EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK: Assessing The Philadelphia 11 After 50 Years
How To Destroy a Once Great Denomination
Fifty years ago this week we saw the beginning of the end for a once great Christian denomination, The Episcopal Church in the United States. 
The Episcopal Church is in such disarray today that describing it as “great” or even “once great” may seem implausible. But it was. As recently as the 1980s, it was home to thousands of bible believing, evangelical congregations and pastors. In the 1960s, it claimed more than 3.4 million members, making it one of the largest denominations in the country. Many of the nation’s oldest educational institutions, such as University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University, were founded by Episcopal clergy or were associated with the Episcopal Church. The Pew Research Center said Episcopal Church “has often been seen as the religious institution most closely associated with the American establishment, producing many of the nation’s most important leaders in politics and business.” About a quarter of the presidents of the United States (11) were members of the Episcopal Church.
In 1960, an Episcopal priest, Dennis Bennett, told his small Seattle church that he had experienced an outpouring of the Holy Spirit in his life. That experience led to a revival in his congregation and in other Episcopal churches around the country. Bennett’s book Nine O’Clock in the Morning, a reference to the outpouring of the Spirit at Pentecost, became a best seller and made Bennett a key figure in the charismatic renewal movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
But on July 29, 1974, in an event that was not sanctioned by the denomination, eleven women were ordained as priest in Philadelphia. These women, dubbed The Philadelphia Eleven, created a rift in the Episcopal Church that quickly led to other policy changes, the departure of conservatives to other denominations (and to new denominations), and the dramatic decline in size of the denomination. Today, the Episcopal Church claims a million members (about the same number it had in 1925), but in fact the number of people who actually attend Episcopal Churches on a given Sunday is less than a half-million, and the number of children has declined even more precipitously. At the current rate of decline, the denomination will be essentially out of business in a generation.
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Not all of this massive decline can be laid at the feet of The Philadelphia Eleven, but the irregular ordination of these eleven women caused a breakdown in polity from which the denomination never recovered. An act that should have resulted in church discipline ultimately led to full acceptance of their ordinations a few years later. The Philadelphia Eleven became an inspiration for gay activists in the church. When gay Episcopalians discovered they could flaunt church rules with impunity, they did so. That led to openly gay priests being common in the Episcopal Church long before they were officially sanctioned. This “innovation” led to the departure of yet more conservatives, and the decline continued. Then women bishops, and then gay bishops. Not all slopes are slippery, but this one certainly was.
In one of the great ironies of modern church life, the more “tolerant” and “diverse” and “inclusive” the Episcopal Church professed to become, the more in fact it became monolithic. Today, the Episcopal Church is old, white, and overwhelmingly liberal – with hardly a conservative or a child to be found in most congregations.
Some will read this brief history as a case against women in leadership, but that is not at all my point here. It is a case against DIY theology and church polity. It is a case against a vocal minority bullying a majority for the sake of ideological goals. It is a case against using shifting cultural norms, not Scripture, to determine the doctrine and practices of a church.
Today, the Philadelphia Eleven are celebrated in the Episcopal Church. On June 28, 2024, the 81st General Convention of the Episcopal Church, in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Philadelphia 11, approved July 29 as the date to commemorate the Philadelphia 11. A new (and fawning) documentary of them released last year and is now streaming.
None of these commemorations even mention the havoc that followed in their wake. It is a sanitization of history that further tarnishes the bitter legacy of The Philadelphia Eleven.
