The Episcopal Church

What The Episcopal Church is

The Episcopal Church is the official website of The Episcopal Church, the US-based province of the worldwide Anglican Communion. It serves as institutional homepage, liturgical reference, daily-devotion hub, parish directory, news outlet, and General Convention archive — all under one roof. The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS), the legal-corporate arm of the church, publishes and maintains it.

In practical terms it does four things at once: it gives you the Book of Common Prayer 1979 to read and pray from, it gives you Forward Day by Day each morning, it helps you find an Episcopal parish near you, and it tells you what the national church is actually doing — General Convention resolutions, the presiding bishop's schedule, racial reconciliation work, creation care, refugee resettlement, and the rest of the mainline-Christian agenda the denomination has set for itself.

Why visitors and lifelong Episcopalians keep coming back

The single biggest practical difference between episcopalchurch.org and a typical evangelical teaching site is that it assumes you came for the liturgy, not the lecture. A first-time visitor to an Episcopal service is going to encounter a printed bulletin packed with rubrics, antiphons, collects, and a Eucharistic prayer that has been refined across centuries. This site exists, in large part, to make those words available outside the pew — so you can read them ahead of time, pray the daily office at home, or just understand what is happening when the priest says "The Lord be with you."

For lifelong Episcopalians the appeal is different but related — the BCP 1979 lives here in full, the lectionary tells you exactly what is being read across the entire denomination this Sunday, and Forward Day by Day arrives the same day for everyone. There is a comforting unity to that, and the site delivers it without trying to be a brand. It is the thoughtful person's mainline denominational website: institutional, calm, and quietly confident that the prayer book and the parish will do most of the work.

The Book of Common Prayer 1979 + liturgy resources: the heart of the site

The 1979 Book of Common Prayer is the doctrinal and devotional spine of The Episcopal Church, and the site hosts the entire text — Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, Compline, the daily office lectionary, the baptismal covenant, the Eucharistic prayers (Rite I and Rite II, including the four Prayer D options), the catechism (often called the Outline of the Faith), the Psalter, the historical documents, and the canticles. You can read it page by page, jump to a specific service, or hand the link to a curious friend.

This sounds like a small thing. In practice it is transformative — most visitors to an Episcopal church have never seen a prayer book before, and giving them the full 1979 BCP for free, on any device, is a profoundly hospitable move. The site also surfaces complementary resources: Enriching Our Worship (the supplemental liturgies with expanded language for God), the Book of Occasional Services, Lesser Feasts and Fasts, and the daily readings from the Revised Common Lectionary that TEC shares with most other mainline Western churches. If you want to know what the Episcopal Church prays, this is the address.

Forward Day by Day: the daily devotional that has outlasted everything

Forward Day by Day is the flagship daily devotional of Forward Movement, an official agency of The Episcopal Church, and it has been published continuously since 1935 — about 90 years of uninterrupted daily reflections. Each entry runs roughly 250–300 words, anchored to one of the day's lectionary readings, written by a rotating cast of bishops, priests, deacons, and lay leaders across TEC. New writers take a month at a time, so the voice changes regularly without ever feeling chaotic.

It matters because daily devotion is the part of Christian life most prone to gimmickry, and Forward Day by Day refuses to do it. There are no streaks. There are no tier upgrades. There is no celebrity narrator. There is one short reading, one short reflection, a brief prayer, and a verse to carry — every day, on the web, in the app, and in a small print booklet you can drop in your pocket. For mainline Christians who find Jesus Calling too sentimental and My Utmost for His Highest too Reformed, Forward Day by Day is often the quiet middle path.

Find-a-parish and the diocesan structure: the polity made visible

The Episcopal Church is organized into 110 dioceses (across the US, plus jurisdictions in Haiti, the Virgin Islands, Taiwan, Honduras, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Ecuador, Puerto Rico, and Europe), grouped into nine provinces, with a presiding bishop elected by General Convention as primate. The find-a-parish tool surfaces all of that. You can search by ZIP code, by diocese, by language (including parishes that offer Spanish, Mandarin, French, or other services), and by accessibility — a small detail that matters more than it sounds when you are looking for a wheelchair-accessible Sunday morning.

Beneath the directory, the site lays out the polity itself — the General Convention (the bicameral governing body that meets every three years), the Executive Council (the year-round board that runs the church between conventions), the canons (the constitution and rules), and the budget. This is one of the few places online where you can actually see how an American mainline denomination governs itself, and the openness is part of the Anglican ethos: a church that meets in public, votes in public, and publishes the results. It is also where the controversies live — every resolution on sexuality, prayer book revision, climate, and racial reconciliation is here, and the site does not edit out the dissent.

Pricing

Where The Episcopal Church falls behind

No first-party Bible-study or commentary tools. If you want verse-by-verse exposition, original-language helps, or a study Bible, you will be heading off-site to Bible Gateway, BibleProject, or a Logos-style platform. The teaching layer here is intentionally thin — the site assumes you do that work in a parish, in a small group, or in seminary, not in a browser tab.

No first-party mobile app from TEC itself. Forward Movement publishes an excellent Forward Day by Day app, several developers maintain solid BCP 1979 apps (Mission St. Clare and the iPieta-style Anglican apps), and the lectionary is everywhere — but episcopalchurch.org as such has no flagship mobile experience. On phones, the site is responsive and competent rather than delightful.

Inconsistent information architecture. The site has grown organically across two decades of redesigns, and you can feel the layers. Some topics live under the presiding bishop's office, some under the General Convention office, some under Forward Movement, some under Episcopal Migration Ministries — and the cross-links are not always there. Searching often beats browsing.

A specifically American, specifically progressive, specifically mainline framing. Readers coming from ACNA, the Anglican Continuing movement, the Reformed Episcopal Church, or a Global South province will find a site that does not represent their distinctives or, in some cases, their reading of Anglican theology. The site is not unfair to them — it simply is not for them.

The Episcopal Church vs. ACNA vs. Continuing Anglican bodies

There are three broad streams of Anglican Christianity in North America, and the websites reflect three different stances. The Episcopal Church (episcopalchurch.org) is the historic US province of the Anglican Communion — in full communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury, ordains women to all three orders, has consecrated openly gay bishops since 2003, and authorizes same-sex marriage rites church-wide. The Anglican Church in North America (anglicanchurch.net, reviewed at /resources/acna) formed in 2009 as a separate jurisdiction primarily of former TEC and Anglican Church of Canada parishes that disagreed with those moves, holds to a more traditional reading on marriage and ordination (women priests are permitted in some dioceses, women bishops are not), and is recognized by many — though not all — Global South Anglican Communion provinces rather than by Canterbury. Continuing Anglican bodies (the Anglican Catholic Church, the Anglican Church in America, the Anglican Province of America, the Reformed Episcopal Church) trace back to earlier separations (largely the 1977 Affirmation of St. Louis) and tend to use the 1928 BCP, hold to a male-only priesthood, and operate outside the Anglican Communion structure entirely.

Different starting points. TEC is broader in resources (BCP 1979, Forward Day by Day, a 6,000-parish directory, polished daily-office tooling, the full weight of a national church) and progressive on the contested questions. ACNA is leaner, faster-growing, more evangelical in feel, and more conservative on sexuality and ordination. The Continuing Anglican sites are smaller still, deeply traditional in liturgy (1928 BCP, often the King James-style language), and frequently Anglo-Catholic in churchmanship.

Which one to read first depends on what you are looking for. If you want the mainline American Anglican church at its institutional best — and the 1979 BCP, daily office, and lectionary at your fingertips — episcopalchurch.org is the address. If you are looking for an Anglican home that holds to a more traditional reading of marriage and ordination while remaining liturgical, ACNA. If you want the older prayer book and the older shape of Anglican worship, the Continuing Anglican jurisdictions. These are real and substantive differences, and the websites do not try to hide them from each other.

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