The “senior” Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church now automatically succeeds to the office of Presiding Bishop upon the death of the former tenant of the office. But in 1925 the office will become elective””so that its duties shall not always fall to an old man.
I suspect that the early 19th century principle governing bishops (give them a parish for which to be responsible and they’ll have less time to interfere in what [i]we’re[/i] doing) also applied to the office of Presiding Bishop (if he has a diocese to oversee, his national role will be limited).
The year 1919 was the year of the Nation-Wide Campaign, designed to build up a national apparatus to replace the rather creaky structures of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. An elected Presiding Bishop without local jurisdiction was a logical adjunct.
There’s an interesting account of this process in “Reminiscences of Bishop R. Bland Mitchell: The Pre-1919 Church and the Nation-Wide Campaign Revolution.†Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 30:4 (December 1961): 230-50.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]
Oh, that we could go back to the pre-1925 practice!
The whole 1900-1950 period of PECUSA history is interesting–and understudied. Someone should do more with it. It includes, of course, such notables as John Gardner Murray and Henry St. George Tucker. Tucker had a fascinating life, but there is no book-length biography of him, to my knowledge. Even the Wikipedia article says very little about him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_St._George_Tucker_(bishop)
I wish that someone out there would consider a trip to Virginia Seminary–to the Tucker Papers there–and really start to unfold the life of this wise, beloved figure.
We spend a great deal of time studying the lives of bishops like Jim Pike when virtually no time is given to–for example–the lives of Tucker and one other influential bishop whose story contains so much American history: Henry Benjamin Whipple, who also lacks a first-rate, modern biography.
David, I too have been hoping for a good solid biography of Whipple. Some days I’m actually tempted to pursue a PhD in history just so that I might do a good dissertation on him. We have many such who could use good biographies, including Tuttle (though there’s some good commentary on him in Szasz – http://tinyurl.com/5hcg3v ) and Kip (I’ve been on the hunt for an original of Kip’s autobiography…but so far for naught).
While we’re on the subject, what about an updated biography of Charles Brent. Alexander Zabriskie’s BISHOP BRENT: CRUSADER FOR CHRISTIAN UNITY is now sixty years old. Few twentieth century ordained Episcopalians have had as great a global impact.