Lucien Lee Kinsolving

Early and family life

Lucien Lee Kinsolving was born to the second wife of the Rev. Otis Americus Kinsolving (1822–1894), minister at St. John's Episcopal Church in Halifax, Virginia. His mother died of complications two weeks later. Like his maternal grandfather Asa Rogers (who served as a Confederate militia general), the Rev. Otis Kinsolving supported the Confederate side, and particularly Mosby's Rangers, although his eldest son Charles James Kinsolving (1846–1920) joined the Richmond Howitzers light artillery company. While Lucien was still an infant, Otis Kinsolving was imprisoned for treason by occupying Union forces, so relatives helped with the children until the widower moved with his family to Halifax County, Virginia at war's end and remarried.

Another elder half-brother by his father's first wife, George Herbert Kinsolving, became the second bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Texas and later delivered the sermon at the consecration of this bishop. His slightly older brother, the Rev. Arthur Barksdale Kinsolving (1861–1961), became known as an author and historian in Maryland and published a biography of this Bishop Kinsolving in 1940. His half-brother by his father's third wife, the Rev. Wythe Leigh Kinsolving, served Episcopal churches in the South and in New York City.

After education in Halifax and then Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, Kinsolving spent three years as a lay missionary among the small parishes in West Virginia. He then decided upon a theological career common to many in his family and enrolled at the University of Virginia. After two years, he moved back to Alexandria to attend Virginia Theological Seminary (1886–1889) with a special interest in Brazil, although at the time seminary policy discouraged mission work in Catholic countries.

In 1891, Lucien Kinsolving returned to the United States to marry Alice Brown (1865–1944) of New Jersey, a kinswoman of Bishop McIlvaine of Ohio as well as descendant of founding father Richard Stockton. The University of Pennsylvania awarded him an honorary Doctor of Divinity degree in 1899.

Ministry

Virginia's bishop, Francis McNeece Whittle, ordained Kinsolving and fellow Virginia Seminary graduate James Watson Morris deacons in June and priests in August, 1889, whereupon they set out on a stormy sea voyage to Brazil, sponsored by the American Church Missionary Society. To a limited extent they followed in the footsteps of Anglican missionaries there before their birth, when any evangelism among the native population by non-Catholics was illegal, except for services in English held pursuant to a limited concession in an 1810 treaty between England and Portugal. Although Portugal recognized Brazil's independence in 1825, under a constitutional monarchy headed by former Portuguese royalty, Anglican missionaries continued to serve primarily foreign sailors and traders in the cities. However, one Scot-born missionary educated in Ohio and funded by the Episcopal Church and American Bible Society, Richard Holden, had tried to evangelize in northern Brazil (including Belem, Para and Bahia in the Amazon basin), but ultimately disaffiliated from the Anglican church in 1864 without establishing any permanent mission.

On November 15, 1889, shortly after these missionaries arrived in Brazil (and as they learned Portuguese under the auspices of a Presbyterian pastor near São Paulo), a coup d'état deposed the king, Dom Pedro II, disestablished the Catholic Church, established a federal republic and guaranteed freedom of religion.Kinsolving and Morris soon moved to Brazil's southernmost state, Rio Grande do Sul, and its capitol, Porto Alegre. That state had received many European immigrants during the previous decades, especially Protestant Germans.

The young Americans arrived at Porto Alegre on April 21, 1890, accompanied by four Brazilians, of whom Vicente Brande, Antonio M. de Fraga and Americo V. Cabral would all serve the church for many years. They held their first public service on Trinity Sunday, June 1, 1890, and in August 1891 opened a second mission in Rio Grande, the port city where Presbyterians entrusted a small congregation to these Episcopalians. A third mission was established in Pelotas after the arrival of recent VTS graduates the Rev. William Cabell Brown and John Gaw Meem, together with lay missionary Mary Packard (daughter of the VTS dean and who would serve 27 years in Brazil before her retirement).

Unlike prior missionaries, these Americans established both English- and Portuguese-speaking congregations. Kinsolving also founded a small theological school before briefly returning in 1891–1892 to the United States to marry his fiancé (who returned with him to the Rio Grande city mission), as well as to secure additional funding and missionaries. West Virginia's bishop George Peterkin made an episcopal visit in 1893, during which he ordained four Brazilians as deacons and confirmed 142 candidates at four missions (the 3 city missions and one in the town of Santa Rita do Rio dos Sinos). Also in that year, the Episcopalians began publishing O Estandarte Cristao (the Christian Standard) in Porto Alegre. Bishop Peterkin also arranged for new Portuguese translations of the Bible and Book of Common Prayer, which Brown completed in 1897 and which were published in Philadelphia for shipment southward.

Death and legacy

Kinsolving died on December 18, 1929, and he is buried at the Virginia Theological Seminary; his wife Alice survived him by nearly 15 years and is buried at St. Andrew's Churchyard in Burlington, New Jersey. A bust of the founding bishop stands outside Anglican Church of the Savior, Rio Grande, Brazil.

The Brazilian Episcopal Church became an autonomous province of the international Anglican Communion in 1965. The Episcopal Church recognizes Kinsolving and four of his fellow American missionaries and six Brazilians liturgically on June 7 as the Pioneers of the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil.