When Channing turned 18, he went to Henderson, Kentucky, to work in his cousin Alex B. Barrett's general store, as well as save money for future studies.

There, he was confirmed by Benjamin Bosworth Smith, Kentucky's first bishop, on 7 April 1849, and also studied Greek at night under the guidance of the rector of St. Paul's Church.

[1] Then, like his eldest sibling John (1823-1870, who became a long-serving rector at St. Peter's Church in Rome, Georgia), Channing attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Reports of VTS graduates who wanted to or served as overseas missionaries, including Augustus Lyde, Henry Lockwood and Francis Hanson, inspired him.

They reached their destination almost eight months later, on 28 June 1856, having sailed around South America, and with stops at Rio de Janeiro and Sydney, Australia.

They soon learned that of the about twenty missionaries who had traveled to Shanghai to work under Boone since 1845, only about half remained—many experienced health problems, as well as the strains of cultural adjustment and physical dangers.

Meanwhile, in 1856, three years after Commodore Matthew Perry's four-warship entry into Edo Bay, Townsend Harris (a devout Episcopalian) had become the first American consul in Japan.

[6] Due to longstanding government restrictions on the teaching of Christianity (since the arrival of Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century) and the need to learn Japanese, Liggins' and Williams' religious duties were initially limited to ministering to American and British residents of the Nagasaki foreign settlement, as well as to visiting sailors.

The American Civil War also complicated matters; by 1864, Williams and a Dutch Reformed pastor were the only Protestant missionaries remaining in Japan.

He sailed for the U.S., and on October 3, 1866, during a meeting of the Board of Missions in New York City, Williams was consecrated as Missionary Bishop of China and Japan at St. John's Chapel.

Williams remained in the United States that winter, traveling to both northern and southern cities to tell American clergy and people about the missionary fields in China and Japan.

He presided over the first Synod of the Anglican Church in Japan in 1887, where these discussions occurred not only with the foreign missionaries, also with even more Japanese clergy and lay people.