29
April 1607 A.D. First
Anglican Worship Service in America.
The 1559 Book of Common Prayer would have been used. Also, inferrably, the 1599 Geneva Bible? There was no King James Bible or version at
this point. Also, we know the 1599 Geneva version was used even by leading
Churchmen into the 17th century.
Also, had the privilege to participate in an Anglican worship service in 2007 for the 400th anniversary of this event. I remember taking with an Englishman, a tourist, after the service. I asked him, "Did you recognize the service "Oh yes," he politely replied. But, we digress and here’s one version of that first Anglican service.
The English
first attempted to settle the New World in Virginia. The first Anglican worship
ceremony of the Jamestown party in the new world was held on
this day, April 29, 1607. "The nine and twentieth day, we set up a
Crosse at Chesupioc [Chesapeake] Bay, and named that place Cape Henry,"
wrote Captain John Smith. Reverend Robert Hunt led them in a service. The
colonists would soon establish a place of worship.
If Christians erect a facility to worship in, what should it look like? The Virginia
sanctuary was not a typical church building. It was a simple shrine in the
forest covered with a tattered sailcloth. The altar was a plank nailed between
two trees.
By the end of
that summer, however, the colonists had built a wooden church inside the
Jamestown fort. John Smith said it looked more like a barn than anything else.
By January of the next year it had burned down.
The colonists
built a new sanctuary to take its place. This is where Pocahontas and John
Rolfe were married in 1614.
Three years
later, yet another wooden church building was erected, this one outside the
walls of the fort. Virginia's House of Burgesses, the first representative
assembly in America, met in this church in 1619; obviously the much
talked-about wall of separation between the church and state had not yet been
erected!
Virginia
itself was a parish of the Church of England, an overseas extension of the
diocese of London. Robert Hunt was the first chaplain of the Jamestown
settlement. His task was difficult, because most of the early colonists to
Virginia were more interested in this world's riches than in spiritual
treasures. Rev. Hunt held regular services in the Jamestown church while also
working diligently for the physical well-being of the colony. It was he who
built the first colonial grist mill. Much of his time, however, was spent
caring for the many sick and dying in the colony and defusing quarrels among
the settlers.
In 1639 the
prospering colonists built a new brick church in Jamestown, and added a brick
tower in the 1640s. The remains of this church tower can still be seen--one of
the oldest English-built edifices standing in the United States today. The
Anglican faith (now known as Episcopal) was in America to stay.
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