Bishops...

The bishop is coming this weekend, to rededicate (or something like that) the conserved church building, and some other episcopal stuff. I had a chat earlier today with a lady who was borrowing some of our registers for a book she was writing. She knew very little about the Episcopal church, and asked lots of questions about it. She had rather accepted a Church of Scotland history that had the current Presbyterian form of church as you find it appearing intact in 1560 at the hands of John Knox. The story (for both episcopalian and presbyterian churches) is much more subtle and interesting and complicated than that. Bishops and presbyteries rubbed shoulders on and off for another 140 bloodied years, and both churches have a vivid and fractured history since then, to this day! The picture shows, in 1784, the non-juring Scottish bishops consecrating Samuel Seabury as the first bishop in the Episcopal church of the USA (as we know call it) when the English church refused to do so. This picture hangs in the church in Dunoon, a gift from that church to Holy Trinity Dunoon in 1984.