Charles Inglis

Charles Inglis was born in Ireland in 1734, a clergyman's son, and was ordained in the Church of Ireland before he crossed the ocean as a young missionary to the American colonies. He served parishes in Delaware and Pennsylvania and then came to Trinity Church in New York, the chief Anglican church of the city. He served first as an assistant and then as rector. He was a faithful, learned, but otherwise unremarkable colonial clergyman. Then shots were heard 'round the world, and he had to choose. He chose to be faithful to his word and vows and his convictions even though it put him on the losing side of the American Revolution. Romans 13 is the lectionary reading for tomorrow August 13th, appropriate to these themes of Charles's life as he lived it out in his convictions.

Inglis was bound by conviction and by his ordination oath to the king, and he was conscience-bound not pretend otherwise even when it grew dangerous to be faithful to that oath. In the spring of 1776, with New York in colonial hands, word came that General Washington would attend service at Trinity. It was also communicated that Washington would be glad if the prayers for King George were left out. Inglis, by his own account, paid no regard to it. One Sunday a company of armed Continental soldiers marched into the church during the service, rifles and bayonets in their hands, and made it known that they would shoot if he prayed for the king. Inglis prayed for the king, and no shots were fired. When at last it became impossible to go on, the vestry chose to close the doors of Trinity altogether rather than, as Inglis put it, omit the prayers for the king and so give that mark of disaffection to their sovereign.

In September 1776 a great fire swept New York, both armies blamed the other for burning the city down, and Trinity Church burned along with it. When the war was lost and the new republic was secured, Inglis was among thousands of Tories who could not stay. He felt that as a Christian unjust taxes and the like were nor a morally defensible ground to justify a revolt instead of trusting God's appointed governors. He gave up the country where he had spent his whole ministry and went north, to the island of Nova Scotia, a cold and thinly settled British colony in eastern Canada. Nova Scotia swelled with refugees as broken as himself in the wake of the war.

In America, the Revolution is often romanticized, but it was a war like any other, displacing thousands, leaving tens of thousands of orphans and widows in its wake. And there even in the wreckage and loss, God used Charles' faithfulness in the loss as a foundation. The Anglican churches of British North America had never had a bishop of their own; they had always had to look across the sea back to Britain for their bishop and like the colonies had not ruled themselves locally. For nearly two hundred years the colonies had been governed at arm's length from London, at best with a long distance touch and at worst as an afterthought, with no one nearer than the far side of the Atlantic to ordain a priest or confirm a child. In 1787 Charles Inglis was consecrated Bishop of Nova Scotia, the first bishop the Church of England ever sent to a colony. He became the first overseas bishop of a church that would spark the beginning of a wave of missionary bishops that would one day bring the Gospel through the Anglican Communion to much of the rest of the whole world. His diocese was almost comically vast, consisting of what is now Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and beyond to a scattering of churches across a wilderness. Perhaps a bit like Florida claiming the whole continent, before people knew how vast North America was it was difficult to set workable diocesan boundaries. He spent the next thirty years building: ordaining the first home-grown North American clergy, planting parishes, founding a college at Windsor to train priests on the same soil where they would serve.

He died in 1816, an old man of eighty-two, exiled from his home but serving faithfully where God had relocated him. He had lost nearly everything once, his church burned and his country gone, and out of that loss as God often does, He laid the first stone of something larger from what had fallen. The single colonial diocese he founded has become the Anglican Church of Canada and a part of a Communion that now circles the earth. Every bishop consecrated for a distant land since stands in a line that begins, in a real way, with a faithful priest who would not compromise his convictions to pray faithfully for his king even when it became dangerously unpopular to do so.