I’m repeatedly struck, as I revisit St. Stephen’s journey over 200 years, by how our physical church today implements so many facets of the identity and mission established at its birth.

St. Stephen’s founders envisioned a particular sort of urban church; to shape it they embraced the Philadelphia of the 1820s that was fast becoming a modern city in an unprecedented nation. Some of these founders were civic leaders who contributed to that growth.

In 1822 the group bought a failed new (1811) Methodist church they’d rented in a burgeoning district west of the colonial quarter that now featured lively cultural and academic institutions, advanced medical facilities, theaters, hotels and businesses that framed the church. The woodcut shown here advertises the church’s proximity to a growing University of Pennsylvania (right rear). Despite residences throughout, the founders opted against a neighborhood church for one that drew congregants who, like themselves, worked nearby but lived beyond¾even Burlington NJ. St. Stephen’s became a “downtown” church with a varied ministry even to travelers and hospital patients and their families.

Why St. Stephen?

Best known as the first Christian martyr, in 1822-3 St. Stephen eerily personified the Episcopal Church. Like it, Stephen was young: he died at 29; the church was 40, founded with the nation as a semi-independent branch of the Anglican Church. He’s also a pivotal player in forming the early Church (Acts 6-7) and model for all beyond. The youth was a transformative preacher and scholar who articulated the doctrinal foundation of the Church recorded in Acts. He epitomized the Apostles’ requirements for the new Church’s deacons: He was “full of faith,” performed miracles and received Christ’s blessing in a vision as he bore witness to the Christian path before his fatally stoning. Tirelessly compassionate toward the needy, as deacon Stephen embodied the social structure and activities of the Church as established by the Apostles. Protestants who upheld that apostolic mandate after the Reformation usually supported High-Church doctrines and practices. St. Stephen’s founders counted among them.

They sought a High-Church alternative to the doctrinal mix of their older parishes. The founders’ leader was a High-Church churchman, The Rev. James Montgomery (1787-1834), whom they called as St. Stephen’s first rector. Montgomery’s mentor delivered the church’s consecration sermon in 1823, its unofficial mission statement: the Right Rev. John H. Hobart (1775-1830), the powerful Bishop of New York who devised the Episcopal High-Church doctrines and practices over prior decades. Hobart’s concept vivified the inherited Anglican High-Church emphasis on the clergy, sacraments, and liturgical materials with Protestant enthusiasm—inside a beautiful church.

Sidestepping Stephen’s rejection of manmade temples as God’s house, Hobart put forth an ideal devotional experience inspired by the physical church. For him all human faculties coalesced, sublimely illuminated, when interacting with the right church.

“the excitement and the expression of the feelings of devotion should be aided by these exterior embellishments that delight the eye, and gratify the taste, and thus . . .enlighten the understanding and elevate the heart”

— Hobart, The Worship of the Church on Earth, a Resemblance of That of the Church in Heaven, 14

The interior of the new St. Stephen’s met that ideal. Its “splendid yet chaste ornaments,” contended Hobart, evoked those of the Age of Faith (the Middle Ages) with “high embowed” roof, “antic pillars,” storied windows” and “dim religious light” that perfectly suited the building’s purpose: worship “with the feelings of awful and reverential, yet lively and cheerful devotion” (Hobart 14).

Hobart’s criteria drew on a text quoted widely by those for and against the Gothic and Gothic Revival: John Milton’s evocative description, in his 1632 Il Penseroso, of mass in an ostensibly Gothic English abbey church. By invoking that sensitive account of worship in such a church by a perceived enemy (a strict, yet independent-thinking Protestant), Hobart upheld the English Gothic church as a modern Episcopal model even for Low-Church objectors. St. Stephen’s showed a way.

We’ll explore St. Stephen’s and the Gothic separately. Here, let’s move to the new physical church’s mission.

Unlike Milton, who loved the abbey church’s isolation, Hobart sought to unify a disparate community “in want, in sin, and in misery” (Hobart 9). Hobart’s vision thus embraced St. Stephen’s social realities and mission as a modern downtown church.

As a physical church, St. Stephen’s architecture emphasized community. Its open interior, however compact given the church’s modest size, exuded amplitude. The galleries framing that interior drew your eyes to the climactic east wall while offering more seats, bringing upper-level worshippers (typically lower-rent parishioners and visitors) closer to the Word and rites in the chancel. The overall effect: engaged coalescence. In worship, this physical church merged those present within Christian communities throughout time: connection and continuity.

Despite later radical physical and doctrinal changes, these qualities enfold us today, enabling the physical church to pursue its founding mission in new ways for our shifting world.

— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator