In the first part of this two-part essay, I discussed the visionary leadership of Bishop Arthur Selden Lloyd, who served as General Secretary of the Episcopal Church’s Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society from 1899 to 1919. Inheriting an inefficient and poorly financed system for supporting mission work, Lloyd developed a plan for administrative and financial restructuring, combined with a church-wide push to inform, raise funds, and nurture spiritual growth: the Nation-Wide Campaign.
The Campaign and “The Most Important Legislation Ever”
The campaign was formally launched on Easter 1918, with letters by Lloyd and Presiding Bishop Daniel Tuttle in all the church papers. A massive survey of the church’s needs accompanied the efforts, ultimately finding that the church needed to double its number of missionaries, and to triple annual funding.
Snappy full-page ads were commissioned, plus teaching materials and a pageant for Sunday Schools. The Rev. Frank Heartfield, rector of St. George’s, Newburgh, New York, drew on the militant spirit of the moment and organized his every member canvass committee as a draft board, which issued cards to each parish family announcing they were “hereby drafted for services.” The Ven. F.W. Neve, Archdeacon of the Blue Ridge in Virginia, wrote an official seven-verse campaign hymn, to the tune of Aurelia, which stirringly ended in a prayer:
We then in happy chorus sing Christ, our Lord, to Thee, / With every power awakened, from every sin set free. / We know Thou art before us, we feel Thy strength within, / Be with us, lead us, help us, the world for Thee to win.
The Living Church’s editor, F.C. Morehouse, became a major backer of the effort, and used many of his columns to detail specific needs: $120,000 for a theological college in Nanking, $100,000 for a boys boarding school in Cuba, a chapel for the growing student ministry at the University of Illinois, motor cars for rural missionaries in Northwest Texas.
The campaign was heartily endorsed by General Convention when it met in Detroit in October 1919. Its approval of the church’s first triennial budget included major financial support for the effort in subsequent years. The joint session on the campaign on October 15 was especially moving for those who worked and prayed for so long to bring it to life.
Lloyd said it “brought to the General Convention what I never saw there before. For one day the Spirit of God controlled that splendid body of men. I have never seen in my life a witness of the power of the Spirit of God in Christian men as I saw it manifested in the joint meeting of the two Houses at Detroit. It was the day that made me know the Campaign was according to the will of God, and would do what it was undertaking to do … It has proved that if the Church has a chance, and is given a chance, it will do what the Christ bade it to do.”
Morehouse was similarly ecstatic:
There ensued such a scene as the oldest members of General Convention had never witnessed before. The Day of Pentecost was fully come. With one accord, with one mind, in one place, the national Church of America almost visibly witnessed the descent of cloven tongues as of fire, and the pervading presence of the Holy Spirit rested upon all of us.
Shortly afterward, the convention approved a series of canonical changes that consolidated the church’s common work under a new body, “The Presiding Bishop and Council,” today’s Executive Council. Bishop T. Frank Gailor of Tennessee was elected as the council’s president, and set aside his diocesan work for three years to assume what would soon become the regular responsibility of the presiding bishop.
Morehouse lauded the canons creating the new council as “the most important piece of legislation that the American Church has ever enacted,” noting “the tremendous significance of the immediate mobilization of the whole Church’s power for continuous action.” The Rev. George P. Atwater, a prominent Ohio clergyman, said, “A national consciousness has dawned. We are now the Church in the United States, and not a Church scattered across geographical areas. National thinking, national action, and national cooperation will result in glorious national achievement.”
TLC also documented this “glorious national achievement” week after week for much of the year following “Mobilization Day” — December 7, 1919 — when pledges were collected and tallied. These listings, which still inspire, emphasized the spiritual transformation that accompanied fundraising success.
The January 31, 1920, “Mobilization Day and After” column noted that Sunday attendance had doubled since the campaign began at St. John’s Church in Ames, Iowa, and 22 young people had dedicated themselves to life service in the church, including six for the priesthood. At St. Paul’s in Kent, Maryland, pledges were secured for a new rectory, a pipe organ, and an increase of $300 in the rector’s salary.
A month later, at St. Athanasius’, a Black church in Brunswick, Georgia, 52 women joined the Altar Guild and eight boys and three men committed to the choir. Pledges quadrupled at the Church of the Ascension in Sierra Madre, California, and two brand new missions in Uvalde and Del Rio, Texas, raised pledges for mission totaling $54,000, or $270 per communicant ($4,832 in 2024 dollars). At the “sleeping mission” in Armour, South Dakota, where services had been held only once a month for 20 years, parishioners guaranteed the whole salary of their new rector, purchased a house for him, and made plans to build a new church.
Initial estimates that the campaign would raise $55 million for diocesan and national purposes (just over $1 billion in today’s money) proved to be overblown. But the 1922 State of the Church report noted that annual funding for the church’s mission had doubled during the previous triennium, and diocesan revenues had tripled. Existing debts were retired, 187 new missionaries were sent into the field, and Sunday School enrollment increased by 24,000 pupils. All across the church, dioceses launched summer camps, college ministries, and training institutes for teachers and social service workers.
“The Nation-Wide Campaign has accomplished one of the most stupendous tasks that has ever confronted the Church in establishing the principles and practice of Christian stewardship among our people. The whole Church has a wider vision of her chief purpose and responsibility,” the 1922 report said.
Lloyd had by then stepped down from his longstanding role at Church Mission House, but nearly all his remaining proposals would be implemented in the next several years. Dioceses swiftly consolidated their boards and set up new administrative structures after the “Presiding Bishop and Council” model. The “partnership” model of funding, by which parishes would pay a single assessment to the diocese, part of which would be passed on to the national church, gradually followed.
In 1925, the House of Bishops elected John Gardner Murray of Maryland to serve as the first Presiding Bishop fully devoted to leading the national church. A firm Nation-Wide Campaign man, Murray proposed “Pay, Pray, and Perform” as the Episcopal Church’s slogan. Others who led the campaign would rise to prominence in following decades, and helped to carry forward its ethos of bold, unified action. The stewardship campaigns most parishes still hold each fall are a faint shadow of that Pentecostal moment that shook the Episcopal Church more than a century ago.
Lessons for Structural Change Today
Replicating the Nation-Wide Campaign is not a realistic solution to the problems the Episcopal Church faces today, but when we talk about cutting funds and simplifying structures, it’s worth taking care to avoid the problems our current system once aimed to solve. Too much bureaucracy can be deadly, but so is poorly coordinated effort. Our church will not be able to meet the challenges before us if we make our funding systems too complex or dependent on the prejudices of the powerful.
Factionalism is no less a temptation now than it was a century ago. Directing more funds to local mission is needed, but we must find other meaningful ways to pursue common action at a churchwide level, as a testimony to the unity that is Christ’s calling and gift.
The Episcopal Church thrived in a great time of crisis by accurately gauging the passions of a historical moment, and using what was then state-of-the-art organizational theory. It also sought talented lay and clerical leaders, many of them young, setting a bold vision before them, and giving them space to use their gifts.
There is little evidence to suggest that we are now in a watershed moment of national unity, but many of the challenges we face are common across other religious groups and the nonprofit sector. We must seek the best counsel possible in plans for restructuring, drawing on models that have proved successful in other places. We should tap leaders with expertise and give them space to try different solutions. At least some of them should be young, so there will be champions for our new vision and new systems for generations to come.
The Nation-Wide Campaign was ultimately fruitful because it was a spiritual movement, rooted in prayer and faithful preaching, issuing a challenge to mature discipleship. It aimed to expand mission work at the local, diocesan, and national church level. It trusted in God’s ability to move among his people, believing, in Lloyd’s words, that if the Church “is given a chance, it will do what the Christ bade it to do.”
The evangelists of 1919 had the advantage of appealing to themes at the heart of the gospel — the summons of the Great Commission, the thrilling spectacle of Pentecost, the abundant gifts of the Holy Spirit. Finding the right biblical themes and rhetorical moves to motivate us to consolidate structures and shrink budgets may be more challenging, but if we focus solely on logistics and methods, a great opportunity will be lost. If our new systems aren’t ultimately intended to bring unbelievers to Jesus and stir up the faithful for the work of ministry, they will not be worthwhile or enduring.
My prayer is that the Holy Spirit who once descended on General Convention as a “pervading presence,” bringing unity, joy, and hope, will come among us once more as we face the challenges of a new time of crisis with boldness. Archdeacon Neve’s prayer is still worth singing: “Be with us, lead us, help us, the world for Thee to win.”
Great article, Fr. Mark.