It was first incorporated under Royal Charter in 1701 as the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) as a high churchmissionary organization of the Church of England and was active in the Thirteen Colonies of North America.[3] The group was renamed in 1965 as the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG) after incorporating the activities of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA). In 1968 the Cambridge Mission to Delhi also joined the organization. From November 2012[4] until 2016, the name was United Society or Us. In 2016, it was announced that the Society would return to the name USPG, this time standing for United Society Partners in the Gospel, from 25 August 2016.[5]
During its more than three hundred years of operations, the Society has supported more than 15,000 men and women in mission roles within the worldwide Anglican Communion. Working through local partner churches, the charity's current focus is the support of emergency relief, longer-term development, and Christian leadership training projects. The charity encourages parishes in United Kingdom and Ireland to participate in Christian mission work through fundraising, prayer, and by setting up links with its projects around the world.
History
Foundation and mission work in North America
Seal of the "Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts" (1701)
In 1700, Henry Compton, Bishop of London (1675–1713), requested the Revd Thomas Bray to report on the state of the Church of England in the American Colonies. Bray, after extended travels in the region, reported that the Anglican church in America had "little spiritual vitality" and was "in a poor organizational condition". Under Bray's initiative, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts was authorised by convocation and incorporated by Royal Charter[6] on 16 June 1701. King William III issued a charter establishing the SPG as "an organisation able to send priests and schoolteachers to America to help provide the Church's ministry to the colonists".[7] The new society had two main aims: Christian ministry to British people overseas; and evangelization of the non-Christian races of the world.[6]
The society's first two missionaries, graduates of the University of Aberdeen, George Keith and Patrick Gordon, sailed from England for North America on 24 April 1702.[8] By 1710 the Society's charter had expanded to include work among enslaved Africans in the West Indies and Native Americans in North America.[7] The SPG funded clergy and schoolmasters, dispatched books, and supported catechists through annual fundraising sermons in London that publicized the work of the mission society.[9]Queen Anne was a noted early supporter, contributing her own funds and authorizing in 1711 the first of many annual Royal Letters requiring local parishes in England to raise a "liberal contribution" for the Society's work overseas.[10]
In New England, the Society had to compete with a growing Congregational church movement, as the Anglican Church was not established here. With resourceful leadership it made significant inroads in more traditional Puritan states such as Connecticut and Massachusetts. The SPG also helped to promote distinctive designs for new churches using local materials, and promoted the addition of steeples. The white church with steeple was copied by other groups and became associated with New England-style churches among the range of Protestant denominations.[11] Such designs were also copied by church congregations in the Southern colonies.
From 1702 until the American Revolution, the SPG had recruited and employed more than 309 missionaries to the American colonies that came to form the United States.[12] Many of the parishes founded by SPG clergy on the Eastern seaboard of the United States are now listed among the historic parishes of the Episcopal Church. SPG clergy were instructed to live simply, but considerable funds were used on the construction of new church properties. The SPG clergy were ordained, university-educated men, described at one time by Thomas Jefferson as "Anglican Jesuits." They were recruited from across the British Isles and further afield; only one third of the missionaries employed by the Society in the 18th century were English.[12] Included in their number such notable individuals as George Keith, and John Wesley, the founder of Methodism (which was originally a movement within the Anglican Church).[13] The SPG and all British officials were permanently expelled[where?] in 1776.[citation needed]
Through a charitable bequest bestowed upon the SPG by Barbadian planter and colonial administrator Christopher Codrington, the Codrington Plantations (and the slaves working on them) came under the ownership of the Society. With the aim of supplying funding for Codrington College in Barbados, the SPG was the beneficiary of the forced labour of thousands of enslaved Africans on the plantations. Many of the slaves on the plantations died from such diseases as dysentery and typhoid, after being weakened by overwork.[citation needed] The SPG even branded its slaves on the chest with the word SOCIETY to show who they belonged to.[14] In 1758, the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Secker agreed to reimburse funds to the SPG's accounts for the purchase of slaves from Africa and the hiring of third party enslaved labour. Between 1710 and 1838, around 600 to 1,200 slaves lived and died on the plantations.[15]
The ownership of the Codrington Plantations by the SPG started to come under scrutiny during the late 18th century, as the British abolitionist movement started to emerge. In 1783, Bishop Beilby Porteus, an early proponent of abolitionism, used the occasion of the SPG's annual anniversary sermon to highlight the conditions at the Codrington Plantations and called for the SPG to end its connection with colonial slavery.[16] However, the SPG did not relinquish ownership of its plantations in Barbados until the passage in Parliament of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.[citation needed]
At the February 2006 meeting of the Church of England's General Synod, attendees commemorated the church's role in helping to pass the Slave Trade Act of 1807 to abolish Britain's involvement in the slave trade. The attendees also voted unanimously to apologise to the descendants of slaves for the church's involvement in and support of the slave trade and slavery. Tom Butler, the Bishop of Southwark, confirmed in a speech before the vote that the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts had owned the Codrington Plantations.[14]
On Friday 8 September 2023, USPG announced at a press conference in Barbados that it will be seeking to address the wrongs of the past by committing to a long-term project: ‘Renewal & Reconciliation: The Codrington Reparations Project’.[17] The project will be in partnership with Codrington Trust and the Church in the Province of the West Indies (CPWI). The work will include four areas of work in collaboration with the descendants of the enslaved; community development and engagement; historical research & education; burial places & memorialisation, and family research. USPG has pledged, in response to proposals that Codrington Trust has advanced, 18M Barbadian dollars - (£7M) - to be spent in Barbados over the next 10–15 years to support this work.[18][19]
Africa
The Rev. Thomas Thompson, having first served as an SPG missionary in colonial New Jersey, established the Society's first mission outpost at Cape Coast Castle on the Gold Coast in 1752. In 1754 he arranged for three local students to travel to England be trained as missionaries at the Society's expense. Two died from ill health, but the surviving student, Philip Quaque, became the first African to receive ordination in the Anglican Communion. He returned to the Gold Coast in 1765 and worked there in a missionary capacity until his death in 1816.[20]
SPG missionary activities in South Africa began in 1821. The Society's work in the wider region made significant progress under the leadership of Bishop Robert Gray, expanding to Natal in 1850, Zululand in 1859, Swaziland in 1871 and Mozambique in 1894. During the period 1752–1906, the Society employed a total of 668 European and locally recruited missionaries in Africa.[20]
Global expansion
The Society established mission outposts in Canada in 1759, Australia in 1793, and India in 1820. It later expanded outside the British Empire to China in 1863, Japan in 1873, and Korea in 1890. By the middle of the 19th century, the Society's work was focused more on the promotion and support of indigenous Anglican churches and the training of local church leadership, than on the supervision and care of colonial and expatriate church congregations.
From the mid-1800s until the Second World War, the pattern of mission work remained similar: pastoral, evangelistic, educational and medical work contributing to the growth of the Anglican Church and aiming to improve the lives of local people. During this period, the SPG also supported increasing numbers of indigenous missionaries of both sexes, as well as medical missionary work.
Women's missionary leadership
To a limited degree, the Society was socially progressive from the mid-1800s in its encouragement of women from Britain and Ireland, including single women, to train and work as missionaries in their own right, rather than only as the wives of male missionaries. In 1866, the SPG established the Ladies' Association for Promoting the Education of Females in India and other Heathen Countries in Connection with the Missions of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.[21] In 1895, this group was updated to the Women's Mission Association for the Promotion of Female Education in the Missions of the SPG. As part of the inclusion of more women in this organization, Marie Elizabeth Hayes was accepted into the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in 1905. She served as a member of the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, India, where she is known for her notable work as a Christian Medical Missionary. Her leadership in the medical field promoted more women's leadership in the Society's mission activities.
The promotion of women's leadership within the Society's overseas mission activities was championed for many years by Louise Creighton, also an advocate for women's suffrage. At the peak of SPG missionary activity in India, between 1910 and 1930, more than 60 European women missionaries were at any one time employed in teaching, medical or senior administrative roles in the country.[22] In Japan, Mary Cornwall Legh, working among people with Hansen's disease at Kusatsu, Gunma. She was regarded as one of the most effective Christian missionaries to have served in the Nippon Sei Ko Kai.[23] In China, Ethel Margaret Phillips (1876–1951) was an SPG medical missionary who constructed two hospitals, worked with the YWCA, and went on to establish a private practice.[24]
Post-Second World War reorganization
The SPG, alongside the Church Mission Society (CMS), continued to be one of the leading agencies for evangelistic mission and relief work for the Churches of England, Wales, and Ireland in the decades following the Second World War. In the context of decolonization in Africa and India's independence in 1947, new models of global mission engagement between the interdependent member provinces of the Anglican Communion were required.
In 1965 the SPG merged with the Universities' Mission to Central Africa (UMCA), and in 1968 with the Cambridge Mission to Delhi, to form the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (USPG). The Society found a new role in support of clergy training and in the movement of community development specialists, resources and ideas around the world church.
Notable churches, health care, and educational institutions
The list of SPG- and USPG-founded and sponsored church, hezlthcare, and educational institutions is geographically diverse. In some cases direct funding was supplied by the Society; in others SPG and USPG mission staff played prominent roles as founding ordained clergy, fundraisers, academic and administrative staff.
The modern charity's work is devoted to increasing local churches' capacity to be agents of positive change in the communities that they serve. The United Society "seeks to advance Christian religion," but also to promote and support local Anglican church partners in their mission activities in a local community context. Project work includes community based health care provision for expectant mothers and for those with HIV and AIDS, as well as education and work skills training programmes. The charity is also involved in the training and development of Anglican lay and ordained church leaders and localized social advocacy on a diverse range of issues from gender based violence to climate change.
Projects in Africa still attract the largest percentage of the United Society's funding due to historic links and established endowments. In the financial year 2013, the charity supported church based initiatives in poverty relief, health, education and church leadership training in 20 different countries.[25]
The Clapham Sect, or Clapham Saints, were a group of social reformers associated with Holy Trinity Clapham in the period from the 1780s to the 1840s. Despite the label "sect", most members remained in the established Church of England, which was highly interwoven with offices of state. However, its successors were in many cases outside of the established Anglican Church.
The Methodist Episcopal Church (MEC) was the oldest and largest Methodist denomination in the United States from its founding in 1784 until 1939. It was also the first religious denomination in the US to organize itself nationally. In 1939, the MEC reunited with two breakaway Methodist denominations to form the Methodist Church. In 1968, the Methodist Church merged with the Evangelical United Brethren Church to form the United Methodist Church.
Beilby Porteus, successively Bishop of Chester and of London, was a Church of England reformer and a leading abolitionist in England. He was the first Anglican in a position of authority to seriously challenge the Church's position on slavery.
Roland Allen was an English missionary to China sent by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG).
Codrington College is an Anglican theological college in St. John, Barbados now affiliated with the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill. It is one of the oldest Anglican theological colleges in the Americas. It was affiliated to the University of Durham from 1875 to 1965.
The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) is a UK-based Christian charity. Founded in 1698 by Thomas Bray, it has worked for over 300 years to increase awareness of the Christian faith in the UK and worldwide.
Thomas Bray was an English clergyman and abolitionist who helped formally establish the Church of England in Maryland, as well as the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge and Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.
The Church of the Province of Myanmar in Asia is a member church of the Anglican Communion. The province comprises the entire country of Myanmar. The current archbishop of Myanmar and bishop of Yangon is Stephen Than Myint Oo.
The Anglican Diocese of Belize was established in 1883. The current bishop is Philip Wright.
Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui, known in English as the Holy Catholic Church in China or Anglican-Episcopal Province of China, was the Anglican Church in China from 1912 until about 1958, when it ceased operations.
The Episcopal Church (TEC), based in the United States with additional dioceses elsewhere, is a member church of the worldwide Anglican Communion. It is a mainline Protestant denomination and is divided into nine provinces. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church is Michael Bruce Curry, the first African American bishop to serve in that position.
The Universities' Mission to Central Africa was a missionary society established by members of the Anglican Church within the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, and Dublin. It was firmly in the Anglo-Catholic tradition of the Church, and the first to devolve authority to a bishop in the field rather than to a home committee. Founded in response to a plea by David Livingstone, the society established the mission stations that grew to be the bishoprics of Zanzibar and Nyasaland, and pioneered the training of black African priests.
The Reverend Griffith Hughes, FRS, was a Welsh naturalist, clergyman, and author. Hughes wrote The Natural History of Barbados, which included the first description of the grapefruit. His work was praised by Linnaeus, but it has also been considered a "scientific fraud".
James MacSparran was an Irish-born Anglican clergyman, writer, diarist, and slaveowner.
The history of Methodism in the United States dates back to the mid-18th century with the ministries of early Methodist preachers such as Laurence Coughlan and Robert Strawbridge. Following the American Revolution most of the Anglican clergy who had been in America came back to England. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, sent Thomas Coke to America where he and Francis Asbury founded the Methodist Episcopal Church, which was to later establish itself as the largest denomination in America during the 19th century.
The Cambridge Mission to Delhi was an Anglican Christian missionary initiative to India in the mid 19th and early 20th centuries led by graduates of the University of Cambridge. Individual members of the mission community are credited with helping to establish St. Stephens's College, a constituent College of the current University of Delhi, for social reform initiatives, and for providing support in the later years of the Indian independence movement.
The Codrington Plantations were two historic sugarcane producing estates on the island of Barbados, established in the 17th century by Christopher Codrington and his father of the same name. Sharing the characteristics of many plantations of the period in their exploitation of slavery, their particular significance was as a part of a charitable bequest in 1710, on the death of the third Christopher Codrington (1668–1710), to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG).
Francis Le Jau was a missionary to South Carolina with the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG). Born into a French Huguenot family in the La Rochelle region of France he later fled to England during the persecution of Huguenots after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. He subsequently converted to Anglicanism and eventually graduated from Trinity College, Dublin. In 1700 he moved to St. Christopher's Island where he served for 18 months at the request of Bishop Henry Compton. From 1706 until his death in 1717 Le Jau served as a missionary to South Carolina based in Goose Creek.
Benjamin Henry Arthur Margoschis was a Protestant Christian missionary in India. He served the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) as an overseas missionary in India. The inhabitants of Nazareth, a small town in Tamil Nadu, called him the "Father of Nazareth" and Margoschis Aiyar. Aiyar means clergyman in the native language. Reverend Margoschis was responsible for the development of the small town of Nazareth, which is situated at the southern part of Tamil Nadu, India.
Bennett, J. Harry Jr. (1958). Bondsmen and Bishops: slavery and apprenticeship on the Codrington plantations of Barbados, 1710-1838. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Calam, John. Parsons and Pedagogues. The S. P. G. Adventure in American Education (Columbia UP, 1971), before 1776. online
Cox, Jeffrey (2002). Imperial Fault Lines: Christianity and Colonial Power in India, 1818-1940. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. ISBN0-8047-4318-5.
Cross, F. L, ed. (1957). The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. London: Oxford University Press.
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Glasson, Travis (2012). Mastering Christianity: Missionary Anglicanism and Slavery in the Atlantic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-977396-1.
Gregory, Jeremy (2013). Foster, Stephen (ed.). Britain and North America in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-920612-4.
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Ion, A. Hamish (1993). The Cross and the Rising Sun. Vol.2. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. ISBN978-1-55458-216-7.
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Pierre, C. E. (October 1916). "The Work of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts among the Negroes in the Colonies". Journal of Negro History. 1 (4): 349–360. doi:10.2307/3035610. JSTOR3035610. S2CID150088139.
Pascoe, Charles Frederick (1901). Two Hundred Years of the S.P.G.: an historical account of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1900 (based on a digest of the society's records). London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.
Parry, Thomas (1847). Codrington College. London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. p.11.
Seton, Rosemary (2013). Western Daughters in Eastern Lands: British Missionary Women in Asia. Santa Barbara: Praeger. ISBN978-1-84645-017-4.
Thompson, Henry Paget (1951). Into All Lands: a history of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1950. London: S.P.C.K.
Wilder, Craig (2013). Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press. ISBN978-1-59691-681-4.
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