My sermons and my presentation on Sunday will focus on mission and ministry in New York. Need I say that the focus will center on the life of the Episcopal Church in New York?
From the establishment of the Anglican Church in North America, it was understood that while it provided chaplains to the English colonists, it was also to be a missionary enterprise. Missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts(SPG) were obligated to Baptize Africans and native peoples as well as European settlers. Early bishops of the new American Church were zealous missionaries-not least John Henry Hobart of New York, Philander Chase of Ohio and Jackson Kemper of Wisconsin. Both of our parishes were founded both as conveniences for summer residents who were pew holders of Trinity Parish, and as mission enterprises to local rural populations. They quickly developed from summer chapels to year-round congregations.
As some of you know, my parish of St. Michael worships in a magnificent building which with other church structures covers three-fifths of the city block on which it stands. Like your parish of St. James' it is a 19th-century building and it is reflective of the assumptions of the Church in New York at that time: to grow a congregation and to build to accommodate that growth.
My predecessor, Dr. T.M. Peters who was a priest in the parish from 1843 to 1893 and Rector from 1858, addressed the need for a new church building in 1887 by asserting in his Annual Sermon that “we must build the foundations broad” in order to do the work the church was called to do. For him and for others of that time there were two sides to the Church’s work that were inseparable: the ministry to the community in which the particular part of the Church (the parish) found itself and the building up of the congregation of the parish itself. So in the construction of the new church (the third building on the site) there was also projected a Parish House to minister to the needs of the new immigrant populations settling to the north and east of the church.
Among the positions taken by Dr. Peters during his rectorate was that St. Michaels would be come a Free Church without rented or sold pews; ministry was extended to black and mixed-race people in various ways; and his oft repeated claim that St. Michael’s was ideally suited to proclaim the Gospel in its neighborhood as the well-to-do lived to the south and west of the church and the poor and immigrant lived to the east and north. Thus all manner of folks could worship God and respond to the Gospel together.
This effort continued with his son John Punnett Peters who succeeded him in 1893, and indeed, there were some signal events that marked his very remarkable ministry.
In addition to the initiatives of his father, the second Dr. Peters caused the parish to assume responsibility for an African American mission congregation in 99th Street; he attended the Niagara Conference where the NAACP was founded; a member of the parish, Margaret Elizabeth Furniss Zimmerman, bequeathed $1 million+ to St. Michaels in 1918 for its mission work, and shortly after Peters' death, the Vestry appropriated $200,000 of endowment funds (in 1919 dollars) to construct St. Jude’s Chapel for that African-American congregation for which he had assumed responsibility. Bishop Manning consecrated it in 1922.
This period up to the first World War is known as the Progressive era, and many social changes began during and after it. The question I would pose is this: Have those changes in the society--Jim Crow laws imposed in the south, Asian exclusion laws in the west, anti-immigration legislation, increased lynching; the Great Depression, World War 2; and the suburban migrations thereafter caused the Church in New York and the Episcopal Church generally--allowed part of its DNA (the English village church) to overcome Jesus’ command to go out and to proclaim the Good News and to Baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit? The Episcopal Church has vastly more parishes of 100-200 members than parishes like St. James' or St. Michaels. We seem to like those small village-like churches(our DNA, yet what about Jesus’ command and the legacy of our founders and forbearers?
The Rev. Canon George W. Brandt, Jr.+
Rector, St. Michaels, Manhattan
The Rev. Canon Brandt will be the next Bicentennial Guest Preacher at St. James' on Sunday, December 13. He will preach at both the 9:10 a.m. and 11:15 a.m. services and speak at the adult education forum at 10:30 on "Ministry and Mission in New York City."
