Understanding the context in which the Episcopal Council on Global Mission was established in 1990, and its successor network, the Episcopal Partnership for Global Mission in 2000, requires an understanding of the longer history of world mission in the Episcopal Church. In 1835 the General Convention put the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society (DFMS) on a church-wide footing, making mission a church-wide responsibility. Every member of the Episcopal Church was designated as being a member of the missionary society as well as a member of the Episcopal Church. Thus, DFMS was created to be a centralized mission sending society on behalf of the whole church, and mission, both global and domestic, was a mandate in which every member was to be concerned.
This centralized structure for mission work contrasted with the voluntary society principle in the Church of England, which, as a whole, never sent any missionaries internationally. Instead, mission, whether foreign or domestic, was the province of voluntary societies of committed people who banded together to promote and implement it. A number of such groups were founded for world mission: the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1698, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1701, the Church Missionary Society in 1799, the South American Missionary Society in 1844, and a number of other organizations. It should be noted, however, that the voluntary principle also had two major expressions in ECUSA in the 19th century: the American Missionary Society, which did not survive, and the Episcopal Church Women and their United Thank Offering, which flourish to this day.
Thus, with some exceptions, Anglicanism in the UK and the USA had two different ecclesiologies for how to carry out mission: a church-wide, centralized and somewhat top-down ecclesiology in ECUSA, where world mission was considered to be the responsibility of the whole church; and a grass-roots, voluntary ecclesiology in the Church of England, which implied that world mission, while important, was better left to particularly passionate advocates. Both approaches ultimately carried mission out on a worldwide basis, initially focusing on areas where the respective national governments had influence through colonial and imperial expansion.
We now fast-forward to the late 1960s, when the General Convention Special Program’s focus on the urban and racial crises in the USA resulted in drastically reduced funding for international missionaries, with numbers sinking from about 260 in 1968 to about 70 in 1974. This upset Episcopalians who continued to be committed to world mission, and they wondered whether the DFMS would ultimately abandon missionary-sending altogether. To continue reading this history, please download the pdf here!
To read the historical document that established EPGM in 1999, please download the pdf here! 