File:St Cyprian exterior 05.jpg

English: St. Cyprian’s rich history began in the late 1800’s when it was established as a place of worship in the Episcopal tradition for former slaves and other African Americans in St. Augustine. The present church building was consecrated in 1900. For many decades the parish thrived as a cornerstone of spiritual life in the Lincolnville neighborhood of St. Augustine, and teachers, shop owners, attorneys, doctors and dentists were counted among the membership during its prosperous years. Although St. Cyprian’s was not directly involved in the Civil Rights movement when it came to St. Augustine in the 1960’s, there are stories of individual members of the congregation supporting the cause from behind the scenes. In the generations that followed, the church’s membership declined and the building suffered from deferred maintenance as the Lincolnville neighborhood experienced its own decline.

In the late 1990’s the people of Trinity Episcopal Parish offered their generosity to help renovate the building and renew the spirit of the congregation. However, when the national Episcopal Church began welcoming and affirming gays and lesbians in its life and leadership, a significant group of St. Cyprian’s parishioners left the Episcopal Church in late 2006. Following the schism a faithful remnant of St. Cyprian’s parishioners, committed to the Episcopal Church and its position of inclusion, resolved to rebuild the congregation and its ministry. Today, St. Cyprian’s is honoring the legacy of its origins and is committed to providing a welcoming worship experience to all of God’s children.

THE BIRTH OF ST. CYPRIAN'S CHURCH Trinity Parish is St. Augustine’s first Episcopal church - the oldest non-Roman Catholic church in Florida, in fact. Trinity did not escape the racial turmoil of the post-Confederate south. In the face of the racial segregation at the time, St. Augustine’s African American churchgoers chose to attend African American churches, but none were Episcopal. However, one woman was too devoted to her faith to give it up. Mrs. Julia Jackson was from the Bahamas, where the Episcopal Church had great success among the African American community. When Mrs. Jackson moved to St. Augustine and visited Trinity nearly thirty years after the Civil War, she could see why African Americans were uncomfortable there. She wrote to Bishop Edwin Gardner Weed with her concerns. Then she invited some friends and started preaching her faith wherever comfortable space was available. Bishop Weed soon sent a deacon to take over for Mrs. Jackson, and in 1893, the Florida diocese reported the first African American Episcopal congregation in St. Augustine. It consisted of twenty members meeting for services in a rented building.

The African-American congregation named their new Episcopal church after Saint Cyprian (200-258) of Carthage in northern Africa, whose life bears a striking resemblance to that of Saint Augustine (354-430), also of Africa. In the third century, Cyprian wrote, “When the stain of my earlier life had been washed away by the help of the water of birth, then straightway in a marvelous manner doubts began to be resolved, closed doors began to open, dark places to grow light; what before had seemed difficult was now easy, what I had thought impossible was now capable of accomplishment” (Treatise on the Grace of God). It is assumed that Saint Cyprian was a person of color and therefore was a logical choice to be the patron saint of this new congregation.