Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
First Missionary Bishop in the United States
May 24 · d. 1870
Jackson Kemper (1789–1870) was the first missionary bishop of the Episcopal Church. Where earlier American bishops had been chosen by settled dioceses, Kemper was sent ahead of the church into the western frontier, and for thirty-five years he crossed it by horseback, stagecoach, and canoe, planting parishes, ordaining clergy, and founding schools from Missouri to Minnesota. He turned an eastern establishment into a church that would go to the people, and Nashotah House, which he founded, still trains its clergy.
Jackson Kemper was born in 1789 in New York and ordained a priest of a church that was, in those years, a comfortable eastern institution. For some twenty years he served as assistant to the venerable Bishop William White in Philadelphia, a settled and respectable ministry. He might have ended his days a city rector. But the church he served was about to attempt something it had never tried, and it chose Kemper to be the one who tried it.
In 1835 the General Convention resolved to send a bishop not to a diocese that already existed, but out ahead of the church, into the vast and half-settled country of the West, to plant the church where there was as yet none to plant it. It was a new kind of office, and it fell to Kemper. He was consecrated missionary bishop for Missouri and Indiana, and before long his charge stretched across Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kansas, a territory larger than western Europe, with almost no clergy and almost no churches in it.
He gave the rest of his life to crossing it. For thirty-five years he traveled by horseback, stagecoach, open wagon, and canoe, thousands of miles a year, preaching in courthouses and taverns and farmhouses, gathering a few families here and a few there into congregations, confirming, ordaining, and coming back again. When others pleaded that the frontier was too raw and the climate too hard for eastern clergy, Kemper had no patience with the excuse. As his memoirist records his words, he put the pointed question: "Is climate ever to be taken into consideration by those who have solemnly bound themselves at the Altar of God?" He believed the church that waited for people to come to it had forgotten its commission; the church must go.
He built for the future as he went. Seeing that clergy sent from the settled East wilted on the frontier, he founded Nashotah House in Wisconsin to train priests among western men, on the ground where they would serve, and Racine College after it. He carried the gospel to the Native peoples of the territories, urged again and again that the Scriptures and the services be translated into their languages, and ordained among them; the Ojibwe deacon Enmegahbowh was raised to orders in his time. He asked nothing of his clergy he did not ask first of himself. When a brother bishop fell ill and needed someone to make a hard southern visitation in his place, Kemper simply went, explaining, in words his memoir preserves, "I belong entirely to the Church."
He served until the end. In 1859 the frontier he had watered had grown church enough to give him at last a settled diocese, and he became the first Bishop of Wisconsin; he died in harness in 1870, an old man of eighty, near the seminary he had founded. He had been given a church that sat still and waited, and he handed on a church that traveled, that reached out, that had become in his lifetime a genuinely national body. The dioceses of the American Midwest are the map of where he went, and Nashotah House still sends out the clergy he first imagined riding into a country that had none.
There are two ways to be a church, and Jackson Kemper spent his life on the harder one. A church can wait, keeping its doors open and its lamps trimmed, trusting that those who want it will come and find it; and there is nothing false in that. Or a church can go, out past the last settled parish, to people who have not asked for it and may not want it, and begin. Kemper had been ordained into the waiting church and could have stayed there in honor. Instead he spent thirty-five years on horseback going, and when his clergy protested that the country was too raw and the weather too hard, he asked them whether men who had sworn their vows at the altar of God had any right to consult the climate. It is an uncomfortable question, and it was meant to be. Most of us have some frontier we have declined to cross because it was cold there, some person or place we have decided is simply too far. Kemper's whole life presses the question gently back on us: to what, exactly, did we bind ourselves, and does the distance really excuse us? He thought he belonged entirely to the Church, and so he went where the Church was not yet. The map of a dozen American dioceses is the answer he left.
How we know. The standard life is Greenough White's An Apostle of the Western Church: Memoir of the Right Reverend Jackson Kemper (1900), which quotes his letters and journals at length and is freely available on Project Canterbury; the founding statement of his office is George Washington Doane's consecration sermon, The Missionary Bishop (1835). His dates and calendar entry are given in the Episcopal Church's own reference sources and in Lesser Feasts and Fasts.
Kemper was born on 24 December 1789 at Pleasant Valley, New York, graduated from Columbia College in 1809, and was ordained deacon in 1811 and priest in 1814. For roughly two decades he was assistant to Bishop William White in the united parishes of Christ Church, St. Peter's, and St. James', Philadelphia, and an early leader of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society. On 25 September 1835 he was consecrated at St. Peter's, Philadelphia, as the Episcopal Church's first missionary bishop, "Missionary Bishop for Missouri and Indiana." His jurisdiction later reached across Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Kansas.
The novelty of the office was recognized at the time. Preaching at Kemper's consecration, Doane declared of the missionary bishop, "It is a new office in this Church. The event has not occurred before," and described a bishop "going before, to organize the Church, not waiting till the Church has partially been organized." This inverted the older American pattern, in which a diocese first organized itself and then sought a bishop, the pattern of the first American bishop, Samuel Seabury, and of Kemper's own consecrator, William White. Kemper was, instead, a bishop sent ahead of the church, and the change made him a hinge figure in its history.
He founded Nashotah House in Wisconsin in 1842, with James Lloyd Breck and companions, and Racine College in 1852, to train clergy for frontier ministry. He consistently urged mission to the Native American peoples and the translation of Scripture and the liturgy into their languages, and ordained the Ojibwe clergyman Enmegahbowh; the fuller record of that work, like all mission in the era of westward expansion and Native displacement, is a complicated and painful one. In 1859 he resigned his missionary jurisdictions to become the first (diocesan) Bishop of Wisconsin, and he died on 24 May 1870 near Nashotah, having spent thirty-five years turning an eastern-establishment church into a national one. Tradition credits him with organizing six or seven dioceses, ordaining some two hundred clergy, and traveling on the order of 300,000 miles; the round numbers are approximate. His missionary-bishop office, a bishop sent ahead of any organized see, was a conscious American innovation, parallel to, and not descended from, the colonial episcopate that had opened for the Church of England in 1787.
Kemper is commemorated on 24 May, the day of his death, in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America, under the title "First Missionary Bishop in the United States"; his liturgical color is white.
The collect appointed for him prays for the missionary spirit he embodied:
Lord God, in your providence Jackson Kemper was chosen first missionary bishop in this land, and by his arduous labor and travel congregations were established in scattered settlements of the West: Grant that the Church may always be faithful to its mission, and have the vision, courage, and perseverance to make known to all people the Good News of Jesus Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
He has no ancient iconographic attribute; the church remembers him instead as the archetype of the frontier bishop, with the saddlebags that carried his vestments and communion vessels across a roadless country. He is venerated above all as founder and patron of Nashotah House, the seminary he raised up to form clergy for the West. He stands in Anglican memory beside the other bishops of the great missionary expansion, George Augustus Selwyn in the Pacific and Samuel Ajayi Crowther on the Niger.
Principal biography. Greenough White's An Apostle of the Western Church: Memoir of the Right Reverend Jackson Kemper (1900) remains the standard life, sober and thorough, quoting Kemper's own letters and journals; it is freely available on Project Canterbury. No modern critical biography has replaced it, so the memoir and the primary journals it draws on are the backbone of any study.
Primary sources. George Washington Doane's consecration sermon, The Missionary Bishop (1835), is the founding charter of the office Kemper first held, online at Project Canterbury; Kemper's own "Journal of an Episcopalian Missionary's Tour to Green Bay, 1834" is likewise on Project Canterbury.
Reference. The Episcopal Church's biographical glossary gives a reliable short life and the exact ordination dates, and Lesser Feasts and Fasts carries the calendar entry and collect.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Jackson Kemper to preach the Gospel to the people of the American Frontier: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.