Herman Hoeksema, George Ophoff, and Henry Danhof rejected these three points and maintained them to be contrary to the Reformed confessions of faith. Soon thereafter, when these men said they could not abide by these three points, they were disciplined through suspension, or deposition, from the ministry by their respective classes. The CRC maintained that the position of these three men was inconsistent with the Bible's teachings. The men objected to this deposition also from a church political point of view, arguing that only the consistory has the right to depose their minister, not a classis. The CRC disagreed, and these ministers, as well as their followers, were deposed by the CRC and organized into a new denomination, taking the name of Protesting Christian Reformed Churches. The denomination later renamed itself the Protestant Reformed Churches in America. Rev Hoeksema become the pastor of the First Protestant Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Comprising over 700 denominations and a large number of independent churches, there is no central authority governing Pentecostalism; however, many denominations are affiliated with the Pentecostal World Fellowship. There are over 279 million Pentecostals worldwide, and the movement is growing in many parts of the world, especially the global South. Since the 1960s, Pentecostalism has increasingly gained acceptance from other Christian traditions, and Pentecostal beliefs concerning Spirit baptism and spiritual gifts have been embraced by non-Pentecostal Christians in Protestant and Catholic churches through the Charismatic Movement. Together, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity numbers over 500 million adherents. While the movement originally attracted mostly lower classes in the global South, there is an increasing appeal to middle classes. Middle class congregations tend to be more adapted to society and withdraw strong spiritual practices such as divine healing.
While some Evangelicals emphasize eternal salvation, many in the emerging church emphasize the here and now. Participants in this movement assert that the incarnation of Christ informs their theology. They believe that as God entered the world in human form, adherents enter (individually and communally) into the context around them and aim to transform that culture through local involvement. This holistic involvement may take many forms, including social activism, hospitality and acts of kindness. This beneficent involvement in culture is part of what is called missional living. Missional living leads to a focus on temporal and social issues, in contrast with a perceived evangelical overemphasis on salvation. Drawing on research and models of contextual theology, Mobsby asserts that the emerging church is using different models of contextual theology than conservative evangelicals, who tend to use a "translation" model of contextual theology (which has been criticized for being colonialist and condescending toward other cultures); the emerging church tends to use a "synthetic" or "transcendent" model of contextual theology. The emerging church has charged many conservative evangelical churches with withdrawal from involvement in contextual mission and seeking the contextualization of the gospel.
The Episcopal Church experienced notable growth in the first half of the 20th century, but like many mainline churches, it has had a decline in membership in more recent decades. Membership grew from 1.1 million members in 1925 to a peak of over 3.4 million members in the mid-1960s. Between 1970 and 1990, membership declined from about 3.2 million to about 2.4 million. Once changes in how membership is counted are taken into consideration, the Episcopal Church's membership numbers were broadly flat throughout the 1990s, with a slight growth in the first years of the 21st century. A loss of 115,000 members was reported for the years 2003–05. Some theories about the decline in membership include a failure to sufficiently reach beyond ethnic barriers in an increasingly diverse society, and the low fertility rates prevailing among the predominant ethnic groups traditionally belonging to the church. In 1965, there were 880,000 children in Episcopal Sunday School programs. By 2001, the number had declined to 297,000.
These innovations have been responded to in various ways. The opposition to Ritualism produced the Reformed Episcopal Church in 1873. Opposition to the ordination of women priests and to theological revisions incorporated into the Episcopal Church's 1979 Book of Common Prayer led to the formation of the Continuing Anglican movement in 1977; and opposition to the consecration of the first ever openly homosexual bishop led to the creation of the Anglican Church in North America. It officially organized in 2009, forming yet another ecclesiastical structure apart from the Episcopal Church. This grouping, which reported at its founding that it represented approximately 100,000 Christians through its over 700 parishes, elected former Episcopal Robert Duncan as its primate. The ACNA has not been received as an official member of the Anglican Communion by the Church of England, and is not in communion with the see of Canterbury, but many Anglican churches of the Global South, such as the Church of Nigeria and Church of Uganda, together representing approximately 1/3 of the worldwide Anglican Communion, have declared themselves to be in full communion with it.
Within a year from the founding of the REC, like-minded Canadian Anglicans in New Brunswick and Ontario seceded from that Church and formed Reformed Episcopal congregations. In October 1874, Edward Cridge, dean of the Anglican cathedral in Victoria, British Columbia, withdrew with about 350 of his congregation to form the Church of Our Lord
and join the Reformed Episcopal Church. Cridge was consecrated a bishop for the REC in 1876. Many of the Canadian Reformed Episcopal Churches joined the United Church at its founding. The Reformed Episcopal Church now has three churches in Canada, two in British Columbia and one in Ontario. St. George's Church, Hamilton is affiliated with the Diocese of the Northeast in the USA, and both Holy Trinity Church in Colwood and Living Word in Courtenay are a part of the Diocese of Western Canada and Alaska.
In 1877, in response to a petition from REC sympathizers in England, the REC's Fifth General Council acted to establish the Reformed Episcopal Church in that country. Former Church of England minister Thomas Huband Gregg was consecrated a bishop to lead adherents there. By 1910 there were 28 ministers and 1,990 communicant members constituting the Reformed Episcopal Church in that country. In 1927, the Reformed Episcopal Church in England merged with the Free Church of England.