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The Special Committee on Theological Education in the Episcopal Church (TEEC) began in 1965 as an outgrowth of an initiative originating in the Division of Christian Ministries, part of Executive Council’s Home Department, to respond to a perceived crisis in recruitment, retention, and education of candidates for the ministry, which required careful study before any recommendations could be made to General Convention.

The Committee, chaired by Dr. Nathan M. Pusey, met for the first time on March 28, 1966. As part of its work, the Committee consulted seminarians and young clergymen to understand their experiences and concerns, and shared these findings with General Convention in their 1967 report.

The Committee saw the need for “an agency with power” to overhaul the Church’s entire system of theological education. It recommended the creation of a Board for Theological Education with members appointed by the Presiding Bishop and reporting to General Convention. The work of the Board was to find strategies for recruiting promising candidates to the ministry, to modernize the seminary system and improve its curricula, to determine necessary funding, and to expand educational opportunities to laymen and women.

The recommendation was adopted by the 1967 General Convention.

John Shelby Spong was born June 16, 1931 in Charlotte, North Carolina. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1952 from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill he earned a Master of Divinity degree from Virginia Theological Seminary in 1955. He was ordained a deacon and a priest that year.

For two years, Spong served as rector at St. Joseph’s Church in Durham, North Carolina, before assuming the rectorship of Cavalry Church in Tarboro, North Carolina, in 1957. In a city that resisted integration, Spong ministered to the Black congregation at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church alongside the white congregation at Cavalry. He continued service as a rector at St. John’s Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, (1965) and St. Paul’s Church in Richmond, Virginia (1969) before being consecrated Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark in 1976. As bishop he continued to work tirelessly on behalf of those marginalized in the Church, ordaining a non-celibate gay deacon to the priesthood in 1989 and advocating for women clergy. Spong gained recognition among lay audiences for his many books on theology, which often challenged conventional doctrine. After retiring as bishop in 2000, he continued to speak on faith, modernity, and social justice.

John Shelby Spong died on September 12, 2021.

After an appeal to General Convention of the need for a hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina for African Americans, St. Agnes Hospital and Nursing School was founded in 1896. The hospital occupied buildings on the grounds of St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute and served as both a hospital and nurses’ training school. By 1931 it had grown to a 100-bed hospital serving 2,000 patients annually.

St. Agnes was affiliated with the American Church Institute (ACI) from approximately 1906 until 1958, when ACI discontinued appropriations in order to conform to its mission to support only church-related schools and in anticipation of a new county health system.

St. Agnes Nursing School closed in 1959.

St. Augustine’s Normal School and Collegiate Institute (Raleigh, North Carolina) was founded in 1867 by the Rev. J. Brinton Smith of the Freedman’s Commission and the Rt. Rev. Thomas Atkinson, Bishop of North Carolina, from the beginnings of a day and Sunday school for African American children of Christ Church Parish. Smith served as the first principal and Atkinson as the president of the Board of Trustees.

In 1893 the school changed its name to St. Augustine’s School. In 1919 the school became known as St. Augustine’s Junior College, then in 1928 as St. Augustine’s College. For some time it was the only four-year liberal arts college for African Americans sponsored by the Episcopal Church. It was one of the first schools to be affiliated with the American Church Institute (ACI) in 1906 and remained under that organization until ACI dissolved in 1967. It remains a four-year liberal arts college.

St. Margaret's House in Berkeley, California, had its origin in a deaconess training program initiated in 1907 by Edward L. Parsons, Rector of St. Mark's in Berkeley. Called at first St. Mark's Deaconess Training School, by 1910 it was known unofficially as St. Anne's House and officially as the Training School for Deaconesses in the Diocese of California, later the Training School for Deaconesses of the Eighth Missionary Department (1912). In 1914 it moved to a new home, St. Margaret's House, and was incorporated as the Deaconess Training School of the Pacific.

The School expanded to include a School for Christian Service, a Student House for women students at UC Berkeley, and a Church Service Center. In 1930, it relocated to larger quarters near its partners in education and added a Summer School of Religion, an extension department, field service, and a retreat and conference center to its broadening spectrum of activities. Eventually it came to identify itself as a graduate school, offering, in conjunction with the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, a two-year program leading to the Master of Arts in Christian Education degree. The name of the institution was formally changed to St. Margaret's House in 1950.

By the mid-1960s, the movement toward full equality for women in the church diminished the need for a separate women's training school. In 1966 the St. Margaret's House Board voted to terminate its educational programs. The Board of Trustees became the Berkeley Center for Human Interaction and Organizational Renewal, a non-profit unaffiliated with The Episcopal Church. Renamed the Strong Center in 1979, it eventually focused on the environment and became The Strong Foundation for Environmental Values, which is scheduled for dissolution at the end of 2023.

St. Mark’s School (Birmingham, Alabama) was founded in 1891 as an outgrowth of St. Mark’s Church, with financial support from J. A. Van Hoose, a white Episcopal deacon and the 10th Mayor of Birmingham. It was the first institution in the city to offer secondary education to black students and was initially established as a girls’ boarding school.

St. Mark’s was an American Church Institute (ACI) school from 1912 to 1941 when it was dropped due to the exorbitant expense necessary to renovate its buildings. Calhoun School in Lowndes County, Alabama was brought under ACI oversight in its place. It is uncertain whether the school continued to operate after 1941.

The Rev. James Solomon Russell founded St. Paul’s Normal and Industrial School in Lawrenceville, Virginia in 1888 and served as its principal until his death in 1935. He was succeeded by his son, the Rev. J. Alvin Russell.

In 1941 it began to offer a four-year degree program and changed its name to St. Paul’s Polytechnic Institute. The school’s name changed again to St. Paul’s College in 1957. At one time it was the largest of the American Church Institute’s (ACI) schools with over 1,500 students.

The school was affiliated with ACI until its dissolution in 1967.

St. Philip’s Normal and Industrial School in San Antonio, Texas was founded in1898 by the Rt. Rev. James Steptoe Johnson, Bishop of West Texas, and was headed by Artemesia Bowden as its dean from 1902 to 1954.

St. Philip’s was never administered by the American Church Institute (ACI), though appropriations were made to it from 1918 to 1931. It was incorporated into the San Antonio Independent School District in 1942 as St. Philip’s Junior College, affiliated with San Antonio Junior College under the control of the San Antonio Union Junior College District from 1946.

It began admitting white students in 1955; in 2003 the majority of its student body was Latino.

At the 1973 General Convention, the Joint Commission on Church Music (JCCM) was renewed as the Standing Commission on Church Music (SCCM). The newly formed Standing Commission now served the Church in all matters pertaining to music, including serving as a link between associations of professional Church musicians and diocesan music commissions, assisting individual dioceses with courses and conferences on Church music, and collecting and collating material for future revisions of the Church Hymnal. It was also charged with reviewing The Hymnal 1940 and preparing recommendations to the next General Convention for a revision, which was ultimately approved in 1982 and published in 1985.

At the 1997 General Convention, the Committee on Structure recommended that the Standing Liturgical Commission and the Standing Commission on Church Music be merged into a single commission on worship, incorporating the current work of the two existing bodies, thus becoming the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music.

Prior to the establishment of the Standing Liturgical Commission, liturgical matters were handled by a number of temporary committees and joint commissions. Its most immediate predecessor was the Joint Commission on the Revision and Enrichment of the Prayer Book, established by the 1913 General Convention to revise the Book of Common Prayer.

On the publication of the 1928 edition, the General Convention of 1928 voted to discharge the joint commission and establish in its place the Standing Liturgical Commission for the preservation and study of matters relating to the Book of Common Prayer as well as the development of other liturgical materials. The Standing Liturgical Commission carried out this mandate until the 1997 General Convention, when it was merged with the Standing Commission on Church Music to form the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music.

The China Oral History Project began as the brainchild of the Reverend Leslie Lindsey Fairfield, who served in the Episcopal Missionary District of Shanghai from 1935 to 1940. Aware that few Episcopal missionaries had documented their experiences in China, Fairfield feared that an important chapter in the history of the Church's missionary work might be lost. In 1977, he approached Episcopal Church Archivist V. Nelle Bellamy with the prospect of initiating an oral history project, which would target some 60 former China missionaries. Bellamy agreed to sponsor the project with administrative and logistical support. After securing a small grant from the Cushman Charitable Trust, the Archives assumed responsibility for the administration of these funds and all subsequent contributions to the project.

Fairfield set the project in motion in 1981, when he enlisted William Moss, former President of the National Oral History Association, as a volunteer interviewer. Moss conducted five interviews of former missionaries. In late 1982, Wayne Anderson, Director of the Oral History Office of Northeastern University, was hired to continue with the interviews. In 1984, the Archivist instigated the formation of a Steering Committee for the project, consisting of herself, Dr. Paul Ward, and Fairfield, who would serve as chairman. The Committee hired Cynthia McLean to replace Wayne Anderson as interviewer. McLean conducted the remaining 26 of the project's 56 total interviews.

The project proceeded slowly as funding remained a persistent problem as many of the Committees grant applications were met with rejection. The project took a turn for the better in 1986 with a Lily Memorial Fund grant of $1,500 and a $5,000 Marcia Brady Tucker Foundation grant, followed by a $2,500 United Thank Offering grant the next year. The project was completed with a final grant of $6,000, which Fairfield secured from the Diocese of Western Massachusetts in 1988.

By 1989, McLean had left the project and in 1991 the Committee discontinued the interviews. The project reached completion in 1992, when the Archives transcribed the last of the interviews.

By the project's end, it had targeted 85 missionaries and/or missionary couples. Of that number, eleven were deceased by the time the interviewing got underway. The three interviewers conducted a total of 56 interviews over the course of the project. One missionary couple, the Fairfields, gave two of the 56 interviews. The Steering Committee abandoned 19 potential interviews when the project fell into abeyance in 1989.