This book - Centro de Estudos Anglicanos

UNITY, DIVERSITY, AND CONFLICT IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA 69and religious tracts throughout the state. South Carolina Episcopalians also organizedthe Protestant Episcopal Missionary Society of Charleston (1819), whichsupported missionaries in remote western areas of the state, and the ProtestantEpiscopal Female Domestic Missionary Society (1821), which provided religiousinstruction for the city’s poor residents. These efforts led to the creation of othernew organizations. Philadelphia Episcopalians, for example, formed a Society forthe Advancement of Christianity in 1812, and two of its clerical missionaries,Jackson Kemper and William Augustus Muhlenberg, were active in the creationof parishes in central and western Pennsylvania. As Muhlenberg reported withdismay in 1816, some Episcopalians in frontier areas had been forced to join theMethodist Episcopal Church because no clergy of their own denomination wereavailable to minister to them. 18Evangelicals under the leadership of Alexander Griswold eventually took theinitiative in organizing a national missionary program for the Episcopal Church.In 1815 Griswold began corresponding with Josiah Pratt, a representative of theChurch Missionary Society (CMS), which had been founded by Anglican evangelicalsin the late eighteenth century. Pratt advised Griswold that the most effectiveway of encouraging U.S. evangelism would be to form a voluntary societysimilar to the CMS—a project to which his organization would gladly contributefunds. 19 Pratt’s proposal helped stimulate the 1820 General Convention to createthe Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS) of the Protestant EpiscopalChurch, which any dues-paying Episcopalian could join. Although many evangelicalsdid so, a shortage of both funds and missionaries handicapped the DFMS,and despite modest success on the domestic front, foreign efforts were virtuallynonexistent during the first 15 years of the society’s existence. 20When it became clear that the voluntary system had been a failure, severalmembers of the DFMS board of directors proposed an alternative plan. Accordingto Charles Pettit McIlvaine, the bishop of Ohio, it was the responsibility of thewhole church to proclaim God’s word to the world. “The Church is a MissionarySociety, in its grand design, in the spirit and object of its Divine Founder,”McIlvaine argued. As a consequence, “every member of the Church, by the vowsof that baptism in which he was consecrated to Christ...,stands committed andpledged to take part . . . in promoting the Gospel to the ends of the earth.” 21Although McIlvaine was himself an evangelical, he rejected the cooperative, interdenominationalmodel originally favored by other evangelical Episcopalians.Joining with high church leaders such as George Washington Doane of NewJersey, he instead urged the adoption of a separate denominational approach tomissionary work. This proposal was approved by the DFMS board of directorsand officially adopted at the 1835 General Convention: henceforth, the EpiscopalChurch was itself a missionary society to which every Episcopalian by virtue ofhis or her baptism belonged. In addition, the convention appointed two committees(one for domestic mission, one for evangelism overseas) with the assumptionthat high churchmen would direct the domestic field while evangelicals wouldcontrol the foreign one—an agreement that evangelicals later regretted as high