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Collegiate church in Głogów, Poland

St Mary's Collegiate Church, Haddington, East Lothian, Scotland, consecrated 1410, now a place of worship for the Church of Scotland

A collegiate church is a church served and administered by a college of canons or prebendaries, similar to a cathedral, although they are not the seat of a bishop. They were often supported by (sometimes extensive) lands held by the church. In pre-Reformation England there were usually a number of collegiate churches in each diocese, with several hundred in total. They were almost all abolished in England by Henry VIII in 1547 as part of the Reformation by the Act for the Dissolution of Collegiate Churches and Chantries. Many continued to serve as parish churches with a resident vicar or curate and a limited number retained aspects of their collegiate past down to the 19th century. But the royal peculiars alone have survived with collegiate status.

In England at the end of the twentieth century there were sixteen churches or chapels with the title of Royal Peculiar not all of which were still in regular use for worship. Of these only two are collegiate, each with a Dean and a Chapter of four secular Canons. These are:

• The Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster, and
• St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

In Ireland, there are a number of ancient churches still in regular use that are Collegiate Churches. Most notably the church known as 'St. Patrick's Cathedral' in Dublin, is in fact a Collegiate Church. St. Mary's Collegiate Church in Youghal County Cork, a building of very remote antiquity, maintains a fine choral tradition and St. Nicholas Collegiate Church in Galway is another fine example of a pre-reformation Collegiate Church.

A collegiate church typically has its seating arranged parallel with the south and north walls, facing inwards rather than towards the altar at the eastern end. Such an arrangement is found in university chapels and in cathedrals. It has influenced the design of other churches in that the singing choir is seen as representing the idea of a college. The Westminster model of parliamentary seating arrangement arose from Parliament's use of such a chapel for its sittings until Westminster Palace chapel burnt down in 1834.

The chapel at St. Paul's Collegiate Church at Storrs.

The idea of a "collegiate church" has continued to develop a contemporary equivalent. Many contemporary Collegiate Churches draw on the idea that collegiate means a "church with more than one minister", often understood as reflected in the "priesthood of all believers" and local, congregational governance.

Two different examples of contemporary collegiate churches in America today are The Collegiate Church (New York, NY) (http://www.collegiatechurch.org) and St. Paul's Collegiate Church at Storrs (Storrs, CT) (http://www.stpauls-storrs.org). St. Paul's Collegiate Church at Storrs features contemporary architecture that reflects traditional collegiate church architecture (see above).

St. Paul's Collegiate Church at Storrs, unlike most historical collegiate churches, us a post-denominational, evangelical church.

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