Despite being located in the extreme southwestern corner of Tennessee, Memphis served as the see city for most of the history of the old statewide diocese prior to the first territorial separation in 1983.

After the American Civil War, missionary emphasis in West Tennessee shifted to the city of Memphis, although the church gradually began appearing in larger towns outside the Mississippi River region as well.

A suffragan bishop, W. Fred Gates, Jr., worked out of Memphis from 1966 to 1982; he was elected and consecrated partly for that purpose.

Alex Dickson, the first bishop of the diocese, was closely aligned with "orthodox" forces within Anglicanism opposed to the trends away from teaching "Jesus Christ as the one source of salvation and the normative authority of scripture."

)[1] During the controversies that racked the denomination nationally in the early 2000s (after Dickson's retirement) over the consecration of a non-celibate gay man, Gene Robinson, to the episcopacy, some clergy and laypeople in the diocese, mostly in suburban Memphis, departed their parishes in favor of continuing Anglican groups.