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I live in New York in a neighborhood that's seventy percent Dominican. Neighbors talk with me about visiting their families in Santiago, the Dominican Republic's "second city," and merchants name their stores Ázua Hardware and Puerto Plata Deli, in honor of their native communities.

So although I needed a passport to enter the Dominican Republic to help produce the segment of our series Anglican Communion Stories to which you can link from this page, I never felt as though I was in an unfamiliar place.

However, I knew I was in a historic place!

A Two-Winged Dove

Episcopal Diocese of the D.R.
The Dominican Development Group

Santo Domingo, oldest city established by Europeans in the Americas, dates back, incredibly, to 1496. That means the Roman Catholic Church, planted by Spain, got a four-hundred year jump on the Episcopal Church, which came in 1897.

And here's what's really interesting: for its first six decades, the Episcopal Church in the Dominican Republic wasn't supposed to serve Dominicans!

Many of the sugar mill workers migrating in the 1890s were Anglicans from the English-speaking countries of the West Indies; the church was set up for them. Sixty years passed before Spanish was used in worship services. Once that happened, the Episcopal Church began to grow among Dominicans themselves.

That growth has exploded since the 1990s: the number of congregations has doubled, a medical clinic has been established, and Episcopal schools have filled a historic deficit in public education.

Tourism is now the main industry of the Dominican Republic, with twenty-seven percent of those tourists coming from the United States. There are many beautiful vacation destinations and, since life appears so much better than it does in neighboring Haiti, it's easy to miss the fact that fifty percent of Dominicans live in poverty.

Fortunately, the Episcopal Church does not overlook that reality, and its ministries are designed to foster change for the better.