On June 8, 1855, “Ten well-dressed ladies and nine gentlemen" met in a meeting room at the Chestnut Hill Railroad Station, where they wanted to "build a Christian community." St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Chestnut Hill was then admitted to the Dioces of Pennsylvania less than a year later. The church is on land that was bought in 1856, the same year that a Chapel was built on the site by John H. Carver.

The church has an extremely rich history, as they were active during monumental time periods. In 1863, Rector William Hobart Hare wrote to the children's Sunday school explaining the uprising against the Sioux in Minnesota, saying that they are calling upon the church for help. On April 9, 1865, in the middle of the night, the surrender of General Robert E. Lee was first heard at Appomattox Court House. St. Paul's Episcopal Church rang the bell from the chapel for the good news of peace. The bell still sits ready to ring out “Peace on Earth.” In 1945, George Trowbridge, St. Paul's sixth rector, became the second president of the Philadelphia Fellowship Commission. He fought for racial and religious prjudice, even inviting Eleanor Roosevelt to St. Paul's in 1949 to receive the first National Fellowship Award from the Commission. In 1947, seven years before “Brown vs. the Board of Education,” the organist at the time, Thomas Dunn, hired an African-American soprano for the choir. Dunn later became the director of the Handel and Haydn Society. In 1989, St. Paul's helped to rehab or repair buildings in East Germantown and became known as the "St. Paul's Rehabbers," incorporated in 1993 as Habitat for Humanity, Germantown. The organization is now a part of the Habitat for Humanity, Philadelphia.

St. Paul's has had an incredible arrangment of priests and laypeople throughout the years, who made it their mission to help the community. Three of the eleven rectors, the Rt. Revs. William Hobart Hare, Malcolm Endicott Peabody and James Russell Moodey, went on to serve as bishops. Additionally, assistant rector, Mary Douglas Glasspool, who was ordained priest at St. Paul’s in 1982, became the first openly lesbian woman to be elected a bishop in the Episcopal Church. In June 2014, after the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania approved same-gender marriage, St. Paul's became one of the first parishes in the diocese to perform same-gender weddings.