Learning from Our 1919 Pentecostal Moment, Part One

The ads grabbed my attention first. I was scanning a stack of issues of The Living Church from 1919 for our digital archives project, and a full-page ad ended every weekly issue for months on end. Attractive and bold, under the slogan, “To inform the mind and awaken the conscience,” each one asked thoughtful questions: How will our church welcome the immigrants pouring into our nation? What can we do to revitalize rural congregations? Can we provide new gathering places to replace the saloons that are being closed? Have you considered the impact of a church college education?

They were ads for the Nation-Wide Campaign, a massive push by the Episcopal Church to gather information, raise funds, and, in the words of F.C. Morehouse, editor of TLC, “to touch each individual with the fiery tongue of the Holy Spirit.” The campaign was accompanied by a series of structural and financial reforms that are still with us, and most of them sprang from the vision of a single man, Bishop Arthur Selden Lloyd.

At a time when another visionary bishop, Sean Rowe, is promising major structural changes, it’s worth looking back on how we got the system we now have, one that was state of the art at the time, and born of a moment of great dynamism. Our future plans should take stock of the problems the current structure aimed to fix, and the campaign shows us much about bringing lasting change to our complex church.

Lloyd’s Headaches and the Big Solution

For 20 years, Arthur Selden Lloyd was among the senior leaders at Church Missions House, what passed for an Episcopal Church headquarters, commonly known as “281” for its address on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. In 1899, when Lloyd began his work as General Secretary of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS), the Episcopal Church’s mission work was in disarray. His post had been vacant for two years because so many others had declined it. There were missionary recruiting difficulties and frequent financial deficits. Regular oversight was provided by boards dominated by East Coast financiers, who were often generous but also locked heads with Mission House staff and were sometimes wary of expanding the field of work.

Church party strife was crippling. The American Church Missionary Society was an independent mission agency, supported by evangelical Episcopalians, to oversee newly planted churches in Brazil and Cuba, because High Church bishops at General Convention had blocked the use of church funds for mission in Roman Catholic countries.

Lloyd also locked heads early with the staunchly Protestant J.P. Morgan, a member of the DFMS’s Board of Managers, who was incensed by the display of Catholic vesture at the 1900 “Fond du Lac Circus,” the consecration of a coadjutor for Anglo-Catholic Bishop Charles Grafton. The church supported several missionaries working among immigrants in Grafton’s diocese, and Morgan promised that if these positions were cut, he would prevent more deficits. Lloyd found the suggestion intolerable, and the confrontation helped Lloyd realize how deeply the church needed a unified approach to mission.

At his farewell address in 1920, Lloyd remarked on just how exhausting and inefficient the system he inherited could sometimes be:

All these years in order to carry out your behests it has been necessary to win the favor of individuals …The individual man had to be convinced that what the Board proposed was a thing worth doing. Any priest in any parish in America could say to me, “I am not interested.” Any bishop in any diocese could say to me, “I am not interested.”

The financial structure of the national church and most dioceses was also extremely complicated at the turn of the century. In addition to the DFMS, there were national church boards for social service and Christian education, each responsible for its own fundraising and managed by an independent board, a pattern replicated at the diocesan level. Parishes sometimes received as many as six pledge requests each year, each asking for funds to be sent to a different office, and administrative staff for the various agencies struggled to keep mailing lists updated and to issue receipts.

Through its United Thank Offering, the Women’s Auxiliary (now Episcopal Church Women) had been working for over a decade to collect funds for missions. But Lloyd was frustrated that most of these were allocated to special projects proposed by particularly charismatic missionaries, some of them impractical, at a time when the church could barely make payroll.

Lloyd became a tireless traveler, speaking regularly at parishes across the country and visiting mission stations around the globe. While some visits were heartening, showing deep passion for mission work among ordinary Episcopalians, he was often frustrated by how poorly informed and narrowly focused clergy and parishioners were. The years following the 1910 Edinburgh Conference saw major expansions in mission work across English-speaking Protestantism, as churches put its vision of “winning the world for Christ in a generation” into action. But the Episcopal Church’s efforts seemed to fall further behind, hampered by inefficient systems and a lack of reliable funding.

Despite his frustration, Lloyd was a visionary, and just a few years into his work, he began advocating for a two-pronged approach to kindling a passion for missions and developing a unified structure for mobilizing resources. One part was raising awareness of the need: a churchwide survey, compelling storytelling about the needs, and a push for generous giving. This would eventually become the Nation-wide Campaign, whose posters I discovered in those fragile old magazines.

The other part was a massive reorganization, which would eventually give us the church structure we still know today. Lloyd proposed that the independent boards based out of Church Missions House be amalgamated, and their work overseen by a single body, elected by General Convention. Mission work should be funded by allocations from dioceses instead of pledges from individual parishes, and governed by a triennial budget. The entire organization should be led by the Presiding Bishop, who would give up his see for a time, devoting his energies entirely to the church’s wider mission.

“The Psychological Moment”

Lloyd saw some small steps toward his vision during the first decade and a half of his work at Church Missions House, but World War I proved to be an unexpected catalyst for change. The war years brought several troubling trends in the Episcopal Church’s life to a near-crisis point. College and seminary enrollment plummeted with so many young men entering military service, while the economy experienced four years of double-digit inflation. Several Episcopal-affiliated colleges closed or dropped their affiliations (a 1920 TLC editorial claimed the total shrank in a generation from 24 to just three colleges, and two of these were in financial crisis). For the first time in many years, the number of clergy failed to keep pace with the church’s growth in communicants.

Through the war years the church had relied on a series of crisis appeals at the end of the fiscal year, embarrassing and exhausting projects, which had the accidental advantage of training a few Church Missions House staff (especially future Nation-Wide Campaign manager the Rev. R. Bland Mitchell) in the logistics of high-stakes fundraising.

Still, by 1919, flagging revenues and high interest rates left the DFMS with an operating deficit of over $700,000 (about $12.7 million in today’s money), an amount equal to about a third of the annual operating budget. Without dramatic action, the church was in serious danger of bankruptcy. However, the war years had also brought major changes to what we would today call the nonprofit sector. The Treasury Department’s four “Liberty Loan” campaigns used compelling mass advertising and large-scale rallies to sell about $22 billion in war bonds, with about a third of adult Americans participating, many of them purchasing financial securities for the first time. The Red Cross also massively expanded its operations, developing hundreds of local chapters and new organizational and promotional methods.

There was now a practical template for the kind of churchwide education and fundraising project that Lloyd had long envisioned, and the Episcopal Church’s Nation-wide Campaign would draw directly on these successful models, recruiting key leaders from both recent successful movements. The immediate post-war period was also marked by deep social unity and a buoyant optimism that encouraged bold social experiments of various kinds. The years 1919 and 1920 brought Constitutional amendments authorizing Prohibition and Women’s Suffrage, the founding of the League of Nations, and the Lambeth Appeal’s call to church unity.

In a Nation-Wide Campaign rally in 1919, the movement’s assistant director, the Rev. Louis G. Woods, referenced this unmistakable trend when he spoke of “the divine inspiration which launched the movement at the psychological moment when the supreme lesson of the great war had attuned the hearts of mankind to the truths of religion.”

“The need of those who fought in Flanders felt in those long nights on listening post is being met,” he continued. “The vague longing for a solvent to heal the wounds of the world conflict is realizing itself.”

Go where we would in 1918, the people would meet us and say: “what is the Church going to do now to prepare for the reconstruction when this war is at an end? When the boys come home, full of zeal and eagerness, what will you have for them to do?” The answer is the Nation-Wide Campaign.

At the December 1918 meeting of the Board of Missions, Lloyd proposed steps toward the consolidation of the work of all national church boards, and a campaign for the whole Episcopal Church focused on education about the church’s mission work, followed by a survey of needs and solicitation of pledges for financial support. The Rev. Robert Patton, who had led similar efforts in the Province of Sewanee (as Province IV was then known), was tapped to lead the effort. Initially, $5,000 was set aside for the effort, but this was eventually expanded to a three-year allocation of $350,000 ($6.4 million in today’s funds), a bold endorsement when the church’s finances were already distressed.

Lewis B. Franklin, a New York businessman who had directed the Liberty Loans program, volunteered his time for the effort, and H.P. Davidson, chairman of the Red Cross War Council, joined the board. Patton enlisted a talented group of young clergy as “advance men,” who fanned out across the church to promote the campaign through vigorous missionary sermons, mass meetings in major cities, regular presentations about mission work, and the training of canvassers, who would make house visits to each parish family in following weeks. At least seven of them, including Bland Mitchell, who coordinated the logistics, would become diocesan bishops.

Tomorrow’s post will discuss the 1919 General Convention, which wholeheartedly endorsed the campaign and authorized major structural changes, as well as the Nation-Wide Campaign’s long-term effects and what it can teach us about responding to current challenges.