However, as the property demonstrates, mid to late 19th century English immigrants, far from being hidden, built unique neighborhoods, cultural institutions, and worship sites.

During his first sermon he challenged the parish to raise to money to acquire a site and build their own house of worship.

The fund-raising continued and that summer a parcel of land was secured at the intersection of East Cumberland and Collins Streets.

He was among the founders of the Free and Open Church Association, which was found in 1875, and served as the organization's general secretary for forty years.

Many of those affiliated with the Association were influenced by the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Anglican Communion, and found it "increasingly difficult to reconcile the practice of private pew ownership or exclusive-use rental with their inclusive theology.

Without a reliable source of income, Church of the Good Shepherd found the cost of their annual ground rent a significant hardship.

Goodfellow suggested that "…if the liberal members of the church in this city would only come forward and help my parishioners, who are all poor, and are nearly employed in factories, to purchase the ground rent, the parish would become self-supporting at once.

"[11] In 1887, the debt owned for the ground rents was paid off and the congregation raised funds for the construction of a building designed by T. Frank Miller.

Here one found "rough English poverty: the men employed as car-men, costermongers, and bootmakers, and in furniture making, silk weaving, glassblowing, and ‘gas-work.

The arriving English, and to a lesser degree Protestant Irish, immigrants that worked in the textile mills near Frankford Avenue and Amber Street came from a stratum of British Society that was most impacted by Anglo-Catholicism since Anglo-Catholic clergy were most likely to work in the poorer and more industrial sections of England.

[citation needed] The term has not been applied to priests in the United States; however, the personality of Goodfellow exhibits the qualities found in these English slum-priests.

He exhibited a zeal for soul saving that was almost evangelical in its earnestness, together with a demonstrable interest in the physical condition of their parishioners and a selflessness about he own wellbeing.

The Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania did not have a formalized ministerial outreach to these immigrants, unlike efforts to convert disaffected Italians and Polish Roman Catholics.

This work became formalized in 1901 when the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania recognized this ministry and appointed him lay chaplain to the City's immigration depot.

[13] In these roles, Longshore connected, mostly, English immigrants to temporary housing, religious communities, or assisted them to transportation facilitates if they were heading beyond Philadelphia.

In March 1931, a plea for temporary relief aid for the citizens of Kensington appeared in Church News of the Diocese of Pennsylvania, the situation in the community was described this way: The great industrial section of Philadelphia in Kensington is out of work and suffering, desperately suffering in many cases, because the everywhere present large families of children of the mill workers are going without milk and groceries and in many cases clothing.

It is believed by those who have studied the present labor condition out there that 80 percent of the textile workers are not receiving wages, because their work in the mills is closed indefinitely.

There are over 300,000 Scotch, English, and Irish people in Kensington and about 450 mills, so you can make your own deduction in terms of hunger and personal discomfort at such a time as this.

John A. Goodfellow died at the age of 88 on 13 February 1933, just shy of his 61st anniversary as rector of the Church of the Good Shepherd.

Alex M. Keedwell, a young Anglo-Catholic priest who had served as curate at Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosement, found a congregation of 212 souls in steep decline.

The Federal Writers Project described Kensington as: "the massive faculty here dwarfs the rows of workers’ homes, which are tiny, in need of repair and unrelieved by any sign of vegetation.

Most of them were built during the industrial boom in the early 1900s, but construction improvements during recent years left their dreariness unaltered.

Although the Kensington population has remained virtually the same in its makeup for decades, there has been considerable migration out of the area by families whose incomes are now derived from employment in the landscaped ‘new technology’ plants in the Greater Northeast and the suburbs.

[17] While it is true Church of the Good Shepherd grew under Trauger, to a high of 267 congregants in 1967, this growth is more likely to do with troubles at neighboring parishes.

[18] Although Good Shepherd retained its "whiteness" for it was among the last parishes to make any overtures toward the rapidly growing Puerto-Rican population.

Additionally by Trauger's time, and in all likelihood long before, the concept of whiteness was associated with the Irish, Italian, and Polish ethnics rather than the types of people who sat in Good Shepherd's pews.

He argued that the church building "present[ed] a poor contrast to the new [Beacon Presbyterian], three squares away on the same street, and to other places of worship in the ward."

"[24] The Church of the Good Shepherd was designed for a liturgy that focused on the Celebration of the Eucharist and incorporated formal liturgical practices that developed as a result of Ecclesiology and the larger Oxford Movement.

The insertion of the choir stalls in the nave reflected the particular emphasis on a more ceremonial liturgy and the importance of music commonly found in Anglo-Catholic parishes.

The Ecclesiologists pushed for parishes to adopt this style of placement, which up to the Oxford Movement had only been found in the Great English cathedrals.