Bishop Samuel Seabury
Given the oddball personalities who formed the Episcopal Church, it is something of a miracle that there are Anglicans in America today! A leader of the motley crew was Samuel Seabury. He was publicly recognized Bishop of Connecticut August 3, 1785 at a diocesan convocation in Middletown, CT. Seabury was a loyalist who served as a chaplain with the British forces in New York, preached against the patriotic vision of the Continental Congress, and was horrified at the prospect of war with Great Britain. But after the Revolutionary War, and after almost 200 years without a resident bishop in America, he was the first bishop to be consecrated for the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States (the official title of the Episcopal Church).
At his own expense he sailed to London hoping to be consecrated there, but when the Church of England refused him, he went to Aberdeen Scotland where he was consecrated bishop by the Scottish Episcopal Church in 1784. In exchange for his consecration, Seabury agreed to introduce certain elements of the Scottish Prayer Book into the Episcopal Church. He liked the dignity of his office a lot, signing his first letter to the Connecticut clergy, "Samuel, by divine permission, Bishop of Connecticut." He stubbornly opposed any "lay" involvement in church leadership (General Conventions), until he finally conceded this point for the sake of church unity.
Seabury was a high churchman sacramentalist who introduced into the American Prayer Book an "epiclesis" (prayer asking the Holy Spirit to make the bread and wine of Communion to be the body and blood of Christ) from the Prayer Book of the Scottish Church - contrary to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer practice and theology. The epiclesis was dropped from Anglican observance after the 1549 Prayer Book by the English reformers for theological reasons; it suggests the Roman Catholic idea that there is a moment of consecration, a theology foreign to our Anglican heritage. Seabury and other early high churchmen still held that the real presence of Christ in the eucharist is a spiritual presence, spiritually taken and spiritually received, and that apostolic succession was good for the order of ministry to symbolize the succession of apostolic teaching as St. Paul taught Timothy (2 Tim 2:2). Seabury stood for strong, autocratic episcopal (bishops) control, and for the diocese as the main unit of ministry rather than the local congregation. Like many who followed in the tracks of William Laud, Samuel Seabury was a convinced Arminian who urged the Episcopal Church to simply drop the Calvinist-inclined historic Anglican formularies (the Thirty-nine Articles) as American’s confessional standard. After Seabury died, the newly formed Protestant Episcopal Church officially adopted the Articles as its theological standard in 1801.
Men and Movements in the American Episcopal Church, E. Clowes Chorley
The Critical Years: The Reconstitution of the Anglican Church in the United States of America: 1780-1789, Clara O. Loveland
Documents of Witness: A History of the Episcopal Church 1782-1985, Don S. Armentrout and Robert Boak Slocum
The Making of the First American Book of Common Prayer: 1776-1789, Marion J. Hatchett