The Anglican Church is the oldest Protestant church in Jamaica and, for more than two centuries, was the island’s official church. It arrived with the English conquest of 1655, was paid for by the colonial state until 1870 and still holds many of Jamaica’s oldest public buildings, from the Cathedral of St Jago de la Vega in Spanish Town to the parish churches of many old towns. Today it is organised as the Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, one of eight dioceses of the Church in the Province of the West Indies, with about 300 congregations, 11 high schools, more than 100 primary schools and a teachers’ college. The 2011 census counted 74,891 Anglicans, 2.79% of the population, a fall of a fifth in ten years. Hurricane Melissa in October 2025 destroyed or badly damaged about 50 of its properties, among them St John’s, the parish church of St Elizabeth at Black River.
Last updated: 12 October 2026. This is a living reference: Jamaica Homes updates it when events warrant and reviews it every October. Part of our guide to Christianity in Jamaica. Figures and statistics are on Jamaica Religion Stats.
| Anglican Church in Jamaica | |
|---|---|
| Arrived | 1655, with the English conquest; first clergy appointed to parishes by 1664 |
| Status | Established (state) church until disestablishment in 1870 |
| Diocese | Diocese of Jamaica (1824); Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands since 2001 |
| Province | Church in the Province of the West Indies (formed 1883), eight dioceses |
| Anglicans (2011 census) | 74,891 (2.79% of the population), down 20.0% on 2001 |
| Church figures | 29,945 registered members (Synod handbook, 2014); more than 17,000 members (diocese, 2025); about 30,000 active Anglicans (diocese, November 2025) |
| Congregations | about 300 |
| Cathedral | Cathedral of St Jago de la Vega, Spanish Town |
| Headquarters | Church House, 2 Caledonia Avenue, Cross Roads, Kingston 5 |
| Governing body | Diocesan Synod (houses of clergy and laity, with the bishop) |
| Regions | Kingston, Mandeville and Montego Bay, each with an archdeaconry and a suffragan bishop |
| Bishop (as of 2026) | The Rt Revd Leon Golding, 15th Bishop of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands (enthroned 28 September 2025) |
| Suffragan bishops (as of 2026) | Garth Minott (Kingston); Collin Reid (Montego Bay, consecrated 25 July 2026); Mandeville vacant |
| Archbishop of the West Indies | Philip Wright, Bishop of Belize (elected November 2025) |
| Schools | 11 high schools, 112 primary schools, 9 preparatory schools (diocese) |
| Training | Church Teachers’ College, Mandeville (1965); clergy trained at the United Theological College of the West Indies, Mona |
| Website | anglicandioceseja.org |
The established church, 1655–1824
The Church of England came to Jamaica with the English army that captured the island from Spain in 1655. The invaders destroyed the Spanish churches, and Anglican worship took their place. By 1664 the first clergy had been appointed to the island’s seven parishes, and a parish church of St Catherine was built in Spanish Town in the early 1660s on the site of the Spanish chapel of the Red Cross. Other early churches followed in St Andrew, Vere, Port Royal, St David, St Thomas in the East, St John, St Dorothy and Clarendon. Two of them still stand in altered form: St Peter’s at Alley, the old parish church of Vere in Clarendon, founded in 1671 and rebuilt around 1715, and St Dorothy’s near Old Harbour, built in 1681 on land given by Colonel Thomas Fuller of Thetford.
As the established church it was part of the colonial state. Each parish had a parish church and a rector paid from public funds, and the church’s calendar, marriages and burials became the framework of colonial life. The Spanish Town church was destroyed by the hurricane of 1712 and rebuilt by 1714, and St Peter’s at Port Royal was rebuilt in 1726 after the earthquake of 1692. In Montego Bay the parish church of St James was consecrated in 1782. On paper the Jamaican clergy came under the Bishop of London, but no bishop lived in the island and in practice the planters controlled the church.
It was a church of the planter class, and it was bound up with slavery. Parishes held glebe land worked by enslaved people: the church at Black River, St Elizabeth, owned enslaved people who worked more than 200 acres of glebe in the Brompton area. Visitors described the buildings unevenly. The historian Edward Long called the Black River church in 1774 a “handsome edifice of brick, lately rebuilt”; in 1802 Lady Nugent, the governor’s wife, found it “shabby and much neglected”. The established clergy did little to teach the enslaved majority. That work fell to the Moravians from 1754 and to the Baptist and Methodist missions after them, which is one reason those churches, not the Anglicans, became the churches of the enslaved and of the free villages. See our guides to the Moravians, Baptists and Methodists.
The Diocese of Jamaica, 1824–1870
The Diocese of Jamaica was created on 24 July 1824, and Christopher Lipscomb was consecrated its first bishop the next day. The new diocese also covered the Bahamas, British Honduras (now Belize) and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Lipscomb arrived in February 1825 and was installed on 11 February at the St Catherine parish church in Spanish Town. His instructions were to run the church and to provide religious teaching for the enslaved. The Clergy Act passed by the Jamaican House of Assembly in December 1825 gave him authority over the island’s clergy, and he organised them into three deaneries matching the island’s counties: Cornwall, Middlesex and Surrey.
In 19 years Lipscomb ordained 73 deacons and 66 priests, consecrated 31 churches and licensed 41 other buildings for worship. The first church he consecrated was St Saviour’s at Harewood, St Catherine. He set up more than 50 schools and trained catechists, some of them enslaved, at a central school in Kingston that also prepared teachers, most of them coloured Jamaicans. Anglican congregations began to include large numbers of the enslaved and, after full freedom on 1 August 1838, of free people. The rebuilding of St John’s, Black River is typical of the period: its first stone was laid on 13 July 1837, the church was rebuilt in 1838 and Lipscomb consecrated it in 1843.
Lipscomb died in 1843. His successor, Aubrey Spencer, made the Spanish Town church the cathedral of the diocese that year and divided the island into three archdeaconries. A Gothic chancel was added to the cathedral between 1848 and 1853 at a cost of £4,570. The diocese shrank as the region’s church grew: the Bahamas became the separate Diocese of Nassau in 1861 and British Honduras a diocese of its own in 1891. In the Cayman Islands an Anglican church was built at Bodden Town in the 1820s, but it was destroyed in the hurricane of 1837 and the work lapsed after 1839.
Disestablishment, 1870
By the late 1860s the state church looked hard to defend. According to the diocese, only about 48,000 of a population of some 400,000 claimed membership of the Church of England, yet the government was paying it more than £40,000 a year. In 1870 the colonial government ended the arrangement. Law 30 of 1870 withdrew state support in stages and created the Incorporated Lay Body of the Church to hold its property. The first Synod under the new law met from 29 September to 10 October 1870 and turned the Church into a self-governing, self-financing body in which lay people had a formal voice.
The man who designed the new finances was Enos Nuttall, an Englishman who had come to Jamaica in 1862 as a lay Methodist missionary and was ordained an Anglican priest in 1866. The burden of paying for the church shifted to its congregations, which by then were mostly Black, with some help from property owners. Even so, the number of priests rose from 55 in 1870 to 75 in 1880. Bishop Reginald Courtenay, who had led the church through disestablishment, resigned in 1879; his successor, William Tozer, arrived in October 1879 and left in April 1880.
The Nuttall era, 1880–1916
Nuttall was elected bishop in July 1880 and consecrated at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, in October that year, aged 38. He led the church for 36 years. In his report to Synod in 1888 he counted eight years of work: 28 ordinations, about 20,000 confirmations and 11 churches consecrated. In 1888 Frederick Douet became assistant bishop, the first Jamaican-born bishop. When the dioceses of the British Caribbean formed the Church in the Province of the West Indies in 1883, Nuttall helped draft its constitution; he became its primate in 1893 (some sources say 1892), and the title was changed to archbishop in 1897.
Nuttall’s priority was a locally trained clergy, including Black clergy. Candidates had previously trained at Codrington College in Barbados, the college run by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (today USPG). He founded a diocesan theological college, which opened on church land at Cross Roads in 1893, according to the diocese, and took the name St Peter’s College in 1918. In 1890 he brought the first deaconesses from England. The Order of Deaconesses went on to found girls’ schools, among them Cathedral High School in Spanish Town (1897), St Hilda’s in Brown’s Town and St Hugh’s in Kingston, and trained the first nurses for the Kingston Public Hospital. Nuttall also founded the Belmont Orphanage near Stony Hill in 1891–92 and the Kingston Charity Organisation, and chaired the Jamaica Schools Commission and the boards of Mico and Shortwood training colleges.
The Kingston earthquake of 1907 destroyed much of Kingston, including Kingston Parish Church, and Nuttall led the church’s part in rebuilding the city. The parish church was rebuilt on its old foundations around 1911, and its clock tower, added after the First World War as a war memorial, gave rise to the saying that true Kingstonians are “born under the clock”. Nuttall died on 31 May 1916; the Nuttall Memorial Hospital in Kingston, opened in 1923, is named after him.
The twentieth century, 1916–1962
Under Nuttall’s successor, George Frederick Cecil de Carteret (1916–1931), the church founded DeCarteret College in Mandeville in 1916 and Kingston College, which opened on 16 April 1925 with 49 boys in the old All Saints rectory on East Street. Its first headmaster was a young Jamaican priest, Percival Gibson; it became a diocesan school in 1933 and by 1948 was the largest secondary school in Jamaica. In 1918 Canon E.J. Wortley founded the Wortley Home for children, and in 1927 he built the Church of the Good Shepherd at Constant Spring for the East Indian community. The Diocesan Festival Choir was formed to mark the diocese’s centenary in 1924.
William Hardie became bishop in 1931 and served as Archbishop of the West Indies from 1945. In 1947 Gibson was made Suffragan Bishop of Kingston, the diocese’s first suffragan, he was elected diocesan bishop in 1955 and enthroned on 6 February 1956, the first Black Jamaican to lead the church. Gibson’s years saw a burst of school building: The Queen’s School (1954), St Jago High School (formed in 1954 by merging Cathedral High with Beckford and Smith’s), Glenmuir High School in May Pen (1958) and the school that bears his name, Bishop Gibson High. Anglican priests were also behind some of Jamaica’s best-known financial institutions: the Rev. Henry Clarke founded the Westmoreland Building Society, forerunner of the Jamaica National Group, and Archdeacon Downer the Victoria Building Society in Kingston. Other social work included St Monica’s Home at Chapelton and the Clifton Boys’ Home.
Since independence
In 1964 the diocese took the name the Church in Jamaica in the Province of the West Indies. In September 1965 Mandeville Teachers’ College opened with six lecturers and 75 students, an idea of the Bishop of Mandeville, Benjamin Vaughan; it was renamed Church Teachers’ College in 1967. In 1966 St Peter’s College closed and the church joined Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Moravians and others in the ecumenical United Theological College of the West Indies, which moved in the early 1970s to a campus beside the University of the West Indies at Mona. Gibson was followed by Cyril Swaby (from 1967), Herbert Edmondson and, in 1979, Neville de Souza, who led the church for 21 years.
The ordination of women came in stages. Synod supported it in 1979, and the provincial synod later agreed. On 6 February 1994 the deaconesses Sybil Morris, Patricia Johnson and Judith Daniel were ordained deacons, and on 22 December 1996 they and Vivette Jennings were ordained priests at the Spanish Town cathedral. Judith Daniel became the first woman canon in the province in 2001. The Cayman Islands rejoined the church’s life in the same decades: Anglican worship was revived there in the 1960s at local request, the islands joined the Deanery of Kingston in 1970, St George’s church was dedicated in 1979 and consecrated in 1987, and in 2001 the diocese took its present name, the Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands.
Alfred Reid was enthroned as bishop on 25 January 2001; his years saw a reprint of the Book of Common Prayer in 2007 and a new provincial hymnal in 2010. Howard Gregory was elected on 27 March 2012 and enthroned as the 14th bishop on 17 May 2012. In 2019 he was also elected the 13th Archbishop of the West Indies, leading the province’s eight dioceses. A fourth region, Eastern Jamaica, created in 2005, was folded back in 2014, leaving the three regions of Kingston, Mandeville and Montego Bay. Garth Minott, a former deputy president of the United Theological College, was consecrated Suffragan Bishop of Kingston at Kingston Parish Church on 11 June 2022, succeeding Robert Thompson (2005–2020).
Bicentenary and new leadership, 2024–2026
The church marked the 200th anniversary of the diocese from February 2024 to February 2025 under the theme “Yesterday… Today… Tomorrow: Celebrating Service, Guarding Justice, Affirming Hope”. The Jamaican-born Bishop of Dover, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, preached at the launch in the Spanish Town cathedral on 11 February 2024. Archbishop Gregory said the year would also review the church’s “shortcomings” and confront its ties to the governing elite during slavery. On 21 July 2024 the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, preached at a national service at the National Arena in Kingston and apologised for the Church of England’s part in slavery: “We are deeply, deeply, deeply sorry. We sinned against your ancestors.” During the visit he spoke at a University of the West Indies panel, met the Prime Minister and visited Church Teachers’ College. On 24 July the Postal Corporation issued a stamp showing St Saviour’s, Harewood.
Gregory retired on 31 December 2024. On 24 March 2025 a special Synod at St Luke’s Church Hall, Cross Roads, elected Leon Golding, then Suffragan Bishop of Montego Bay, as the 15th diocesan bishop with 204 of 214 votes. Golding, who grew up in the Spanish Town cathedral congregation, was ordained in 1984 and had been rector of the parish churches of St Mary and Kingston and of Holy Trinity, Westgate, Montego Bay. He was enthroned at the cathedral on 28 September 2025 and told the congregation that “the church is called to be part of the decision-making process in the country”. In November 2025 the provincial synod elected Philip Wright, Bishop of Belize, as Archbishop of the West Indies. On 8 April 2026 the 155th Synod elected Canon Collin Reid, rector of the cathedral for almost 20 years, as fifth Bishop of Montego Bay; he was consecrated at St James Parish Church, Montego Bay, on 25 July 2026. As of 2026 the Anglican Communion’s directory lists the see of Mandeville as vacant.
Beliefs and worship
Anglicans describe their church as both catholic and reformed. They hold to the Bible, the historic creeds, the two sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, and government by bishops in what they regard as succession from the apostles. Worship follows set forms, chiefly the Book of Common Prayer used in the Province of the West Indies, with the Eucharist as the main Sunday service in most parishes. The church keeps the Christian year, from Advent to Easter, and Jamaica’s public holidays on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday and Easter Monday follow the calendar it brought. Women have been ordained priests since 1996.
Jamaican Anglicanism is shaped by its history as the old church of the state. Its parish churches sit at the heart of the old towns, its rectors chair school boards across the island, and its synod, cathedral services and bishops’ statements still carry public weight; the Bishop of Kingston, Garth Minott, became president of the Jamaica Council of Churches on 1 January 2026. Worship is liturgical and generally more formal than in the Pentecostal and Church of God congregations that have overtaken it in size; see our guides to Pentecostal churches and the Church of God.
Organisation
The diocese is one of eight in the Church in the Province of the West Indies, a self-governing province of the worldwide Anglican Communion, whose provincial synod meets every three years with houses of bishops, clergy and laity. Within Jamaica the highest decision-making body is the annual Diocesan Synod, to which the bishop is accountable. The island is divided into three regions, each with an archdeacon and a suffragan bishop, and into deaneries and “cures”, groups of churches served by one rector. The diocese’s offices are at Church House, 2 Caledonia Avenue, Kingston 5.
| Region | Registered members (2014) | Cures (2014) | Suffragan bishop (2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kingston (including former Eastern Jamaica) | 5,938 | 42 | Garth Minott |
| Mandeville | 7,396 | 18 | vacant |
| Montego Bay | 6,611 | 17 | Collin Reid |
Source: Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, citing the Synod Handbook 2014. The regional figures add up to 19,945, while the same source gives a diocesan total of 29,945; one of the figures may be a misprint. In 2014 the diocese reported 105 full-time clergy, 45 supplementary ministers, 11 Church Army officers, four hospital chaplains and three deaconesses. By February 2025 the Bishop of Kingston said the church had 51 full-time priests and 46 supplementary or retired priests, most of them over 50.
Bishops of Jamaica
| No. | Bishop | Years | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Christopher Lipscomb | 1824–1843 | First bishop; consecrated 31 churches |
| 2 | Aubrey Spencer | 1843–1872 | Made Spanish Town the cathedral |
| 3 | Reginald Courtenay | 1872–1879 | Led the church through disestablishment |
| 4 | William Tozer | 1879–1880 | Left after a few months |
| 5 | Enos Nuttall | 1880–1916 | Archbishop of the West Indies from 1897 |
| 6 | George Frederick Cecil de Carteret | 1916–1931 | DeCarteret College and Kingston College founded |
| 7 | William Hardie | 1931–1950 | Archbishop of the West Indies 1945–1950 |
| 8 | Basil Dale | 1950–1955 | |
| 9 | Percival Gibson | 1955–1967 | First Black Jamaican diocesan bishop |
| 10 | Cyril Swaby | 1967–1970s | |
| 11 | Herbert Edmondson | 1970s–1979 | |
| 12 | Neville de Souza | 1979–2000 | Women ordained priests in 1996 |
| 13 | Alfred Reid | 2001–2011 | Cayman Islands added to the diocesan name |
| 14 | Howard Gregory | 2012–2024 | Archbishop of the West Indies from 2019 |
| 15 | Leon Golding | 2025– | Enthroned 28 September 2025 |
Sources: Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands; Wikipedia. Spencer’s term is often given as running to 1872, although Courtenay was already in charge in 1870; sources differ slightly on some dates.
Schools and institutions
Education has been the church’s largest public contribution since Lipscomb’s schools of the 1820s, and the diocese made it a theme of its bicentenary. Many church schools were built on church land or in church buildings; some are “leased” schools whose upkeep is carried entirely by the government. The diocese reports 11 high schools, 112 primary schools, nine preparatory schools and several early childhood institutions, with clergy serving as chaplains to the high schools. The bequest of Robert Hugh Munro and Caleb Dickenson, left in trust with the churchwardens of St Elizabeth, founded Hampton School and Munro College in the 1850s.
| Institution | Place | Founded | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| St Jago High School | Spanish Town | 1954 (merger) | Includes Cathedral High School (1897); traces its origins back 280 years |
| St Hilda’s Diocesan High School | Brown’s Town, St Ann | Nuttall era | Founded by the deaconesses |
| St Hugh’s High School | Kingston and St Andrew | Nuttall era | Girls’ school founded by the deaconesses |
| DeCarteret College | Mandeville | 1916 | |
| Kingston College | Kingston | 1925 | Diocesan school from 1933 |
| The Queen’s School | Kingston and St Andrew | 1954 | |
| Glenmuir High School | May Pen, Clarendon | 1958 | Founded by Bishop Gibson |
| Bishop Gibson High School | Mandeville | Gibson era | Named after Percival Gibson |
| Church Teachers’ College | Mandeville; campus in Brown’s Town | 1965 | Teacher training; renamed 1967 |
| Nuttall Memorial Hospital | Kingston | 1923 | Private hospital named after Archbishop Nuttall |
| Wortley Home | Constant Spring, St Andrew | 1918 | Children’s home |
| Clifton Boys’ Home | – | – | Boys’ home |
Sources: Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands; Kingston College; Church Teachers’ College; National Library of Jamaica. This is a selection, not a complete list of the 11 high schools. The diocese also reports three children’s homes, four homes for the elderly and a private hospital. Clergy are trained at the United Theological College of the West Indies at Mona; Codrington College in Barbados, founded on a bequest to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (now USPG), also trains Anglican clergy for the province.
Notable churches
Anglican churches make up a large share of Jamaica’s listed historic buildings. A selection, with links to their entries in the Jamaica Homes glossary:
| Church | Place | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cathedral of St Jago de la Vega | Spanish Town, St Catherine | 1714 | Former St Catherine parish church on a Spanish church site; cathedral since 1843; tower 1817 |
| Kingston Parish Church | Kingston | c. 1911 | Rebuilt after the 1907 earthquake; war memorial clock tower; monument to Admiral Benbow |
| St Peter’s Church, Alley | Clarendon | 1671; rebuilt c. 1715 | Old parish church of Vere |
| St Dorothy’s | near Old Harbour, St Catherine | 1681 | On land given by Colonel Thomas Fuller |
| Hanover Parish Church (St Mary’s) | Lucea, Hanover | c. 1725 | First baptism recorded 1725 |
| St Elizabeth Parish Church (St John’s) | Black River, St Elizabeth | 1837–43 | Destroyed by Hurricane Melissa, 2025; belfry survives |
| St George’s | Buff Bay, Portland | 1814 | Former parish church of St George |
| St Mark’s (Mandeville Parish Church) | Mandeville, Manchester | 1820 | Stone church at the head of the town |
| Holy Trinity | Retreat, St Mary | 1828 | Georgian; land given by Henry Rigg |
| Portland Parish Church (Christ Church) | Port Antonio, Portland | land granted 1836 | Brick with stone dressings |
| St Mary’s, Montpelier | St James | 1847 | On the former Montpelier estate, linked to the 1831–32 rebellion |
| St Thomas Parish Church (Christ Church) | Morant Bay, St Thomas | 1865 | Replaced the old church at Church Corner |
| St Ann Parish Church | St Ann’s Bay | 1871 | Consecrated by Bishop Courtenay |
| Church of the Good Shepherd | Constant Spring, St Andrew | 1927 | Built for the East Indian community and the Wortley Home |
| St Peter’s Church | Port Royal | 1726 | Rebuilt after the 1692 earthquake |
| St James Parish Church | Montego Bay | 1782 | Georgian; site of Bishop Reid’s consecration in 2026 |
| St Saviour’s | Harewood, St Catherine | Lipscomb era | First church consecrated by Bishop Lipscomb; on a 2024 stamp |
Sources: Jamaica Homes glossary; The Gleaner; Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. More churches are described in our guide to churches and cemetery sites. The Catholic cathedral in Kingston is covered in our Catholic Church guide.
Notable Jamaican Anglicans
- Christopher Lipscomb (bishop 1824–1843), first Bishop of Jamaica, who opened the church to the enslaved and set up more than 50 schools.
- Enos Nuttall (1842–1916), former Methodist missionary who rebuilt the church after disestablishment and became the first Archbishop of the West Indies.
- Frederick Douet, assistant bishop from 1888 to 1904 and the first Jamaican-born bishop.
- Percival Gibson (1893–1970), first headmaster of Kingston College, first Suffragan Bishop of Kingston and, from 1955, the first Black Jamaican Bishop of Jamaica.
- The Rev. Henry Clarke, founder of the Westmoreland Building Society, from which the Jamaica National Group grew.
- Judith Daniel, one of the first four women ordained priest in Jamaica in 1996 and the first woman canon in the province.
- Howard Gregory, Bishop of Jamaica 2012–2024 and Archbishop of the West Indies from 2019, who led the bicentenary’s reckoning with slavery.
- Rose Hudson-Wilkin, born in Montego Bay in 1961, former chaplain to the Queen and the Speaker of the House of Commons, and in 2019 the first Black woman to become a Church of England bishop.
- Sean Major-Campbell, priest, human rights advocate and Gleaner columnist, dean of the Kingston Deanery.
Membership and decline
The Anglican Church has been in long decline in Jamaica. Already in 1870, according to the diocese, only about 48,000 of some 400,000 Jamaicans claimed membership. Between the 2001 and 2011 censuses the number of people calling themselves Anglican fell from 93,612 to 74,891, the steepest fall of any major denomination, and the church’s share of the population dropped below 3%. The census measures identification, not attendance: the church’s own counts of members are far lower.
| Census | Anglicans | Share of population | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 93,612 | 3.61% | – |
| 2011 | 74,891 | 2.79% | ▼ 20.0% |
Source: STATIN, Population and Housing Census 2011. The 2022 census religion tables have not yet been published. Full figures for every denomination are on Jamaica Religion Stats.
| Year | Church figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1870 | about 48,000 claiming membership | Diocese, history |
| 2014 | 29,945 registered members (excluding unconfirmed children) | Synod Handbook 2014 |
| 2025 (February) | 300 congregations, more than 17,000 members | Diocese, via The Gleaner |
| 2025 (November) | about 300 churches, about 30,000 active Anglicans, most over 60 | Bishop Garth Minott, The Living Church |
The church’s leaders have spoken openly about the reasons: an ageing membership, the growth of Adventist, Pentecostal and Church of God congregations, and the rise of “no religion”, which reached 21.3% in 2011. The Gleaner noted in March 2025 that the church owns “vast properties” and many schools while facing falling membership and financial strain. Our analysis Jamaica, a Nation of Churches, Is Quietly Changing Its Faith looks at these trends across all denominations; see also our guide to Seventh-day Adventists.
Hurricane Melissa, 2025
Hurricane Melissa made landfall on Jamaica’s south coast on 28 October 2025 as a Category 5 storm with sustained winds of about 185 mph. Bishop Golding called it “the most powerful storm ever recorded in Jamaica”. The western and central parishes, where many of the church’s oldest buildings stand, took the worst of it. USPG, the Anglican mission agency, reported that about 50 church properties were destroyed or severely damaged and that nine church buildings were lost entirely. The diocese named four destroyed churches: St John’s, Black River, and St Thomas, Lacovia, and St Luke’s, Balaclava, all in St Elizabeth, and St Thomas, Bluefields, in Westmoreland. “When I say destroyed, literally, flat on the ground,” said Claudette Marshall, head of mission and ministry. Bishop Minott called it “unprecedented destruction, disaster in terms of our historic buildings”.
Churches, schools and other diocesan property also lost roofs or were damaged in St Elizabeth, Trelawny, Westmoreland, Manchester, St James, St Ann and Portland. St George’s in Westmoreland lost its roof, and St Michael’s at Clark’s Town, Trelawny, was among the heritage buildings damaged. The diocese’s photographs of the aftermath include Christ Church, Christiana; St Stephen’s, Cambridge; St Peter’s, Petersfield; and the Clifton Boys’ Home. In St Ann, after Clapham Primary School lost its roof, classes moved into St Paul’s Anglican Church while repairs went on.
St John’s, Black River
The loss most felt was St John’s, the parish church of St Elizabeth, a brick church begun in 1837 on a site used for worship for about 300 years, in a town the Jamaica National Heritage Trust has declared a historic district. Its clock dated from 1839, its bell was cast at Whitechapel in London in 1848, and its pipe organ, built in England, was installed in 1915. Melissa brought down the walls and shattered the organ; only the belfry and clock tower were left standing. The congregation moved into the partly damaged rectory next door, four of the five churches in the cure were severely damaged, and at Christmas 2025 the parish held its carol service in the churchyard in the rain. Brett Ashmeade-Hawkins of the Jamaica Colonial Heritage Society set up a crowdfunder for the church. Reports up to April 2026 gave no rebuilding plan, cost or timetable.
Relief and recovery
The diocese put people before buildings. Its relief plan covered shelter, food and pastoral care, clearing debris, restoring power and communications, repairing churches and schools, and trauma support for clergy, teachers and parishioners. USPG contributed to its appeal alongside the Anglican Alliance and the Diocesan Disaster Response Task Force. Help came from across the Anglican world: the Diocese of Trinidad and Tobago shipped relief goods and building materials, the Diocese of Oxford opened an appeal, and the Bishop of Toronto launched an appeal in February 2026 with a C$50,000 matching grant. At home, the Kingston Deanery and the District Grand Lodge of Jamaica ran a joint relief hub that had raised J$2 million for house repairs by May 2026, and the former board of the Mavis Fraser-Davis Trust gave its remaining J$2.6 million to St Albans Anglican and a Moravian church in Malvern, St Elizabeth, to help students. In March 2026 Bishop Minott said the church was helping people who do not own their land to put up temporary homes, since they cannot build permanent ones. Accepting his election as Bishop of Montego Bay in April 2026, Collin Reid said there was “no better time to go west”.
Other churches suffered as badly: more than 150 Adventist churches were significantly damaged, about one in ten Baptist churches lost its roof and five Moravian churches in the west were reduced to rubble. See our guides to the Moravians and Baptists.
Current issues
- Buildings and money. The church holds one of the largest property portfolios in Jamaica, much of it historic and costly to insure and maintain, while membership and income fall. Melissa has sharpened the choice between restoring heritage churches and building more modestly.
- Clergy. In February 2025 the church had 51 full-time priests for about 300 congregations. Stipends averaged J$50,000 to J$70,000 a month plus housing and other allowances, and enrolment at the United Theological College was low.
- Slavery and reparations. The bicentenary brought an apology from the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2024. The Church of England’s £100 million fund for communities affected by the slave trade, linked to the historic investments of Queen Anne’s Bounty, has been debated in England; Welby told Jamaicans he preferred the term “reparatory justice”.
- Public voice. Bishop Golding has called for the church to take part in national decision-making, and Anglican clergy have written on a Jamaican republic, reparatory justice and human rights.
- The wider Communion. In October 2025 the provincial House of Bishops issued a statement responding to members’ concerns about recent developments in the Anglican Communion, including the appointment of a new Archbishop of Canterbury.
- Leadership. The see of Mandeville, one of the church’s three regional bishoprics, was listed as vacant in 2026.
Timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1655 | English conquest; Church of England arrives |
| 1664 | First clergy in the island’s seven parishes; St Catherine church built in Spanish Town |
| 1671 | St Peter’s, Alley, founded as parish church of Vere |
| 1681 | St Dorothy’s built near Old Harbour |
| 1714 | Spanish Town church rebuilt after the 1712 hurricane |
| 1726 | St Peter’s, Port Royal, rebuilt |
| 1782 | St James Parish Church, Montego Bay, consecrated |
| 1824 | Diocese of Jamaica created (24 July); Christopher Lipscomb consecrated |
| 1825 | Lipscomb installed in Spanish Town (11 February); Clergy Act |
| 1838 | Full freedom; St John’s, Black River, rebuilt |
| 1843 | Spanish Town church becomes the cathedral; Lipscomb dies |
| 1861 | Bahamas becomes a separate diocese |
| 1870 | Disestablishment under Law 30 of 1870; first Synod meets |
| 1880 | Enos Nuttall consecrated bishop |
| 1883 | Church in the Province of the West Indies formed |
| 1888 | Frederick Douet, first Jamaican-born bishop |
| 1890 | Order of Deaconesses founded |
| 1897 | Nuttall becomes Archbishop of the West Indies; Cathedral High School founded |
| 1907 | Kingston earthquake destroys Kingston Parish Church |
| 1916 | Nuttall dies; DeCarteret College founded |
| 1924 | Diocesan centenary; Festival Choir formed |
| 1925 | Kingston College opens |
| 1947 | Percival Gibson becomes first Suffragan Bishop of Kingston |
| 1956 | Gibson enthroned, first Black Jamaican diocesan bishop |
| 1965 | Church Teachers’ College opens in Mandeville |
| 1966 | St Peter’s College joins the United Theological College of the West Indies |
| 1970 | Cayman Islands join the Deanery of Kingston |
| 1996 | First women ordained priests (22 December) |
| 2001 | Diocese renamed Jamaica and the Cayman Islands |
| 2011 | Census counts 74,891 Anglicans, down 20.0% on 2001 |
| 2012 | Howard Gregory enthroned (17 May) |
| 2019 | Gregory elected Archbishop of the West Indies |
| 2024 | Bicentenary; Archbishop of Canterbury apologises for slavery (21 July) |
| 2025 | Leon Golding elected (24 March) and enthroned (28 September); Hurricane Melissa (28 October) destroys or damages about 50 properties |
| 2026 | Collin Reid elected (8 April) and consecrated (25 July) Bishop of Montego Bay |
Updates to this page
| Date | Change |
|---|---|
| 12 October 2026 | Page created. |
Sources: Statistical Institute of Jamaica, Population and Housing Census 2011; Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, history pages (“More on History”; Patrick E. Bryan, “From Lipscomb to Gregory”, 1 February 2024), schools history, 200th anniversary message from Archbishop Howard Gregory (1 February 2024), bicentenary launch notice (2024), Hurricane Melissa 2025 page and news listings (2025–2026); Anglican Communion, diocesan directory (2026); The Gleaner, Leon Golding elected (24 March 2025), Golding enthroned (28 September 2025), Fr Sean Major-Campbell column (17 September 2025), “Requiem for historic buildings in Black River” (10 November 2025), Paul H. Williams series on St John’s Church (December 2025), Collin Reid elected (11 April 2026), Black River recovery (28 April 2026); Jamaica Observer, Garth Minott consecration (11 June 2022), Welby apology (22 July 2024), Reid election (8 April 2026); Church Times, Welby in Jamaica (26 July 2024) and Hurricane Melissa (7 November 2025); The Living Church, “Hurricane Melissa Flattens Jamaican Churches” (6 November 2025) and “Caribbean Anglican Churches Focus on Renewal” (27 March 2026); USPG, Jamaica appeal (November 2025); Anglican Ink, Montego Bay election (9 April 2026); Diocese of Toronto, Bishop’s appeal (2026); Kingston College, history; Church Teachers’ College, about; National Library of Jamaica, Enos Nuttall exhibit; Wikipedia, Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, Enos Nuttall, Percival Gibson, Rose Hudson-Wilkin, Codrington College, United Theological College of the West Indies; Jamaica Homes glossary entries and news reports (2025–2026).