James Lloyd Breck (June 27, 1818 – April 2, 1876) was a priest, educator, and missionary of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America.

Founded in 1828 by [the Reverend William Augustus Muhlenberg]], one of the great educators in American history, life in this "Church school" formed Breck in many different aspects of his human nature.

Profoundly affected by the religion, personality, and many gifts of Muhlenberg, Breck resolved at age sixteen to devote himself to the work of a missionary educator.

From Whittingham, who from 1840 served as Bishop of Maryland, Breck acquired a deep admiration of St. Columba, the sixth-century missionary educator who established a mission station and school on the island of Iona off the coast of Scotland.

While Muhlenberg called himself an "Evangelical Catholic," and Whittingham was a decided High Churchman, it is difficult to place Breck's churchmanship precisely.

He considered himself a member and a priest of "the Holy Catholic Church" of the Creed, and he was a confident Anglican in the Episcopal denomination, but whether he was a full-blown Anglo-Catholic is difficult to establish.

In 1842, by then a deacon in the Episcopal Church, he went to the frontier of Wisconsin with two classmates, under the direction of Bishop Jackson Kemper, to found Nashotah House, intended as a monastic community, a seminary, and a center for theological work.

Breck was ordained into the priesthood later that year by the Missionary Bishop, Jackson Kemper at the Oneida Indian settlement 150 miles north of Nashotah.

He had a knack for communicating with them on a deep level, promising that the Great Father did not seek to destroy them but only to bring peace among the rival peoples centered round Christ Jesus the Savior of all human beings.