Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches

The current presiding bishop is Quintin Moore. Bishop Moore is the sixth presiding bishop in the history of the communion. He was elected as presiding bishop in 2016 and on March 5, 2020, was reelected for another four year term .[2] His reelection took place during a meeting of all sitting archbishops who unanimously re-elected him for a second term. In addition to serving as the presiding bishop of the CEEC, Moore serves as a sign of unity in the communion as well as convenes the International House of Bishops. He also serves as the Presiding Bishop of Province USA and is the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Restoration. Bishop Moore throughout his ministry has raised support, trained the leadership, given spiritual oversight or personally been involved at the ground level in over 100 church plants. Throughout the years he has preached in 34 countries sowing seeds of the Gospel and building relationships with Christian leaders.

The Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches (referred to as the CEEC) was birthed among the Christian churches which has become known as the “Convergence Movement”, and sometimes referred to as the “Convergence of the Streams” renewal. This is the spiritual vision, rooted in the New Testament revelation and the experience of the early Christians, that saw the church as one body with many diverse and contributing parts. Or, to put it another way: one river with many streams. In the 1940s, a mission pioneer of the union Church of South India, Bishop Leslie Newbigin, wrote a work called The Household Of God,[3] examining the spiritual and functional nature of Christ's church from a missions perspective. Newbigin goes on to make a startling statement for his time; that is, that the one Church of Jesus Christ, which has been so fractured by human sin and political/cultural circumstance through history, is by its nature threefold in the spiritual essence of its historical and existential makeup. This threefold nature he describes as being Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox/Pentecostal or charismatic. In describing this threefold reality, he goes on to remark that these three streams represent emphases that are all necessary for the wholeness and fullness of the Church on earth as God has decreed it in Christ and revealed it in the apostolic tradition of Holy Scripture. The Catholic he relates to the emphases of “incarnation and creation”; the Protestant to “biblical proclamation and conversion”; and the Orthodox/Pentecostal to “the mystical and the Spirit”.

At this point in the 20th century, Bishop Newbigin was a lone voice crying out for a holistic understanding of the nature of the Church of Jesus Christ that was born out of an apostolic missionary activity in the nation of India. This vision eventually led to the formation of the Church of South India, made up of 5 different denominations, receiving apostolic succession through the Anglican tradition from Anglican bishops in India. In turn, this united expression of the Lord’s one Church, made up of those from differing streams, was recognized by the Anglican Communion and brought into inter-communion with them.

Not until the 1970s did this vision begin to gain a wider hearing. It was through the fruits of the ecumenical movement, the charismatic renewal of the mainline Churches, and the Liturgical Renewal movement that was trans-denominational in its scope (and included the historic Vatican II Council of the Roman Catholic Church) that this understanding of the Church as one river made up of many streams, all necessary for the fullness of the river and the gladness of God’s people, began to gain impetus. Robert Webber, Professor of Theology and Bible at Wheaton College in Illinois, began to publicly give voice to this concept in his efforts at ecumenical and evangelical renewal of the unity and fullness of the Church, tied to its ancient roots. His 1978 book, “Common Roots”,[4] looked at foundational elements of the Church’s life, worship, witness, and spirituality that had roots in the second century experience of Christianity. In this work, he urged leaders across the evangelical spectrum of the Church to take serious notice of the models presented in the second century Church for renewal of these aspects of the Church’s life today.

This was followed in the 1980’s by his book “Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail: Why Evangelical Christians Are Attracted to the Liturgical Church”.[5] He chronicled his own personal spiritual journey from a fundamentalist evangelical background into the Anglican tradition and the six reasons for this attraction. In the epilogue to this work he quotes his pastor at that time who stated that he believed the future of the Church of Jesus Christ might very well lie in the “convergence of the catholic and evangelical” streams or traditions of the Church. Many pastors since have identified and resonated with this vision. Soon thereafter, it was realized that the one stream or tradition missing was the Charismatic/Pentecostal; not realizing that Bishop Newbigin had made the same prophetic observation some 40 years earlier.

Throughout the 1980s and '90s a series of articles appeared in various publications making the same emphasis that Bishop Newbigin had made in the 1940’s as well as chronicling the journey of evangelicals and Charismatics toward one of the sacramental and liturgical branches of the church. Among those were "Three Streams, One River?" by Richard Lovelac, Professor of Church History at Gordon Conwell Seminary, appearing the Sept 1984 edition of Charisma Magazine,[6] "Back to the Fathers", by Christopher Paul which was an interview with Thomas C. Oden,[7] "Why the Bishops Went to Valdosta", by Randall Balmer,[8] and "Ancient Altars, Pentecostal Fire", by Paul Thigpen.[9]

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