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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2009
In the 1830s, among those associated with the Tractarian revival in England and also among certain figures in the (then) Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States (PECUSA), the idea of the ‘missionary bishop’ was propagated, which presented the bishop as a pioneer evangelist as the apostles were understood to be in New Testament times and saw the planting of the Church as necessarily including a bishop from the beginning for the ‘full integrity’ of the Church to be present. This view of the bishop as the ‘foundation stone’ was not held by the Evangelicals of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), who saw the bishop by contrast as the ‘crown’ or coping stone of the young churches. Two main protagonists were the High Churchman, Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, and the honorary secretary and missionary strategist, Henry Venn. The party, led by C.F. Mackenzie as Bishop and mounted by the Universities’ Mission to Central Africa (UMCA) in 1861 to the tribes near Lake Nyassa, was the outworking of this Tractarian ideal.
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