Who We Are
We are committed to being an all-embracing spiritual home for everyone, where people come to love and be loved, to grow in faith and spirit, and to explore together the spiritual dimension of life through the person and teachings of Jesus within the cathedral of God’s creation that surrounds us in our beautiful state.
The Episcopal Church in Wyoming
The Episcopal Church in Wyoming seeks to be God’s loving community throughout Wyoming and the world.
We are a diverse community consisting of 50 churches and faith communities, as well as four Wisdom Centers, that together are seeking to know, love and serve our Creator. We are committed to being an all-embracing spiritual home for everyone, where people come to love and be loved, to grow in faith and spirit, and to explore together the spiritual dimension of life through the person and teachings of Jesus. Our desire is to encounter together the living God, enabling us to live as God’s people in God’s world. We are deeply rooted in the Christian traditions of prayer, contemplation, spiritual exploration, aesthetic experience and loving engagement in both Wyoming and the world.
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The Episcopal Church in Wyoming is one of over 100 national and international dioceses in The Episcopal Church, which is one of 38 Episcopal/Anglican Churches around the world that comprise the worldwide Anglican Communion, with more than 85 million members under the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Faith on the New Frontier
The historic land of Wyoming has long been a place with a frontier mindset. Wyoming’s trails, roads and highways follow centuries-old Native American hunting and trade routes. For generations, Shoshone, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Ute, Lakota and Crow peoples valued innovation as they lived off the land, gathered plants, visited family and tracked game along watercourses and over mountain passes in the seasonal subsistence patterns of their lives. The pioneering spirit of the Episcopal Church’s early presence in the region began in the 1880s through visionaries such as the Welsh missionary-priest John Roberts, Bishop Ethelbert Talbot and the Arapaho priest Sherman Coolidge. Native American spirituality, historically so often crushed by white settlers, was in time encouraged to emerge alongside new found faith in ways that continue to enhance our seeing and experiencing God in new and fresh ways.
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As many communities experienced the “boom and bust” of the discovery of gold, oil, coal and valuable minerals throughout the state, so resilience and a frontier approach to life became a necessity. As the Episcopal Church of Wyoming today, we are seeking to build on our distinct foundation and history as we embrace the unique faith opportunities of our current times. Wyomingites are an independent people, where living on the frontier requires and fosters both self-reliance, community and creativity. Taking the message of Christ to "new frontiers" is an ongoing exploration of spiritual discovery, engaging the frontiers of our hearts, minds and communities.
Our Beautiful State
Wyoming is a land of great geographical diversity with wide expanses of prairie, high mountain peaks, and deserts. Wyoming is often described as a “small town connected by long streets,” with wide-open spaces in-between. Wyoming is dotted with lakes and rivers that boast world-class fishing, and plains where “the deer and the antelope play.” Herds of bison are being restored to the lands where they used to roam in great number. In Wyoming, one can see the infinite, eternal and renewing power of God. With 240 sunshine days per year, Wyoming’s blue skies and starry nights are legendary.
Wyoming’s population includes a strong Native American presence, especially of the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho peoples, as well as other cultures that have moved here over the years, from the Basque peoples of Spain, to the English, Italian and Hispanic, among many others.
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