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Albert Ervine Swift was born in Claremore, Oklahoma on July 1, 1913. After graduating from the University of Oklahoma in 1935, he studied at the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He completed his Bachelor of Divinity degree in 1938 and later earned Doctor of Sacred Theology degrees from General Theological Seminary in 1953 and Ripon College in 1959.

Swift was ordained to the priesthood in June 1939 and began service in the China mission field. After teaching a year at St. John’s University, Shanghai, he became vicar of St. John the Evangelist in Hankow. He was also choir director at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Hankow, and an assistant at St. Hilda’s Refugee Camp, Wuchang.

Swift met Elizabeth Ann Slusser at the mission in Shanghai and married her on September 9, 1940. Due to World War Two, the Swifts moved from China to Baltimore, Maryland, where Rev. Swift became the curate of St. David’s Church. In 1943, he became assistant secretary of the National Council’s Overseas Department where he recruited new missionaries for overseas fields. He served as acting director of the department from 1947 to 1948, when he and his family traveled to the Philippine Islands on missionary service. From 1948 to 1950, he taught as a faculty member of St. Andrew’s Theological Seminary, Manila. In 1951, he served as Acting Dean of the seminary.

Swift served as a bishop both internationally and domestically. He served as the Bishop of the Missionary District of Puerto Rico from 1951 to 1965 and of the Virgin Islands from 1951 to 1963. He was the Assistant Bishop of Pennsylvania from 1965 to 1967, the Assistant Bishop of Southern Florida from 1968 to 1969, and the Assistant Bishop of Southeast Florida from 1969 to 1974. From 1972 to 1973, the Swift family lived in Honduras, where he served as Bishop-in-charge. He then served as Bishop-in-Charge of the Convocation of American Churches in Europe from 1974 to 1978.

Swift retired from active service in 1978 to Boca Raton with his wife Elizabeth to whom he was married for almost 63 years. He died there on June 21, 2003.

Henri Alexandre Stines was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on October 29, 1923. He completed his theological training at Seminaire Theologique, the Episcopal seminary in Port-au-Prince, and was ordained in Haiti as a deacon in 1945 and a priest in 1947. The following year, Stines received his Master of Divinity from General Theological Seminary.

After immigrating to the United States in 1950, Stines first served as vicar at St. James Episcopal Church in Charleston, West Virginia. In 1953 Stines began a long career of revitalizing struggling churches when he assumed leadership of Grace Episcopal Church, Detroit, Michigan. Under eleven years of his stewardship, Grace Church grew from fewer than 100 members to over 1200, making it one of the most active multiracial Episcopal churches in Detroit.

After a stint as Director of Southern Field Service for the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Race Unity (1964-1966), during which time he led protests against segregation and coordinated Southern congregations involved in justice ministry, Stines returned to direct ministry by accepting a position at the Church of the Atonement in Washington, D.C. In 1969, he moved to All Souls Episcopal Church in Berkeley, California, broadening its membership to the entire Bay area and offering educational programs attuned to social concerns of the community. Stines returned to Chicago in 1972, this time to Trinity Episcopal Church, growing it from fewer than 25 members in 1972 to more than 225 members by 1984 with a committed vestry, innovative liturgies in French and Spanish, and special ministries to the elderly and homebound. Stines retired from parish ministry in 1986, although he continued to serve as an interim priest in Chicago and New Jersey until 1990.

Henri Alexandre Stines died on March 8, 1995.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.