Robert Hallowell Gardiner

Robert Hallowell Gardiner (also Robert Hallowell Gardiner III ; born September 9, 1855 in Fort Tejon , California , † June 15, 1924 in Gardiner (Maine) ) was an American lawyer and one of the leading figures of the early ecumenical movement .

Life

Gardiner was a son of officer John William Tudor Gardiner and his wife Anne Elizabeth Hays Gardiner. The family lived in Maine from 1859 and in Boston from 1866, where Robert Gardiner graduated from the Roxbury Latin School . He then attended Harvard College and finally studied law at Harvard Law School . In 1880 he settled as a lawyer in Boston , where he mainly worked for banks and other companies. He also managed several trusts , mostly in the real estate sector. In 1882 the family moved to neighboring Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts . Gardiner also kept the firm after moving to the inherited Oaklands manor house in Gardiner (Maine) in 1900, in the city founded by his great-grandfather Silvester Gardiner and in which his grandfather Robert Hallowell Gardiner (1782-1864) had been mayor. In 1918 he gave up his practice as a lawyer in order to be able to concentrate fully on church work.

Gardiner had been married to Alice Bangs of Boston since June 23, 1881. The marriage produced five children: Robert Hallowell IV (1882–1944), Alice (* 1885), Sylvester (1888–1889), Anna Lowell (* 1890) and William Tudor (1892–1953).

Church activity

Gardiner was very involved in the United States Episcopal Church . Initially he supervised the Sunday school in his congregation, but was soon drawn up for functions at a higher level. In 1904 he became president of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew (an organization for church youth work) and at the same time a member of the general convention of his church. Here he headed the constitutional committee from 1910. When the Episcopal Church was one of the founding members of the Federal Council of Churches in the USA (the predecessor organization of the National Council of Churches ) in 1908 , Gardiner was involved and became a member of the executive committee.

When Bishop Charles Brent campaigned at the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in October 1910 in his report on the World Mission Conference in Edinburgh for the launch of an initiative to overcome the differences between the Christian churches, Gardiner was one of the most ardent supporters. Then a commission was established that a world conference on " Faith and should prepare" (Faith and Order). Charles Palmerston Anderson , Bishop of Chicago, was appointed President and Gardiner Secretary of the Commission. Entrepreneur JP Morgan, Jr. provided $ 100,000 to cover expenses.

Gardiner succeeded in the next few years in establishing contacts with many other churches and in establishing support committees in other churches, especially in the USA, Canada and Great Britain. In May 1913 a first interdenominational conference was held in New York City . The focus of participation was in the Protestant world, but Orthodox and Old Catholic churches also agreed to support them. Even an initial reply from Cardinal Secretary of State Pietro Gasparri in December 1914 was friendly. In Germany, official talks with Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze and Friedrich Albert Spiecker were planned for September 1914 . At the beginning of August 1914, Gardiner also took part in the founding meeting of the World Association for Friendship Work of the Churches in Constance . But then the outbreak of the First World War interrupted the hopeful beginnings and made international cooperation more difficult. Gardiner now had to deal with resistance in his own church, especially by Bishop William T. Manning . In January 1916, however, at a conference of various American churches in Garden City (Long Island), the first substantive determinations for the planned world conference were made.

After the end of the war, Gardiner immediately returned to Europe to advance the planning. After the Lambeth Conference and the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople had supported the efforts for Christian unity in appeals to all Christians in 1920 . August 1920 invited to Geneva for a preparatory conference. 133 delegates from over 80 churches in 40 countries came together and elected a committee to prepare the world conference. Brent was elected chairman and Gardiner secretary. He had also attended the Geneva conference immediately before that, at which the Movement for Practical Christianity , the other pillar of the ecumenical movement, was founded.

In the following years Gardiner tried to get all the churches in the world to take part in the world conference. A rejection came from Rome, however, and support also declined in his own church, so that Gardiner had to fall back on his own savings to finance his trips. In 1922 he became seriously ill from overwork and died two years later in his Oakland residence. He did not live to see the first World Conference on Faith and Order in Lausanne in 1927 .

literature

• Ralph Ruhtenberg: Robert H. Gardiner. Layperson and organizer of the Faith and Order Movement. In: Günter Gloede (Ed.): Ecumenical Profiles. Bridge builder of one church. Evangelischer Missionsverlag, Stuttgart 1961, pp. 190–200.
• John F. Woolverton: Robert H. Gardiner and the Reunification of Worldwide Christianity in the Progressive Era. University of Missouri Press, Columbia 2005.

Remarks

1. ↑ Entry on www.findagrave.com .
2. ↑ Cf. Ruth Rouse , Stephen Charles Neill : History of the Ecumenical Movement 1517-1948. Vol. 2. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1958, p. 12.