Who We Are

St. John's  is an Episcopal Church in the Episcopal  Diocese of East Carolina. The Diocese of East Carolina is made up of 75 congregations united in spreading the Good News of God in Christ. The Diocese roughly covers the Eastern 1/3 of North Carolina, with 1-95 as the Western boundary and the Atlantic Ocean as our Eastern boundary.

Episcopal comes from the Greek word Episkopos  meaning bishop. We are a Christian church guided by our bishops, served by our priests and deacons (as ordained ministers) supporting the work and witness of the majority of our ministers, the baptized members of our church.

Rt. Rev. Clifton Daniels, 3rd
Bishop of East Carolina

The St. John's parish family is made up of over 400 persons. We are young and old, married and single, long term members and brand new Christians. The St. John's family is a group of people experiencing Christian worship as a community, studying the Bible for its relevance to their lives, and along the way, learning together how to build stronger lives, marriages and families.

St. John's was founded in November 1853 after the congregation of St. James' Episcopal Church in downtown Wilmington had grown too large for its worship space. Rather than alter their current  building, the people of St. James supplied $150,000 in building funds to establish a new church. The land on the corner of Third Street and Red Cross was purchased and then donated by Dr. Armand DeRosset, then the Senior Warden of St. James'. The new church was named St. John's because James and John were two of Jesus' disciples. The name was chosen to emphasize the desire that brotherly love exist between the two churches.

A century later, the parish was relocated from downtown to the new suburb of Forest Hills. The land for the new building was donated by the MacRae family in 1953. The first service in the new St. John's was held on July 10, 1955. 

Today, with the construction of the Independence Boulevard extension, St. John's is no longer a suburban church.