Independent Sacramental Movement

The Independent Sacramental Movement (ISM) refers to the extremely loose collection of orders, churches, jurisdictions, and freelance clergy made up of sacramental Christians (and, depending on how one draws boundaries, some Christo-Pagans and Thelemites) who are not part of the historic sacramental denominations. Many in the ISM owe their origins to schisms from Roman Catholic, Old Catholic, Anglican, and Orthodox churches, and generally claim to preserve the historical episcopate or apostolic succession, though this claim would be seriously questioned, if not rejected, by the ecclesiastical authorities of Rome, Constantinople, Utrecht, and Canterbury. Utrecht and some jurisdictions within the Anglican Communion have engaged in ecumenical conversation with some groups which could be included in the ISM. Groups which are structurally similar but without claiming the apostolic succession may also be classed as part of the ISM.

Groups within the ISM (often known as Independent Catholic, Old Catholic, Liberal Catholic, Autocephalous Orthodox, Free Sacramental, etc.) tend to share a number of characteristics: small groups and/or solitary clergy, centrality of the sacramental life (especially the Eucharist), a mediatory priesthood mostly composed of volunteers, ordination potentially available to a significant percentage of the membership, and experimentation in theology, liturgy, and/or church structure.

The term was popularized by John Plummer in his book "The Many Paths of the Independent Sacramental Movement", although it was earlier used by Richard Smoley in "Inner Christianity," and perhaps first used in the mid-1970s by a short-lived cooperative organization called the Synod of Independent Sacramental Churches. ISM groups range from the broadly inclusive (including marriage of same-sex couples and the ordination of women) to the socially conservative; also from the traditionally orthodox to the esoteric, although the term is most commonly employed to refer to the liberal end of the spectrum. While the term "Independent Sacramental" originated as an etic description, it has been used increasingly as an emic self-description by members of some of these churches and groups.

The term is actually an expansion of an earlier term, The Independent Orthodox, Catholic ,and Anglican Movement. This term was used extensively for many years, primarily due to the spirit of cooperation, that for a long time, truly existed between many of these groups (even though most of them were not formally in communion with one another. Much of this "ad hoc" style of cooperation was due to the common origin of most of these groups' holy orders and lines of spostolic succession. Most of the groups contain a commonality of sources including: Archbishop Arnold Harris Mathew (Old Roman Catholic Church of Great Britain); Bishop Aftimios Ofiesh (Russian Orthodox Church); Bishop Dom Duarte Costa (Brazilian Catholic Apostolic Church); and Bishop Joseph Rene Villate (Syrian Orthodox Church). The majority of the independent Orthodox,Catholic, and Anglican Holy Orders descend from these primary sources.