Virginia Anglicanism - 2

My last posting looked at Anglicanism in Virginia between 1607 and establishment and disendowment c.1800. The latter events all but killed the fledgling Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia, a situation not helped by Bishop Madison's declining health. After the state Convention of 1805, the local governing body was not to meet again until 1812, when its primary function was to elect a successor to Bishop Madison who had died the previous year. However, it must not be thought that Madison had collapsed into complete inertia between 1805 and 1811. He had continued to ordain such candidates as had presented themselves, including later bishop William Meade, and still made visitations to churches within easy reach of Williamsburg, but in the main he had conserved his remaining strength for his College duties at William and Mary.

[The Monumental Church, Richmond]

Although Madison's efforts ensured the survival of William and Mary at least until the great crisis of 1844-46, his efforts for the Church were at best half successful. In the anti-British atmosphere of the 1780s and 1790s the Church's association with the former monarchy and Establishment had given it some powerful enemies, and on the whole, the Virginia Church was much too dependent on colonial ways. The State Convention of 1812 elected Dr. Bracken as Madison's successor, but some of the younger clergy, led by Meade and Wilmer, based in northern Virginia opposed the election, and Bracken was induced to resign his election the following year. A new Standing Committee was elected which was based in the northern part of the Commonwealth, and this left the way clear for a new election, and an opportunity to bring in new blood to revive an ailing Church.

The choice fell on Richard Channing Moore (1762-1841), a native of New Hampshire who had settled in New York, and, following a religious experience, changed careers from medicine to the ministry being an immensely successful rector first on Staten Island, and then at St Stephen's, NYC. At the age of 50, Moore was at the height of his powers, but it took careful negotiation to bring him to Virginia. He was reluctant to be seen as actively condoning the campaign to elect him to the office of bishop, and he was uncertain of his prospects in a Southern State. In the end, he was elected as the new Bishop of Virginia, and also a first Rector of the new Monumental Church, Richmond. As one church historian rather memorably put it, "he came to Virginia to be rector of a church which did not yet have a congregation, and bishop of a diocese which was all but dead."

Moore was consecrated in 1814, and immediately took up his duties in Virginia. He settled into a pattern of itinerating around the Commonwealth in the summer, preaching in abandoned churches and courthouses, as well as in the remaining congregations of the Church. This active style of leadership, couple with an Evangelical emphasis, and an attractive personality began to revive memories of an Anglican heritage among Virginians, and slowly but surely, old parishes revived, and new ones began to be created. Moore spent the rest of the year at the Monumental Church where he soon gathered a large, active, and well-heeled congregation. The standing committee of the Virginia Convention was dominated by Anglican Evangelicals, and in many ways, the Virginia Church came to embody a moderate, discipline, educated, and liturgical manifestation of the wider American Evangelical culture. However, in order to grow the Church, something had to be done to secure a supply of "fit persons suited to the ministry."

The initial attempt focused on reviving the Divinity Faculty at the College of William and Mary. Funding was found, but the lectures attracted only a handful of hearers, and ceased after a few years with efforts then being concentrated on founding a Seminary in northern Virginian. The Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Virginia opened in 1823 in two houses rented in Alexandria, moving a few years later to a rural site at what came to be known as Seminary Hill. Virginia Seminary grew to be the main Evangelical seminary within the Episcopal Church and supplied clergy not just to Virginia, but to other Southern States as well as Massachusetts and Philadelphia until the War Between The States. Unlike the more churchly General Seminary in New York, Virginia was more experiential in its approach to Christianity, and, unlike General where daily offices from the Prayerbook were the norm, the devotional life at Alexandria was orientated more towards Family Prayers, and less formal gathering during the week, but with the due performance of the Prayer Book services on Sundays. This tendency towards a practical approach also showed in the use of seminarians to help with church extension work, and assist in churches on the weekends, so that, but the time they left Virginia Seminary, they were more ready for parochial ministry than clergy with a more purely academic training.

The institutions and methods that Moore set up in the first decade or so of his episcopate in Virginia were to endure until at least the War. William Meade was elected as his assistant, and eventual successor in 1829, and after the death of Moore, John Johns (1797-1877) was elected to take the assistant's slot. With its heavy emphasis on mission, travelling preachers, personal holiness, and lack of formality, the Virginia Church of the 19th century perhaps had a slight feel of the old Methodism about it, but it was a combination that helped to reestablish the Church in the Old Dominion in the years following disestablishment and disendowment. By 1860, the Church was in a healthy and thriving position and was making gains not just in its traditional home in the Tidewater and Piedmont, but was growing strongly in the Shenandoah Valley, and in what was to become West Virginia.