Lucien Lee Kinsolving
Lucien Lee Kinsolving (May 14, 1862 – December 18, 1929) was first bishop of the missionary diocese that eventually became the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil.
Otis Kinsolving was imprisoned for treason by occupying Union forces, so relatives helped with the children until the widower moved with his family to Halifax County, Virginia at war's end and remarried.
[1] In 1891, Lucian Kinsolving returned to the United States to marry Alice Brown (1865–1944) of New Jersey, a kinswoman of Bishop McIlvaine of Ohio as well as descendant of founding father Richard Stockton.
Virginia's bishop, Francis McNeece Whittle, ordained Kinsolving and fellow VTS graduate James Watson Morris deacons in June and priests in August, 1889, whereupon they set out on a stormy sea voyage to Brazil, sponsored by the American Church Missionary Society.
[3] Although Portugal recognized Brazil's independence in 1825, under a constitutional monarchy headed by former Portuguese royalty, Anglican missionaries continued to serve primarily foreign sailors and traders in the cities.
[4] On November 15, 1889, shortly after these missionaries arrived in Brazil (and as they learned Portuguese under the auspices of a Presbyterian pastor near São Paulo), a coup d'état deposed the king, Dom Pedro II, disestablished the Catholic Church, established a federal republic and guaranteed freedom of religion.
The young Americans arrived at Porto Alegre on April 21, 1890, accompanied by four Brazilians, of whom Vicente Brande, Antonio M. de Fraga and Americo V. Cabral would all serve the church for many years.
They held their first public service on Trinity Sunday, June 1, 1890, and in August 1891 opened a second mission in Rio Grande, the port city where Presbyterians entrusted a small congregation to these Episcopalians.
William Cabell Brown and John Gaw Meem, together with lay missionary Mary Packard (daughter of the VTS dean and who would serve 27 years in Brazil before her retirement).
[7] The new missionaries first concentrated their evangelism in the eastern region of the Rio Grande do Sul, which like the Confederacy, attempted to withdraw from Brazil in 1892 and received concessions in 1895.
Waite Stirling, bishop for the Falkland Islands, the eight missionaries had established two additional missions, at Viamao near Porto Alegre and at Boa Vista near Pelotas.
Brown moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he had previously occasionally ministered to the congregations of Anglican chaplaincies (then under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of the Falkland Islands).
Brown also organized Trinity Chapel in Méier (a suburb, now a neighborhood), before he was called back to Virginia to become its coadjutor bishop and Rev.
Morris upon his return to Brazil in 1920 (after 18 years in the United States for family heath reasons) reopened the theological seminary in Porto Alegre and by 1923 built the gothic Church of the Ascension on school grounds.
In his 27-year ministry in Brazil, Kinsolving had baptised 13,535 people and confirmed 4,997, as well as ordained 23 Brazilian clergy (two by then retired, and one of whom, Theodoro Pithan, would become the diocese's first native-born bishop in 1939).
Kinsolving, his four fellow American missionaries and six Brazilians liturgically on June 7 as the Pioneers of the Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil.
