Anglican Diocese of Belize
After repeated appeals by Mr Peat, Rector of Jamestown, Jamaica, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG) sent a succession of missionaries to work among the Indians.
However, in 1776, due to illness and inability to bear the climate there, Shaw was forced to return to England – being replaced by William Standord.
Yet partly due to their efforts and a growing sense of permanence among the settlers, the settlement was preparing to build a church building, call a rector and establish a school by 1810. on the twentieth of July, 1812, that the foundation stone of what was to become St John's Cathedral was laid by the then-Superintendent, Lt.
[4] Two years later, in 1814, when the settlement received its new Superintendent in the person of Sir George Arthur, the evangelical influence intensified.
Armstrong periodically expressed his desire to extend his ministry to the Indians near the settlement and at the Moskito Shore, but was never able to pursue this goal.
[4] By 1825 the early evangelical influence had all but come to an end following the departure of Arthur and Armstrong, and thanks to the efforts of the majority of the settlers.
Newport was ‘a high Churchman of the old eighteenth century type’ who believed in the historic orthodoxy of the Church.
[4] On the thirteenth of April, 1826, St John's Church was consecrated by Christopher Lipscomb, Bishop of Jamaica.
He had earlier, in July 1824, been consecrated and appointed to the Jamaican See with jurisdiction over the Church in the Belize settlement in accordance with the creation of the Diocese of Jamaica, with state-supplied stipends for two clergymen.
About this time In 1830, Codrington College[7] in Barbados started to prepare candidates exclusively to become priests, and in 1833 in England, the Anglo-Catholic Oxford Movement was beginning.
A grant from the SPG's Negro Instruction Fund was secured for the erection of a school at Belize Town as part of the effort to provide education for the slaves who were now legally free.
A small wooden building was erected on the north side of the town dedicated to St Mary the Virgin.
A few years later, the Anglo-Guatemalan Treaty of 1859 was signed, a basis for Guatemala's current and disputed claims about Belizean boundaries.
[4] The Bishop of Jamaica in 1862 sought the support of the SPG in a scheme for the establishment of a mission in Northern British Honduras.
[4] Henry Holme was consecrated first bishop of British Honduras in St Michael's Cathedral, Barbados, on the first of March 1891.
[4] A year later, on 10 January 1894, Ormsby's jurisdiction was extended to include Guatemala, Spanish Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Ormsby divided the colony of British Honduras itself into eight large mission districts and had eighteen clergy at work throughout his extended diocese.
At this time the diocese was reduced by transferring the Isthmus of Panama and all areas south of it to the jurisdiction of the Protestant Episcopal Church of the USA.
Much work was maintained among the Moskito Indians who gave generously to the Church, longing to live under the rule of the British flag, as their ancestors had so done.
[4] The 1931 hurricane that devastated the Colony of British Honduras caused tremendous damage to church property.
[18] In terms of the Internet, in 2012 Wright introduced a) the first Diocese of Belize's Web page and b) the Diocese of Belize's, Anglican Theological Institute's online program (ATI) in conjunction with the Online Anglican Theological College program (OATC),.
[4][19][20] ATI's Director created an Anglican Daily Office Web site, primarily for student use,[21] and was a key person who enabled the 2016 Spanish translation of the 1995 Book of Common Prayer for the Church in the Province of the West Indies (CPWI).
