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Preface 1999

The greater part of a decade has passed since the publication of the first edition of A History of the Episcopal Church. That first edition ended with an optimistic vision of a renewed Episcopal Church that was on the brink of a period of growth and new life. The passage of time has taught me, as it has taught generations of authors before me, that historians do a better job of describing the past than of predicting the future. The second edition, written at the end of the 1990s rather than their beginning, contains a more sober assessment of the last decade of the twentieth century.

I have rewritten the final portion of chapter 10 and have reconfigured and retitled chapter 11. I have included informa tion, such as the adoption of electronic means of communication and the need to evangelize the members of the X generation, which I certainly had not foreseen when I last wrote. I have also added an extended section on the ongoing debate over sexuality. The earlier portions of the book remain unchanged except for minor corrections.

Those who read the final chapter of the book will find that I have not given up entirely on my earlier anticipation of a period of growth and new life in the Episcopal Church, I have only postponed the expected date of its arrival. My persistent optimism may call to mind the closing paragraph of E. Clowes Chorley’s Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church (1946). Chorley, writing at the end of a decade and a half of economic depression and international war, dreamed of an era in which the various elements of the Episcopal Church would give up their feuding and cooperate with one another. “The vision,” he wrote, “may seem to tarry, but the world is very young and its most surprising songs are yet to be sung.”

Robert W. Prichard

Alexandria, Virginia

July 1999