The ads caught my attention first. As I thumbed through 1919 issues of The Living Church for a digital archiving project, I noticed a full-page ad at the back of each week's issue for months. Engaging and bold, under the slogan “Enlighten Minds and Awaken Consciences,” each ad asked a thoughtful question: How can our churches welcome the immigrants flocking to this country? How can we revitalize rural congregations? Can we provide new meeting places to replace saloons that are closing? Have you ever thought about the impact of a college education on the church?
These were ads for a national campaign, a massive effort by the Anglican Church to gather information, raise funds, and, in the words of TLC editor F.C. Morehouse, “touch individuals with the flaming tongue of the Holy Spirit.” The campaign was accompanied by a series of ongoing structural and financial reforms, most of which were born from the vision of one man, Bishop Arthur Selden Lloyd.
Now that another visionary bishop, Sean Lowe, is promising major structural reform, it is worth looking back at how we got to our current system, which was cutting edge at the time and emerged from a moment of great dynamism. Our plans for the future should assess the problems our current structures sought to solve, and this campaign has much to teach us about how to bring about lasting change in our complex Church.
Lloyd's headache and the big solution
For twenty years Arthur Selden Lloyd was one of the senior leaders of the Church Mission House, known as “281” after its address on Park Avenue in Manhattan and commonly referred to as the headquarters of the Episcopal Church. When Lloyd began working as secretary of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS) in 1899, the Episcopal missionary work was in turmoil. His post had been vacant for two years, as many others had declined. Recruiting missionaries was difficult, and budget deficits were frequent. Regular oversight was provided by a board of directors dominated by East Coast financiers who were often generous, but who were sometimes at odds with the Mission House staff and cautious about expanding the scope of their activities.
Church factionalism was devastating: The American Church Missionary Society, an independent missionary organization backed by the Evangelical Anglican Church that oversaw newly established churches in Brazil and Cuba, was forced to abandon its missions after high-church bishops at the General Synod blocked the use of church funds for missions in Roman Catholic countries.
Lloyd also came into conflict early on with DFMS board member and staunch Protestant J.P. Morgan, who had been incensed by the display of Catholic vestments at the 1900 “Fond du Lac Circus” at the ordination of the auxiliary bishop of Anglo-Catholic Bishop Charles Grafton. The church supported several missionaries working with immigrants in Grafton's parish, and Morgan promised to prevent further deficits if these positions were cut. Lloyd could not bear this proposal, and the conflict made him realize how much the church needed a unified approach to missions.
In his farewell speech in 1920, Lloyd described how exhausting and inefficient the system he inherited had been at times:
Up until now, in order to carry out your orders, you have had to get the support of individuals. … Individuals had to be convinced that what the committee was proposing was worth carrying out. Any priest in any diocese in America can come up to me and say, “I'm not interested.” Any bishop in any diocese can come up to me and say, “I'm not interested.”
At the turn of the century, the financial structures of the Church and most dioceses were also extremely complex. In addition to the DFMS, there were Church of England boards for social services and Christian education, each with their own fundraising responsibilities and managed by independent boards. This pattern was replicated at the parish level: parishes might receive as many as six requests for donations each year, each asking them to send funds to a different office, and administrative staff for the various agencies struggled to keep mailing lists up to date and issue receipts.
The Women's Auxiliary (now the Episcopal Women's Organization) had been working for over a decade to raise funds for missionary work through joint gratitude offerings, but Lloyd was frustrated that most of the money was earmarked for special projects proposed by particularly charismatic missionaries, some of which were unrealistic, at a time when the church could barely pay salaries.
Lloyd became a tireless traveller, regularly speaking in parishes across the country and visiting mission sites around the world. Some of his visits were heartwarming, revealing deep passion for missionary work among ordinary Anglicans, but he was often frustrated by the lack of knowledge and narrow-mindedness of clergy and parishioners. In the years following the Edinburgh Conference in 1910, there was a great expansion of missionary work throughout English-speaking Protestantism, as the Church put into action its vision of “winning the world for Christ in one generation”. But Anglican efforts, hindered by inefficient systems and a lack of reliable funding, seemed to be falling further behind.
Frustrated yet visionary, just a few years into his job, Lloyd began advocating a two-pronged approach to ignite passion for missions and develop a unified structure for mobilizing resources. One end of the coin was to raise awareness of the need: a church-wide survey, compelling storytelling about the need, and encouraging generous giving. This eventually became a national campaign, the posters of which I found in that battered old magazine.
Another part was a major reorganization that eventually resulted in the church structure we know today. Lloyd proposed to merge the independent committees based in the Church Mission House, with a single body elected by the General Assembly to oversee its activities. Missionary work should be funded by allocations from the dioceses, not donations from individual parishes, and governed by a triennial budget. The whole organization should be headed by a patriarch who would give up the episcopal see for a time and devote his energies entirely to the wider mission of the church.
“Psychological moment”
While Lloyd had seen incremental progress toward his vision during the first 15 years of his work at the Church Mission House, World War I marked an unexpected catalyst for change. The war years brought several troubling trends in Anglican life to a crisis point. College and seminary enrollments plummeted as many young people enlisted in the military, and the economy experienced four years of double-digit inflation. Several Anglican-affiliated colleges closed or dissolved their affiliations. (A 1920 TLC editorial noted that in one generation the number of colleges had fallen from 24 to just three, two of which were in financial distress.) For the first time in many years, the number of clergy could not keep up with the growing number of church members.
During the war years, the church had resorted to a series of crisis appeals at the end of the financial year, an embarrassing and exhausting project that, incidentally, had the benefit of training several members of the church mission house staff (notably the Rev. R. Brand Mitchell, future national campaign manager) in the logistics of high-value fundraising.
Still, by 1919, sluggish revenues and high interest rates had left DFMS with an operating deficit of over $700,000 (about $12.7 million in today's terms), roughly one-third of its annual operating budget. Without dramatic action, the church was in serious danger of bankruptcy. But the war years also brought about major changes in what we would today call the nonprofit sector. The Treasury Department's four “Freedom Bond” campaigns used persuasive mass advertising and large rallies to sell about $22 billion in war bonds, with about one-third of adult Americans participating, many of whom were purchasing financial securities for the first time. The Red Cross also greatly expanded its operations, developing hundreds of local chapters and new organizational and advertising methods.
A practical template now existed for the kind of church-wide education and fundraising project Lloyd had long envisioned, and the Anglican national campaign drew directly on these successful models, recruiting key leaders from the two most recent successful movements.The immediate post-war period saw greater social cohesion and a bright optimism that encouraged a range of bold social experiments: 1919 and 1920 saw constitutional amendments granting prohibition and women's suffrage, the founding of the League of Nations, and the Lambeth Appeal's call for church unity.
At a national campaign rally in 1919, the movement's associate leader, the Rev. Lewis G. Woods, noted this unmistakable trend, saying, “The movement was launched by divine revelation at a psychological moment when the supreme lessons of the Great War had attuned the minds of mankind to the truths of religion.”
“The desire felt by those who fought in Flanders during those long nights spent in their listening posts is being fulfilled,” he continued. “The vague longing for a solution to heal the wounds of the world's conflict is being realized.”
Wherever we went in 1918, people would meet us and ask, “When the war is over, what is the Church going to do now to rebuild? When the boys come home full of enthusiasm and drive, what are you going to get them to do?”The answer is a national campaign.
At a December 1918 meeting of the Missionary Committee, Lloyd proposed a way to consolidate the activities of all national church committees and an Episcopal-wide campaign focused on education about the Church's missionary work, followed by a needs assessment and a request for financial pledges. The Rev. Robert Patton, who had led a similar effort in the Sewanee Province (then called the Fourth Province), was appointed to lead the effort. Initially, $5,000 was set aside for the effort, but it was eventually expanded to $350,000 ($6.4 million in today's dollars) over three years, a bold endorsement at a time when Church finances were already struggling.
Lewis B. Franklin, a New York businessman who had led the Liberty Loan program, volunteered in the effort, as did H. P. Davidson, chairman of the Red Cross War Council. Patton recruited a “vanguard” of talented young clergymen and dispersed them throughout the Church to promote the campaign through fervent missionary preaching, meetings in major cities, regular lectures on missionary work, and training of recruiters who would visit homes in parishes a few weeks later. At least seven of them became diocesan bishops, including Bland Mitchell, who coordinated logistics.
In tomorrow’s post, we’ll discuss the 1919 General Assembly, which fully endorsed the campaign and approved major structural changes, as well as the long-term impact of the national campaign and what we can learn from it about responding to current challenges.