Episcopal Church Women: The First Hundred Years part 1

This story is excerpted from Episcopal Church Women of Minnesota: The First Hundred Years, published in 1982 and reprinted in 2020. 

The June 1882 issue of the Minnesota Missionary noted that the streets were muddy and that it had rained on the fourteenth when the Diocesan Council had met with Bishop Whipple at Christ Church, St. Paul. Apparently, no one thought it newsworthy that the women of the Diocese—representatives of Ladies’ Aid Societies, Mite Societies, Parish Aid Societies, Rector’s Guilds—had also met with the Bishop the afternoon of the same day and had organized a branch of the Auxiliary to the Board of Missions. But, rain or no rain, mud or no mud, recognition or no recognition, they did meet and they did organize.

In so doing, they witnessed to the pragmatic side of Christian living and seconded the Auxiliary’s aims of increasing funds for the Board of Missions, circulating missionary publications, and educating, and clothing missionaries and their families. They also added an aim of their own: “ . . . to unite all Parishes in the Diocese in the different branches of Missionary Work, Foreign, Domestic, and Diocesan.”

The Auxiliary, that year, was eleven years old—and an entirely subordinate organization. At national level, it answered to the Board of Missions; at diocesan level, to bishops; and, at parish level, to rectors. Nowhere was it anything but a helping hand. With that in mind, let us trace how the Minnesota Branch of the Auxiliary to the Board of Missions increased in size, developed a broader sense of Mission, and finally evolved into the strong, independent, and giving Episcopal Churchwomen of which we are a part today.