The Church of the Good Shepherd, Kensington, was an Episcopal congregation in Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1868, it merged with Emmanuel Church, Kensington, in 1994 to form the Church of Emmanuel and the Good Shepherd. Its 1887 building, designed by architect T. Frank Miller and located at 2121-2127 East Cumberland Street, was demolished in 2016. The Church of the Good Shepherd, Kensington, was an among the few surviving reminders of the mid to late 19th century English immigrant experience and community in Kensington and Philadelphia. Movement has been made to celebrate the colonial experience (i.e. Penn Treaty Park) and preserve the 19th century "new immigrant" experience (i.e. St. Laurentius Church, in Fishtown) in the greater Kensington area. Scholars often refer to this immigrant group as hidden and forgotten.For example, see: Erickson, Charlotte. Invisible Immigrants: The Adaption of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (1972). These immigrants, to outsiders, blended in and disappeared. However, as the property demonstrates, mid to late 19th century English immigrants, far from being hidden, built unique neighborhoods, cultural institutions, and worship sites.
History The Protestant Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd (Church of the Good Shepherd), Kensington, was organized on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, or Michaelmas, 29 September 1868, in the Frankford Market House, on the southwest corner of Frankford Avenue and Adams Street.Adams Street was renamed Hagert Street. The selection of Michaelmas is also significant. In high church and Anglo-Catholic circles, Michaelmas is a feast of dedication. This would be the first Episcopal parish in the City's 31st ward. The parish was incorporated in 1869 and admitted to the convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania on 13 May 1869. The Rev. John W. Claxton, rector of Church of the Advent, a high church/Anglo-Catholic parish located at 5th Street and York Avenue, served as rector while the Rev. A. A. Rickert, a deacon, oversaw the day-to-day activities of the new parish. The parish register begins 20 June 1869 and the first entry is a list of eighteen communicants. This list could be thought of as the founding members. The founding members of the parish are evenly drawn from Emmanuel Church, Kensington, and Free Church of St. John, Kensington. Save for one member who came from Emmanuel Church, Holmesburg. In 1870 the parish grew by four to twenty-two communicants however the parish's Sunday school had a bustling 205 children. Rickert continued to lead the parish until mid-1871 when illness prompted him to return to the West Indies.
After Rickert's departure, the vestry selected the twenty-six year old the Rev. John A. Goodfellow as their next rector. A Philadelphian by birth, Goodfellow had one year stints at St. John's Church, Camden, NJ, and St. Clement's Church, Wilkes-Barre, PA, before receiving the vestry's call. Goodfellow arrived in March 1872 and immediately went to work. During his first sermon he challenged the parish to raise to money to acquire a site and build their own house of worship. After the service, $300.00 was raised for this purpose. The fund-raising continued and that summer a parcel of land was secured at the intersection of East Cumberland and Collins Streets. The parcel was not purchased out right, rather the parish gained all rights to the land provided the parish pay an annual ground rent. This system of "ground rents", where perpetual property rights were exchanged for annual rent was typical in eighteenth and nineteenth century Philadelphia.
The following spring, of 1873, a large frame edifice, with seating for 500, was constructed at a cost of about $4000. The building also featured a vestry room and Sunday school rooms. The funds raised to construct this building were paid for by the congregants and kind well-wishers rather than the sale of pews, which was the typical method to fund the construction of Episcopal churches in this period. To make Church of the Good Shepherd, Kensington, a "free church," that is a church without pew rents is a deliberate social, philosophical and theological action on the part of Goodfellow. 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." The decision to disavow pew rents made theological sense, but they often made financial sense. The sale of pews provided the upfront costs to construct the church building and pew rents provided a constant and steady form of income to support the work of the parish. Without a reliable source of income, Church of the Good Shepherd found the cost of their annual ground rent a significant hardship. Writing to the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania in 1876, Rev. 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."
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. The cornerstone was laid on 16 November 1889 and was consecrated by the Rt. Rev. Ozi W. Whitaker on 21 January 1892.
The evidence suggests that the founders of Church of the Good Shepherd and the Rev. John A. Goodfellow were influenced by Anglo-Catholic principles. The Anglo-Catholic movement within the Episcopal Church in the United States, as in the Church of England, emerged in the 1850s and 1860s. The impact of the movement cannot be overstated. The design of and the worship in Philadelphia's Episcopal churches changed in remarkable ways. A positive influence of the movement changed the Church's approach to the poor and downtrodden. In London, England, for example, a cluster of Anglo-Catholic parishes were found in the City's East End. 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 parishes of London's East End were called the "Biretta Belt," in reference to the special hat worn by Anglo-Catholic clergy. In their own way, the Episcopal parishes in Kensington, Emmanuel, Good Shepherd, St. Ambrose's, St. Luke's and St. Nathaniel's, form a mini-Biretta Belt. Reed, John Shelton. Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian Anglo-Catholicism (1996) p. 155. The very types of industrial workers that were found in Kensington. 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. It is in this industrial milieu that the young Rev. John A. Goodfellow attempted to build the parish. Similar to the London East End parishes who often relied on those outside of their parish to fund parish activities, so too did Goodfellow. He had to look toward the wealthy Center City Episcopalians to help finance the purchase of the land for the parish buildings as well as contribute toward the construction of the new building. The Anglo-Catholic priests who worked in London's East End were called slum-priests. It was a badge of honor since they attempted to minister to areas that others dared not tread. 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. Rev. Goodfellow served almost 61 years as rector the parish. During that time he baptized 2954 people, married, 1007 couples, and buried 2272. His success was measured less by large numbers of communicants than by a smaller but devoted congregation, and a large penumbra of goodwill and affection from people whom he served in other ways. He had rightfully earned the nickname - "Priest of Kensington."
The Church of the Good Shepherd is unique in the composition of its parishioners. The parish registers indicate a strong and significant presence of recent English immigrants, presumably drawn to by work opportunities around the parish. This is especially the case between 1880 and 1920. 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. In the absence of formalized mechanisms, Rev John A. Goodfellow, and Frank A. Longshore, the parish organist who held the position for over forty years, made deliberate and overt attempts to welcome English and to a lesser degree Anglican-Irish immigrants into the life and work of the parish. This work fell mostly to Longshore. Being around 1890, he began to meet steamships arriving from England and connecting Anglican immigrants to parishes in Philadelphia and beyond. 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. Further he was appointed as the Philadelphia representative of the Church of England's Church Immigration Society, in 1905.In 1908, for example, Longshore met 42 vessels that arrived in Philadelphia. In total 3460 people were assisted in one way or rather. Over 2100 referrals were made to various parishes in Philadelphia and elsewhere. "Frank H. Longshore's Forty Years as Organist and Choirmaster of Good Shepherd, Kensington, Commemorated by Parish" Church News of the Diocese of Pennsylvania Nov 1927. 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. Although there is no evidence to suggest that Longshore steered English immigrants to Church of the Good Shepherd, the parish did benefit in terms of numbers thanks to these immigrants.