by Hans Rollmann
CONCEPTION BAY IN 1766
The beginning of a continuing Anglican presence on the island dates from the arrival of the Rev. John Jackson in 1701, following a private subscription by local residents. Jackson's support in 1703 through the newly-founded Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts initiated an enduring relationship between Newfoundland Anglicans and the S.P.G., which, for better or worse, made the missionaries on the island dependent upon an agency far removed from their field of activity. The Anglican missionaries of Newfoundland were especially hampered by a colonial policy that exhibited ambivalent and often hostile attitudes toward settlement. This policy prevented the establishment of a successful glebe and vestry system prevalent in other colonies and so important for an effective ecclesiastical presence in the Americas. And the absence of a local legislature robbed Anglicans of the constitutional entrenchment of preferences characteristic of the "Established Church" elsewhere and made the local ministers precariously dependent upon the favours or disfavours of the many and often changing governors. Although Newfoundland had been the example quoted by Thomas Bray in 1700, when seeking public support for his plan of a Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, the same Newfoundland throughout the eighteenth century became an exception to the initial S.P.G. design of establishing within a short time self-supporting parishes in the colonies.
In 1764 there were two S.P.G. supported clergymen in Newfoundland: the Reverend Edward Langman, a St. John's veteran minister, and the Reverend James Balfour, a convert from Scotch Presbyterianism, who was stationed in Trinity. Although Governor Palliser was greatly responsible for the retarded colonization of Newfoundland during the eighteenth century, he considered the presence of religion a controlling mechanism for pacifying the masses and was thus not opposed to a minister in the most populous region of Newfoundland. In Labrador he encouraged the Moravian mission among the Inuit for similar reasons, so that the natives would not interfere with the trade in Southern Labrador. In 1764, the year in which a church was being built in Harbour Grace, Palliser may very well have had the Conception Bay area in mind when he observed that the inhabitants of Newfoundland "live as mere savages without religion, without marrying or christening their children ... who spend the Lord's Day in idleness and debauchery, every one living as he likes." The call for a third minister, to serve the Conception Bay communities, followed a predictable pattern: private subscription for the building of a church and the maintenance of a minister by the merchants and inhabitants. Not common, however, was that the religious initiative came from a Calvinistic dissenter. It explains, however, the subsequent choice of minister: the Rev. Laurence Coughlan.