Conservative American Anglicanism’s Forgotten Third Seminary

By Arlie Coles

THE LIVING CHURCH

May 20, 2025

 PUT FOTO HERE PLEASE

Ray Sutton, as dean of Cranmer House, prays over-students during a graduation in the 1990s.

The polarized scene in the 1990s Episcopal Church had produced an educational consensus among conservatives: choose Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry (now Trinity Anglican Seminary) or Nashotah House. These two seminaries were trusted sources of education and networking during the Anglican realignment and remain known conservative powerhouses today. Lesser known is that there were cross-jurisdictional plans to add a third to their number: Cranmer Theological House, a seminary of the Reformed Episcopal Church (REC).

Founding and Early Years

The REC, which left the Episcopal Church in 1873 over the latter’s tolerance of Anglo-Catholicism, approached the millennium precariously. It counted 5,783 communicants in 1987—down nearly 40 percent in 30 years—and its Philadelphia Theological Seminary (PTS) suffered from low enrollment and high staff turnover. To reinvigorate PTS, trustees named a new president in 1991: Ray Sutton.

Sutton, formerly a Presbyterian minister and leader of the Christian Reconstruction movement of the 1980s, had brought his Tyler, Texas, church to the REC in 1989. His reconstructionist book That You May Prosper won him both an honorary doctorate from the Central School of Religion and the presidential nod, representing bold, potentially revitalizing ideas. Under Sutton, PTS shed its expensive historic building and sought accreditation from the Association of Theological Schools. Trustees planned new evening and satellite classes, “flexible arrangements” they considered key to survival in the 21st century.

Meanwhile, the Episcopal Church had begun ecumenical dialogue with the Reformed Episcopal Church. By 1994 Sutton was his church’s representative to General Convention, and both churches had identified “mutual recognition of [their] ordained ministries” and pursuit of “joint … educational programs” as goals.

In this atmosphere of attempting turnaround, novel pedagogy, and outreach into the Anglican Communion, Cranmer House was founded as a new REC seminary—with substantial help from conservative Episcopalians.

Cranmer House launched in September 1994, operating gratis from a Shreveport chapel built by pharmaceutical magnate M. Allen Dickson at his company warehouse. Dickson was the seminary’s main benefactor—and an assisting priest at nearby St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. Seminarians followed a modular work-study schedule. Morning classes lasted for three weeks; afternoons and evenings were free for work in Dickson’s warehouse.

The connection to Dickson came through Peter Toon of the Prayer Book Society. Toon taught at Philadelphia Seminary under Sutton and at Cranmer House its first year. Toon’s colleague Louis Tarsitano became Cranmer House’s first dean, stating plainly in 1994 that the school aimed to train conservative ministers by “combin[ing] efforts among traditional-minded Episcopalians and Anglicans in America.”

Tarsitano and Toon left their posts the next year. (Toon also departed Philadelphia Seminary and began another educational venture, Cranmer Seabury House, soon after.) Sutton, who had resigned from PTS, became the second dean, and Cranmer House graduated its first students in 1996.

New Techniques

As Cranmer House grew, so did its inroads with conservative Episcopalians. At its 1998 commencement, Harold Johnson, rector of St. Francis’ Episcopal Church in El Paso, Texas, preached and received an honorary doctorate. Bimonthly advertisements in The Living Church promised an “earn-while-you-learn” experience at Cranmer House and frankly targeted Episcopalians by 1999: “The Episcopal Churches need well-educated men and women. We educate.”

 Cranmer Theological House ad in 1998. | TLC archives

Simultaneously the seminary built international connections. Though it boasted of a cooperative arrangement with the University of Brighton and an extension campus in Germany, Cranmer House’s true global Anglican arrival came at the 1998 Lambeth Conference. Sutton, in England to defend his earned doctorate, visited Lambeth and met bishops from the Church of Uganda. Those contacts would be critical for Cranmer House to pilot new ecclesiastical techniques later repeated by Anglican realignment leaders.

In March 1999, two graduates were ordained deacons at Cranmer House—by Bishop Terence Kelshaw (the Rio Grande) for Bishop Samuel Ssekkadde (Namirembe, Uganda). Kelshaw then licensed the deacons for service at Johnson’s parish in El Paso. This proxy ordination caused confusion. The Living Church called the deacons Ugandans; VirtueOnline clarified they were Americans who had never visited Uganda. Kelshaw hastily said he had obtained permission from Bishop Robert Hargrove (Western Louisiana) to hold the ordination in his diocese.

The movement of these two graduates, with a third later ordained by Hargrove, into Episcopal ministry—without following Episcopal ordination pathways—drew the attention of disaffected Episcopal leaders. That year, Bishop John-David Schofield (San Joaquin) gave Cranmer House’s commencement address, received an honorary doctorate, and declared he would soon send students to Cranmer House, it being “one of only three” acceptable seminaries.

Meanwhile, Sutton was elected bishop suffragan. The REC invited Archbishop Moses Tay (South East Asia) to lay hands on Sutton at his consecration, seeing a “providential crisis point” in the Anglican Communion and aiming to “create solidarity with fellow evangelical Anglicans.” Also invited were six Ugandan bishops and several conservative Episcopal bishops. REC Bishop Royal Grote, preaching four days before the consecration, dared listeners to see God’s preservation of the REC to that date as purposed for “revivifying the Anglican Communion.”

Sutton was consecrated as suffragan bishop of the REC’s Diocese of Mid-America on July 29, 1999, at St. Paul’s in a double bill with a Cranmer House seminar on “the mission of the Church in our times.” Though neither Tay nor the Episcopal bishops attended, the Ugandan bishops did, poised to lay hands on Sutton—until Bishop James Stanton (Dallas) arrived in Shreveport and dissuaded them. In this attempt to have Anglican Communion bishops irregularly consecrate a bishop for America, the REC anticipated Tay’s seismic Singapore consecrations of John Rodgers Jr. and Charles H. Murphy III by exactly six months.

The Ugandan bishops, not providing consecration, provided students: that August, two Ugandan priests matriculated at Cranmer House. In October, Cranmer House awarded an honorary doctorate to Archbishop Livingstone Mpalanyi Nkoyoyo, primate of the Church of Uganda. Clergy of the Reformed Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America gather at Church of the Holy Communion Anglican Cathedral, Dallas, today’s home of Cranmer House.

Unexpected Contributions

Cranmer House left Shreveport for Houston in 2001 with its goals unmet. Accreditation remained elusive: despite pursuing membership in the Association of Theological Schools since 1999, Cranmer House reported affiliation with only Douglas Wilson’s Association of Classical Christian Schools through 2002 and is unaccredited today. Once-promoted links with Lancaster University and Louisiana State University and extension programs in Little Rock and Phoenix—the latter two backed by the now-defunct Central School of Religion—faded. Cranmer House neither joined Trinity and Nashotah in Episcopal esteem nor produced enough conservative ordinands to “revivify the Anglican Communion.”

Instead, Cranmer House’s most important contributions to the early Anglican realignment were the institutional relationships and ecclesiastical techniques it fostered. The seminary brought together evangelical and Anglo-Catholic realignment factions and demonstrated the role external institutions could play for their cause.

When in 2002 Bishop Robert Duncan (Pittsburgh) described “the genesis of [his] worldview change” toward cross-jurisdictional transfer and relicense of clergy outside Episcopal structures, he attributed it to a 1999 visit from Sutton. Those techniques echoed the Cranmer House practice and formed the strategic backbone of the coming realignment. Intercommunion and cross-licensing of Episcopal and REC clergy soon followed in the dioceses of Fort Worth and Pittsburgh, and the REC became a founding jurisdiction of the Anglican Church in North America in 2009 alongside both those dioceses. Duncan served as the ACNA’s first archbishop.

Now in its 31st year, Cranmer House operates from Dallas with Sutton as its chancellor. It advertises an online extension school and a relationship with Dallas Theological Seminary, recently launched the Cranmer Theological Journal, and graduated four students into ministry in May 2024. This year, it launched an extension campus in Atlanta. The REC, now a subjurisdiction of the ACNA, reported 5,968 communicants in 2023.

This revised essay corrects the name of the Reformed Episcopal Church’s Diocese of Mid-America, which Raymond Sutton first served as a suffragan bishop.

Arlie Coles is a lay Anglican from the Diocese of Dallas who writes about modern Episcopal history and polity. She is also a machine-learning researcher serving on General Convention’s Task Force on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property.