The New Church (Swedenborgianism)

Denomination·Founded 1787 CE·The organised New Church has never been large — the two North American bodies together count in the thousands, with additional congregations in Britain, Ghana, South Africa, Korea and Japan; growth is African rather than Western. No consolidated figure is published. Swedenborg's readership has always vastly exceeded the church's membership, which is the movement's standing peculiarity.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → The New Church (Swedenborgianism)

The General Church of the New JerusalemThe Swedenborg Foundation

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Overview Belief 3How to Live 1Practice 1Stories & Scripture 1Community 1 You × The New Church (Swedenborgianism) Discussion
Rite of The New Church (Swedenborgianism)

The Word is carried in, and it stays open.

New Church worship centres physically on the open Word on the altar, brought in at the start of the service and left open. The sermon then usually moves from the letter of the passage to its internal sense, which means the congregation is being taught a reading method every week.

⏱ Weekly — Sunday worship, opening with the Word carried to the altar◌ The congregation
Add to My Beliefs →
What happensThe Word is carried in and opened on the altar and remains open through the service; readings from Scripture and from the Writings; a doctrinal sermon that usually works from the internal sense of the passage
What it needsAn open Bible on the altar, and a congregation trained to hear a text on two levels at once
What it aims atThat the letter of Scripture be honoured while the internal sense is taught
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this rite is held

New Church worship looks Anglican or Lutheran from the door and is doing something different. The Word is carried in ceremonially, opened on the altar, and remains open for the service — a physical statement that the letter of Scripture is the container of the internal sense rather than a discarded shell. Readings are taken from Scripture and from the Writings, and the sermon typically states the letter of a passage and then its correspondence. The General Church at Bryn Athyn, Pennsylvania, built a cathedral in the 1910s and 1920s under Raymond Pitcairn using medieval methods and on-site craft workshops, deliberately without a completed set of drawings, and it is the most visible thing the movement has made. The Swedenborgian Church of North America's Wayfarers Chapel at Palos Verdes, designed by Lloyd Wright, was dismantled in 2024 because of landslide movement and is intended to be rebuilt elsewhere.

The same ground, other faiths

rites that share this one's ideas
The Rigveda. Vedic Religion · scripture Open the book →
The Vedas were not composed by anyone. Hinduism · core tenet Go deeper →
The Kalpa Sutra. Jainism · scripture Open the book →
Reading the scroll. Judaism Go deeper →
Tajwid, and the ten readings. Islam · scripture Open the book →
Akhand Path — forty-eight hours, unbroken. Sikhism Go deeper →

The conversation

argument stays attached to the rite it is about All discussion →

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Where next

The New Church (Swedenborgianism)'s Practice roomback up one layer Propose a change to this riteone button — it routes to the review pool

Numbers count Panfaith activity only — never real-world adherence.

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