Emmanuel Episcopal Church is an open and affirming parish located in downtown Petoskey, Michigan.
Our parish family stretches throughout the Emmet county area and beyond.
Many seasonal residents have found a church home with us, engaging in person when they are in the local area and joining our livestream services when they are not.
Who Are Episcopalians?
The Episcopal Church is often called a bridge church between the Roman Catholic and Protestant denominations. Episcopal theology is largely reformed in nature, while Episcopal worship, spiritual practice, and church structure resemble catholicism. Thus, in our Church, people from a variety of backgrounds find a home that honors their own faith tradition, while providing a new source of shared nourishment.
The Episcopal Church welcomes all who worship Jesus Christ and comprises 108 dioceses and three mission areas in 22 countries or territories. While the Episcopal Church is headquartered in New York City, we are not a national church—we are a multinational denomination. As the only U.S.-based member of the worldwide Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church is part of the world’s third-largest group of Christians and currently has more than 1.5 million members. We are denominational descendants of—and partners with—the Church of England and the Scottish Episcopal Church.
The Book of Common Prayer is an important part of Episcopal life and worship. The Prayer Book includes a wealth of prayers and liturgies for virtually every occasion. It centers our lives in Christ.
“Episcopal” comes from the Greek word for bishop. Episcopal bishops, like Orthodox and Roman Catholic bishops, trace their authority to the first-century Apostles. The presiding bishop leads the American Episcopal Church. A diocese is a geographical group of churches, or parishes, led by a bishop. In the Episcopal church, only bishops may ordain priests. And in each parish, only a priest may preside at the sacraments.
The foundation of Anglican faith: a “three-legged stool.”
This classic expression of the Anglican understanding of authority comes from Richard Hooker (d.1600), a theologian in Elizabethan England. Descended from the Church of England, the Episcopal Church is one of about forty autonomous churches that make up the Anglican Communion, with more than 85 million members worldwide.
Many voices in our tradition have adopted the three-legged stool as a convenient way to explain the nature of Anglicanism, especially in relation to other churches. It is commonly said that Anglicanism looks to three inter-dependent sources of authority—Scripture, reason, and tradition—and that these three sources “uphold and critique each other in a dynamic way,” wrote Urban T. Holmes in What Is Anglicanism?
1: Holy Scripture: “written by people…inspired by the Holy Spirit” —from the Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer.
2: Tradition. We honor the writings of ancient Christians. For instance, every week we recite the Nicene Creed, written by the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 C.E.
3: Reason. When God made us in his image, he gave us complex, reasoning minds. We honor this gift by contemplating God’s will, consulting Scripture and observing the countless ways God is revealed in our world. As Episcopalians, we have not only the right—but also the responsibility—to use our reason to form our own theological understanding.
The mission of the church, as stated in the Book of Common Prayer’s catechism is “to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.” As part of that mission, we follow Jesus into a loving, liberating and life-giving relationship with God, with each other and with the earth. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry calls this the Episcopal Branch of the Jesus Movement. We seek every day to love God with our whole heart, mind, and soul, and to love our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40)