Our shared history
We began in 1723 as Christ Church and are the second oldest Episcopal Church in Connecticut. Our first church home was a wooden building using wood cut from trees growing on the West Haven Green
From the book Sketches of Church Life in Colonial Connecticut we learn that: “In 1723, ten or fifteen families conformed to the Church of England and organized the parish. The Rev. Samuel Johnson, the first Congregational pastor, located in West Haven, became convinced of the invalidity of his ordination and, not without great self-sacrifice, sailed for England in 1722 to receive Holy Orders in the Mother Church.
“He returned in 1723 and commenced his labors in this little mission at West Haven. Being the only Church clergyman in the colony, he could only hold occasional services here. Still the Churchmen were staunch and true, and waited patiently for his successor, the Rev. Jonathan Arnold, another pastor of the Congregational flock near by, to conform to Episcopacy.
“The Congregationalists had, by this time, become thoroughly alarmed, and stipulated, that if he, like his predecessor Samuel Johnson, should embrace the Episcopal faith, the money paid him as a settlement should be refunded.
“Still undaunted in his decision, in 1734 he was dismissed from his pastoral charge among the Congregationalists, and in 1735 went to England for Holy Orders. He returned in 1736 with the appointment as "itinerant missionary for Connecticut" of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and resided in West Haven. He also labored faithfully to sustain the missions in the neighboring towns of Milford, Waterbury, and Derby. It was thus that this little mission at West Haven became the mother Church of New Haven Colony.”
The churches of St. Martin’s in the Fields and St. Johns by the Sea were among the parishes launched by Christ Church. In 2008, these three parishes merged to create the Church of the Holy Spirit. The history of these four congregations is explored on subsequent pages of this website.
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