Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts

Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG). Founded on the recommendation of Thomas Bray, founder of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (1701). Its aim was ‘to settle the State of Religion as well as may be among our own people [in the plantations] … and then to proceed in the best Methods towards the Conversion of the Natives’. At first it aimed at the American colonies and the plantations in the West Indies. SPG was instrumental in making mission part of Anglican life.

Founded in 1701, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, sometimes called the Venerable Society, conducted the foreign mission work of the Anglican Church in the American colonies and other English possessions overseas. Between 1702 and 1785, when it withdrew from the mission field in the United States, it sent out 309 ordained missionaries and distributed thousands of Bibles, tracts, and prayer books. It also sent out schoolteachers, medical missionaries, and libraries. In 1775 it was helping to support seventy-seven missionaries in the continental colonies, but as the Revolution progressed most of them were forced to retire.

Bibliography

Butler, Jon. Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Pascoe, F. C. Two Hundred Years of the S. P. G., 1701–1900: An Historical Account of the Society for the Propagation of Bible in Foreign Parts. London, 1901.