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The Holy Spirit Mission Church for the Deaf was founded as a parochial mission in 1960 at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley, California and would later become a Diocesan mission. A profile of the church written in 1988 states that their mission is “to proclaim to Gospel among hearing impaired and deaf people and their families and to enable Christian ministry and community among hearing impaired and deaf individuals in a language understood by them”.

Roger Pickering, a deaf seminarian, became the first Vicar after his ordination in 1963. During his six-year tenure, he offered services in several different locations in the Bay area, provided pastoral care for hearing impaired persons all over California, and established a religious education program at the California School for the Deaf. After Pickering’s departure, services were reduced from once a week to once a month until 1983 when a full-time Vicar was hired. By 1987, lack of grant money for deaf ministry in the diocese forced the Mission into part-time status once again.

Little information is available regarding the status of the Mission past 1988, however records indicate that it was in operation until the early 2000's.

St. James Church was founded by several Americans in Florence, Italy in 1850 after the Tuscan parliament passed legislation permitting churches of other denominations. It was officially recognized in 1867.

The Church was originally meant to be a place of worship and community for English speaking people in Italy, but has moved to become a multilingual and multicultural congregation.

While St. James is a member of the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe, it maintains its own Board of Trustees. Together, the three boards (which also includes St. Paul’s Within-the-Walls in Rome, Italy) manage endowments for the churches in the convocation.

The Evangelical Educational Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church was organized in November 1866 as a “general Education society” uniting the diocesan Societies of New York, Massachusetts, Ohio and Virginia [and possibly Maryland] with the Divinity Students’ Aid Society in Philadelphia. Twenty years later, it changed it’s name to the Evangelical Education Society of the Protestant Episcopal Church (EES).

EES occupied an important place in the polity of The Episcopal Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was a strong and representative voice for promoting the thread of “rational religion” that dominated worship and clerical leadership in The Episcopal Church up to the post-Reconstruction period. It did this by supporting the education of men for ministry; sponsoring gatherings, conferences and workshops; publishing books and pamphlets; aiding campus evangelism and theological rigor; and providing biblically-centered Christian education.

EES expanded its membership in the 20th century by merging with the Protestant Episcopal Society for the Promotion of Evangelical Knowledge (PESPEK) in 1949 and the Episcopal Evangelical Fellowship (EEF) in 1961. Although a membership organization for most of its history, it shifted to a grant-making organization in the 1990s with an annual donation drive replacing membership dues. Grants are disbursed through the Evangelism for the 21st Century (E-21) grant program, established in 1977, to support emerging forms of lay and ordained ministries.

In 2014, the EES Board changed the organization’s name to the Episcopal Evangelism Society. It continues to support clerical education, publish books and newsletters, and award grants.

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.

The history of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe (ACIE) goes back to 1859, when an American Episcopal congregation in Paris, France, was recognized by the Episcopal Church as a parish. Today, ACIE comprises churches, mission congregations, and specialized ministries in seven countries throughout Europe and falls under the jurisdiction of the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.

The original mission of the Convocation was to minister to English-speaking people in Europe. Today it is a multinational, mulitracial, multilingual, and multicultural communion within the European Union.

John Torok, born in Hungary in 1890 to a Jewish father and a Christian mother, arrived in the United States in 1920 and received into the Episcopal priesthood by Diocese of Maryland Bishop Murray on June 9, 1921.

In 1923, a group of Uniate churches in Pittsburgh elected Torok as their bishop, with the idea that he would lead them out of the Roman Catholic communion and into The Episcopal Church. Torok was consecrated on October 19, 1924 at the Serbian Legation Chapel in Vienna by Bishop Gorazd and Bishop Dositej, both Orthodox bishops. Upon Torok’s return, he found that due to other plans regarding intercommunion being carried out at the same time, any exercise of his episcopal privilege would likely result in a split in the Church.

To mitigate potential discord, Torok retired to secular life. However, several years later a renewal of interest in intercommunion brought him back to Church life. After much canvassing on his behalf by Bishop Frank Wilson of Eau Claire, Torok was elected Suffragan Bishop of that diocese in May of 1934. His primary focus was foreign language work among the Uniate peoples in Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland, but Bishop Wilson could get neither firm approval nor firm disapproval for this work from the rest of the Church. Furthermore, General Convention declined to confirm Torok’s consecration.

Torok returned to secular employment until 1946, when he took up parish work, first in Mexico and later in Puerto Rico. From 1947 to 1950 he served Grace Church in Brooklyn.

John Torok died in 1955.

Katharine Putnam was born on September 10, 1889, in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Upon completing her studies at the Philadelphia Church Training and Deaconess House in 1917, the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society appointed her to the Shanghai District. Putnam arrived in China on August 18, 1917 and taught English at St. Faith’s School and Mahan Boys School in Yangchow. She was set apart as a deaconess on May 23, 1920 and continued teaching until a furlough in 1928.

Upon her return, she was appointed Diocesan Religious Education Director and made supervisor of the women’s work in Shanghai. As part of these duties, Putnam prepared educational religious material, held short-term school appointments at country stations, and helped to train women evangelists. After another furlough in 1934, Putnam returned to St. Faith’s School in Yangchow. From 1937 until 1939, she served as secretary to Bishop Graves. After the Bishop’s retirement Putnam worked in the diocesan office and at St. Elizabeth Hospital until the Japanese placed the missionaries under house arrest in 1942. On February 25, 1943, Katharine Putnam joined other missionaries who had been placed in an internment camp until her release as part of a prisoner exchange on September 20, 1943.

After going back and forth between the United States and China several more times over the next seven years, she returned to the U.S. permanently in 1950 where she worked in various roles within the Church, supporting the training and education of women. After 41 years of service, Katharine Putnam retired from the Episcopal Church in 1958.

Henry Forrester was ordained to the diaconate in 1870 and to the priesthood in 1872. He served as a missionary in the Missionary District of New Mexico and Arizona beginning in 1874. Together with the new bishop of the district, William Forbes Adams, he performed the first Episcopal worship service at the Exchange Hotel on the Plaza in Albuquerque on March 4, 1875. After Bishop Adams’s retirement several months later, Forrester took on ecclesiastical oversight of the Missionary District and established St. Paul’s in Las Vegas as the ecclesiastical center. He continued to travel widely around the territory, establishing missionary outposts in 15 towns.

In 1880, George Kelly Dunlop was elected to fill the vacancy left by Adams’ retirement. That same year, the first convention of the Missionary District was held. Dunlop appointed Forrester priest to the congregation in Albuquerque. Forrester continued to travel across the territory, encouraging the missions he had established in the district. He reported in 1882 that “land has been purchased at 4th and Silver” for $5,000 and in November the first service in St. John’s Church was attended by 33 people.

At the General Convention of 1892 the Board of Missions appointed Forrester to succeed the Rev. W. B. Gordon as the Presiding Bishop’s resident representative to the Mexican Episcopal Church, a position he held until his death in 1904.

Samuel Moor Shoemaker was born on December 27, 1893, to a wealthy Episcopalian family with deep roots in Maryland high society. He attended Princeton University where he was involved with the Philadelphian Society that shaped much of his early ministry. After graduation, he moved to Beijing to teach and do missionary work. While there Shoemaker met Frank N. D. Buchman, a Pietist Lutheran preacher and activist who would go on to found the Oxford Group that evolved into the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) movement.

Shoemaker was ordained to the diaconate in 1920 and to the priesthood in 1921. In 1925 he accepted a call to serve as rector of Calvary Church, New York City.

In 1926, Shoemaker began hosting weekly evening meetings geared toward training working people to witness their faith and convert others in their workplaces. He traveled the country in 1932, sermonizing to combat what he saw as the spiritual decay brought on by the Great Depression. His establishment of a rescue mission on New York City’s Lower East Side led him to minister to men struggling with addiction, including William Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Shoemaker continued to pursue those ministries at Calvary Church in Pittsburgh, where he became rector in 1952. He also sought to win converts through his writing. He published frequently in the parish newsletter The Calvary Evangel and later independently as the renamed magazine Faith at Work. Failing health forced Shoemaker to resign from active ministry in 1962.

Samuel Moor Shoemaker died in Baltimore on October 30, 1963.