WHAT WE BELIEVE
If you want to understand the beliefs of Episcopalians and Anglicans, we invite you to come and pray with us. The experience will inform your understanding. While we have a set of held beliefs, we are also open to what God is showing, speaking and revealing to us on a daily basis.
We share a great percentage of the Ancient Catholic Faith with the Old Catholic, Roman and Eastern Orthodox Catholics but there are some things that differ:
We are not largely concerned with sin. This is not saying sin IS not an important issue, as it can harm our perception of God and ruin relationships with others as well as our inner selves. As Jesus teaches, we our children of a God that grants grace and forgiveness and does not condemn us to eternal damnation.
We accept the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist and do not try to explain what this means.
We affirm that the scripture in the Bible was written by the human hand and not by God as related to the time in which it was written, not present day.
Along with holy scripture, we believe the Tradition of the Church up to the 7th Ecumenical Council in 787 AD as authoritative.
We celebrate that human reason is a gift from God and is authoritative along with scripture and traditions. God continues to reveal the Divine Self to us through advances in science, modern medicine, academic pursuit, technology and other avenues.
We declare the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds as ways to bring definition to the mystery of the Trinity and of the Christian Faith. We use The Book of Common Prayer as our book of worship and devotion. Each national Church of the Anglican Communion has made revisions to the Prayer Book; however, all of them comply theologically to The Book of Common Prayer of 1662 of the Church of England. The Prayer Book is considered to be part of the Sacred Tradition of the Church.
Within the Prayer Book, "A Catechism of the Christian Faith' puts forth the doctrinal tenets of the Church.