The Rt. Rev. Robert Smith
The colony of South Carolina was founded in the year 1670, 350 years ago this year, but its origins date to 1662, when Charles II granted a charter to eight lords proprietors for an extensive territory in the nascent colonies of North America to be called the Province of Carolina. The establishment of the colony was an economic venture. The original governing document of the province, the Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina—never officially enacted but generally followed—was written by a young man by the name of John Locke, then secretary to Anthony Ashley Cooper, later Earl of Shaftesbury.
During the colonial era, the fledgling church in the colony was under the authority of the Bishop of London. The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel sent clergy to minister on these shores. In 1680, St. Philip’s was the first congregation to be organized. The General Assembly of South Carolina enacted the Church Act of 1706, which established the Church of England as the official church in South Carolina, a status it would enjoy for the next seven decades. The foundation was laid, and the church in South Carolina began to flourish. The colony thrived, largely owing to the cultivation of indigo, and then rice, and would become the wealthiest colony in the New World during the eighteenth century. Cotton would become king in the decades leading up to the Civil War.
We acknowledge that this wealth was made possible only because of the exploitation of enslaved people. South Carolina as a British colony was born in slavery, and the legacy of the institution of slavery permeates every aspect of our society, even to the present day. We are now striving to follow the admonition of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, when he noted that true reconciliation can only occur if there is a proper confrontation. We are striving to confront our past and ourselves in order to move into a more just and hopeful future.
After the Revolutionary War, the Church of England was disestablished in South Carolina. In 1785, the Church reorganized itself as the Protestant Episcopal Church in South Carolina. The Diocese of South Carolina was one of the nine original dioceses that formed the Episcopal Church. In 1789, at the third General Convention, meeting in Philadelphia, the Episcopal Church in the United States of America adopted its constitution and canons, as well as approved a Book of Common Prayer for our American context.
The first Bishop of the Diocese of South Carolina was Robert Smith, who also served as rector of St Philip’s Church as well as president of the College of Charleston. In our early Diocesan Constitution and Canons, it was Bishop Smith who insisted that the accession clause be included in our Constitution, indicating that we in South Carolina would be constituted as part of the wider Episcopal Church throughout the former thirteen colonies.
Our second bishop was Theodore Dehon, who was elected and consecrated in 1812. Even though Dehon would die of yellow fever in 1817 at the young age of forty-one, he left behind a volume of theological and pastoral writings, still yet to be compiled in book form for the benefit of us all. He (together with William White and John Henry Hobart and members of Trinity Church in New York and others) was instrumental in the founding of the General Theological Seminary in 1817. Even though we have not always acted like it, since our earliest beginnings, except during the Civil War, we in South Carolina have relished being part of the wider church.
By the time of the Civil War, almost half of the state’s Episcopalians were Black. On June 20, 1861, the diocese withdrew from the Episcopal Church, together with the other southern dioceses, who considered themselves to be the Episcopal Church in the Confederate States. When the war was over, South Carolina and the other southern dioceses promptly returned to the Episcopal Church.
During the period of Reconstruction, a number of parishes struggled over the issue of race, and resisted the admission of Black persons as full members of the diocese. St. Mark’s in Charleston, founded on Easter Day 1865, but not admitted to the Diocesan Convention until 1965, petitioned the Convention for full membership in 1875, around which time a number of parishes withdrew from the diocese for a season. Around the same time, the Reverend Anthony Toomer Porter, together with a couple of other priests, prepared two Black men for ordination. Bishop William Bell White Howe was in favor of the men being ordained. The Standing Committee of our diocese, however, refused to allow their ordinations to proceed; and with their decision, our diocese lost untold numbers of souls who then joined an emerging reformed movement, which would become known as the Reformed Episcopal Church. In addition to St. Mark’s, in 1965, all the Black congregations of the diocese were fully admitted as members of the Diocesan Convention.
In 1922, by act of the General Convention, the Diocese of South Carolina, which included the entire state, was formally divided, and the Diocese of Upper South Carolina was created. Columbia became the see city for Upper South Carolina, while Charleston continued to be the seat of the Bishop for the Diocese of South Carolina. The Diocese of South Carolina extends all the way from Hilton Head Island up to North Myrtle Beach, running the whole length of the coast and extending over 100 miles inland, including such regions as the High Hills of the Santee and the Pee Dee.
Just as we follow a wounded Savior, we in South Carolina also have as our legacy the witness of a martyred bishop. In June 1928, Bishop William Alexander Guerry, VIII Bishop of SC, was shot and killed by one of his own priests over the issue of race. Bishop Guerry had earlier supported the idea of a Black suffragan bishop; additionally, he was unswerving in his support for a fledgling school for Blacks in Denmark, South Carolina, founded by Evelyn Wright, which would become Voorhees College. The story of the reasons behind the Bishop’s death was buried, so effectively that until recently, we as a diocese had lost the collective memory of having had as our own chief priest and pastor a bishop who gave it all for the sake of inclusion and justice. Now, every year on a Sunday in June, across the diocese we observe Bishop Guerry Day, with propers and a fitting collect written for the occasion. Before Bishop Guerry died, he spoke of his assailant, saying: “Pray for him. Forgive him, Father, he knew not what he did.”
Beginning a little over a generation later, Bishop Gray Temple, XI Bishop, serving from 1961-1982, would bravely lead the diocese through the turbulent years of integration.
FitzSimons Allison was elected bishop coadjutor in 1980 and served as the XII Bishop until 1990. As a retired bishop, in the year 2000, Bishop Allison would serve as one of the consecrators in the extraprovincial consecrations in Singapore of two Episcopal priests as “missionary bishops.” This act would set the stage for lengthy upheaval throughout the entire Anglican Communion, as well as in our own diocese.
The episcopate of XIII Bishop Edward L. Salmon beginning in the 1990’s and continuing for eighteen years was marked by burgeoning numerical growth, accompanied by a vast campaign of building and the purchasing of worship spaces and rectories around the diocese, in addition to an emphasis on youth ministry and the encouragement and support of all manner of fruitful ministry endeavors. Bishop Salmon taught our diocese that the congregations compose the diocese; and if one wanted to see the diocese, one only need visit the congregations.
During the episcopate of Mark Lawrence, who, until late 2012, was the XIV Bishop of our diocese, in late 2012, the bishop and most of the clergy would lead the majority of congregations to separate from the Episcopal Church.
In 2012, we in the diocese were confronted with a choice about belonging to a Church where all God’s children would be welcome, no matter the cost. Last year, Debbie Pinckney, longtime Episcopalian and member of the Episcopal Church in Okatie, remarked quite matter-of-factly, “Our faith had become too easy. And these last few years I have learned what it is to have to stand up for my faith and be counted for the things that really matter.” This sentiment is not only our legacy when we are at our very best; it is also our future. It is, quite simply, who we are and who we strive to be, not only on the printed page, but in real life.
At our best, in the Diocese of South Carolina, we are both evangelical and catholic. It was Bishop Guerry who once declared, “If we are to be truly catholic, as Christ himself is Catholic, then we must have a church broad enough to embrace within its communion every living human soul.”
The years since the diocesan separation in 2012 have been marked by growth and progress as we seek to serve our Lord in creative ways throughout the diocese. The play Truth in Cold Blood, which detailed the murder of Bishop Guerry and the events leading up to it, was written by Diocesan Chancellor Thomas Tisdale, and performed at the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston in 2014. This necessary reckoning with our past has continued in earnest, following not only the re-telling of the Guerry story but also the massacre at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015. Book studies and other efforts aimed at racial justice and provoking new insights and understanding continue to multiply around the diocese.
Given the reality that we in South Carolina had a bishop who died for racial justice, it was particularly poignant in April of 2016, when Grace Church in Charleston was consecrated as the cathedral church of South Carolina, and the Most Reverend Michael Curry, the first Black Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, presided and preached. “The truth,” as Bishop Guerry once asserted, “is worth fighting [struggling] for.” The Very Reverend Dr. Robert Willis, Dean of Canterbury, presented a stone for the cathedral, hewn out of stone from Canterbury Cathedral, a tangible reflection of the roots of our very own diocese in the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion.
Our future in South Carolina is bright. We are truly privileged to serve during these times and do so with glad and joyful hearts, knowing we are the Lord’s.
August 27, 2020