Robert Hallowell Gardiner III (September 9, 1855 – June 15, 1924) was an Episcopal layman and ecumenist, head of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew and one of the founders of the World Council of Churches.
His mother was the daughter of a prominent Cumberland County, Pennsylvania businessman, and this was her second marriage, since her first husband (also a military officer) had fallen ill and died at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1843, and she had also previously lost a baby.
Gardiner was then assigned to guard the Grapevine Pass through the Tehachapi Mountains, which gold prospectors crossed on their way to Placerita Canyon near Los Angeles, California.
Commanding officer Col. Edward F. Beale wanted to protect these indigenous peoples as well as displaced Amerindians from a developing slave trade in Native American children.
The elder Gardiners also worried that John C. Fremont had recently reversed over a century of colonial paternalism, with negative consequences toward longtime inhabitants of Spanish or Mexican descent.
Young Robert Hallowell Gardiner graduated from a Canadian high school at age 15, then after another year at Roxbury Latin, entered Harvard College.
He also served as General Convention delegate seven times, and on the General Board of Religious Education (GBRE) with bishops Ethelbert Talbot, Chauncey Brewster, David H. Greer, Thomas F. Gailor and Edward L. Parsons, as well as distinguished laymen Nicholas Murray Butler (president of Columbia University) and George Wharton Pepper (future Senator and the prominent in the University of Pennsylvania law faculty and Philadelphia bar).
After Brent's speech in Cincinnati in October 1910, the General Convention elected a Joint Commission on Faith and Order, with Chicago bishop Charles P. Anderson as President and Gardiner as Secretary, and financed with $100,000 from J. Pierpont Morgan.
In May 1913, Gardiner reported that 22 commissions had been appointed in the United States, Canada and England, and 7,580 persons of many churches were on their mailing list, which included all European countries, Arabia and Palestine, Ceylon, China, India, Japan and Korea, as well as Persia, Syria and Turkey.
[9] Gardiner, stunned, at first returned to his law practice, but soon recovered his ecumenical focus and managed to help organize a congress of 304 Protestant missionaries in Panama City in February 1916, including leaders from the Caribbean, Central and South America who had been omitted from the Edinburgh conference in 1910.
[10] Gardiner also continued to keep open communications with the Russian Orthodox Church and with the assistance of John Mott, helped avoid an influx of Protestant missionaries into that country in upheaval at war's end.
[11] He continued his efforts at war's end, despite Vatican upset about Protestant missionaries distributing their bibles in Italy, and other issues that torpedoed overtures made by midwestern bishops Anderson and Reginald Weller.
Moreover, in November, 1919 a conference in New York City with Episcopalians , Baptists, Congregationalists, Disciples of Christ, Lutherns and other Protestant denominations, as well as Orthodox Armenians , Greeks and Bulgarians called upon Gardiner to bring together another preliminary meeting of the Faith and Order assembly.
During that same month and city, the Life and Work conference was organized by Swedish Archbishop Nathan Soderblom with the participation of many central European churches, many of them deeply disturbed by the anti-German terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty.