Return
to "A Brief History of the Little Church" R. William Franklin, Ph.D.
Dean, Berkeley Divinity School
Yale University
New Haven, CT
The Church of the Transfiguration is one of the most famous parishes of the Episcopal Church in the United States, itself a part of the worldwide family of churches in communion with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Transfiguration is known throughout the country as "The Little Church Around the Corner," and for one hundred and fifty years it has been a very visible worshiping community in an urban setting that has welcomed all classes, all races, and particularly all those marginalized by society for whatever reason, as were actors and actresses, who had theretofore been on the fringes of both society and the Episcopal Church.
The Church of the Transfiguration practiced this deliberate inclusivity for two reasons. First, it was among the earliest parochial outposts in the New World of the Catholic revival in the Anglican Communion. This revival began in England and was associated with the Oxford Movement, whose teachings first arrived on these shores in about 1839. In response to the Age of Revolution in England, which included the industrial revolution, democratic reform, and urbanization, the leaders of the Oxford Movement reasserted that the Churches of the Anglican Communion are part of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of Jesus Christ on earth. In this proclamation they looked in two directions: They looked backward to the primitive church of the persecuted and oppressed, gathered as a eucharistic community; this primitive model was to be a model for the modern church. And they looked up: The church to the Oxford Fathers is also a supernatural society, the body on earth of the risen Jesus, who through the Holy Spirit sanctifies men and women and makes saints. One of these Oxford Fathers, Edward Pusey, urged in particular that the Anglican Catholic revival should focus on modern cities, such as London and New York, rather than on areas of former population concentration and the picturesque countryside where the comfortable parishes were located.
Second, this parish was the creation in 1848 of a man who not only successfully transferred Dr. Pusey's Oxford teaching to Manhattan, but had himself experienced life on the fringes of society. When George Houghton moved to New York City in 1834, he had to work fifteen hour days while still a student to help support his widowed mother. He was so poor after becoming rector of this parish that he lived in the sacristy of the church until a rectory was built, and even later Dr. Houghton supplemented his parochial income by teaching Hebrew at the General Theological Seminary for the meager sum of $500 a year.
George Houghton concluded, on the basis of his own experience and Dr. Pusey's teaching, that some Episcopalians should build a spiritual home in this city of New York to which all would be welcomed. When no one came forward to build such a church, he realized that that builder and pioneer would have to be himself, and he announced his plan to establish a place "where the Church should be free to all, where charitable institutions for the afflicted of all sorts and conditions are made available for all."
This ideal of Catholic inclusivity in the Episcopal Church, which this parish perhaps more than any other in America stood for in the nineteenth century, the welcoming of actors and actresses to sacraments and services for which it became well known, caused "The Little Church Around the Corner" to be immortalized throughout the nation.
What is less well known is that in 1894, after fashion had begun to move up Fifth Avenue north of Twenty-ninth Street, the parish fell on hard times. The news spread in the theatrical world of New York City, and within a month elicited a tremendous financial response from Broadway in support of the Church of the Transfiguration, $3,000 more than was needed for the budget. In typical fashion, Dr. Houghton devoted the excess contributions to the needs of the sick and the poor, to the care of homeless children, and to establish a fund to bury from this church the penniless dead of the city whose families could not afford a proper funeral.
Of the contributions of people of the theater to sustain the parish through the twentieth century, Dr. Houghton wrote:
What you have given is to God, for the use of His sanctuary, the diffusion of His Gospel, the relief of His poor - and there shall be no depreciation on this gift you have given. The gold-rate shall not affect it - no victory, nor defeat, nor change of government, nor baneful legislation. What you have given no gold-bearing bonds of the nation shall yield you an income so sure and so ample. And when you die you will find it already converted into those everlasting per cents which an heavenly science can only compute.
As we end the twentieth century, we live at a moment when many despair in the face of the problems of the institutions, large and small, of the Church. Before such uncertainty the institutional history of the Church often seems "superficial and unworthy, absorbed in trivialities and rivalries," neglecting the deepest fears and longings of God's people.
Yet the founding vision of this parish, wrought out of a time of Christian renewal a century and a half ago, which has sustained it from its early days, still speaks of faith in God's unquenchable desire for the wholeness and restoration of every man and woman in this city, and the record of nine generations who have come to "The Little Church Around the Corner" gives us hope that our church life is not doomed to ultimate frustration but may find its unimaginable fulfillment in the presence and in the joy of the One by whom we were made. The example of the founder and the forebears now beckons us forward to look at the future as the Apostle Paul looked at it, "confident that nothing can separate us from the love of God, constantly leaving the things that are behind, and stretching out toward the things which lie before us, toward the high calling of God in Christ Jesus."