Protestant Episcopal Church Mission

The Protestant Episcopal Church Mission was an Christian missionary initiative of the Episcopal Church that was involved in sending and providing financial support to lay and ordained mission workers in growing population centers in the west of the United States as well as overseas in China, Liberia and Japan during the second half of the 19th Century.

The establishment of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS) by the 1821 General Convention of the Episcopal Church initially combined the voluntary and centralized modes of missionary support, for it was an official organ of the church, but members paid voluntary dues. After this version of the DFMS proved to have little appeal, the 1835 General Convention took the major step of amending the DFMS constitution to read, “The Society shall be considered as comprehending all persons who are members of this Church.” Although solving the membership problem, this change had a strong theological motivation, as expressed at the time by George Washington Doane, bishop of New Jersey, to the DFMS directors:

In an address of great power, he argued "that by the original constitution of Christ, the Church as the Church, was the one great Missionary Society; and the Apostles, and the Bishops, their successors, his perpetual trustees; and this great trust could not, and should never be divided or deputed." The duty, he maintained, to support the Church in preaching the Gospel to every creature, passed on every Christian via the baptismal vow, and they could never be absolved from it.

Legislating that every Episcopalian was a member of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society emphasized that the Church as a whole was called to mission, which defined the church’s nature. Thus, the argument ran, mission could not be delegated to one part of the Church, still less to the purely voluntary inclinations of some of its members. Instead it must be embraced by the whole church and expressed through the missionary activity of each of its baptized members. This view constitutes the precedent for today’s emphasis in many denominations on baptismal mission and on the missional nature of the church.

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