The Rt. Rev. John Freeman Young

Second Bishop of Florida

John Freeman Young (1820-1885) became the Second Bishop of Florida in 1867. The diocese was only twenty-nine years old and it was so devastated by the effects of the Civil War that the Committee on the State of the Church wrote that year that it was a "wonder" that the Church in Florida still had "an organized existence at all." Only four clergymen and lay delegates from just three churches had been present at the diocese's convention of 1866, and later that year Bishop Francis Huger Rutledge had died.

The first ten years of his Episcopate, Bishop Young wrote in a pastoral letter in 1882, were "mainly a struggle for life", but with the end of the depression of 1873 and the beginning of a wave of immigration into Florida, the diocese began to grow very rapidly. In Bishop Young's last ten years it expanded from twenty parishes and missions with fourteen clergy at work to forty-eigh congregations ministered to by thirty-six clergymen.

Bishop Young did much of the work of planting new missions himself. Traveling the length and breadth of the state on horseback, in buggies and carts, by steamer and sailboat and sometimes on foot, he started missions wherever he found a few Episcopal families. He organized in Key West the first Episcopal Church exclusively for black people in Florida and also a Spanish-language parish for Cuban immigrants. He visited Cuba twice, in response to a petition that the Church be established there, and Cuba became an important missionary firld for the Episcopal Church in the United States.

The future bishop had begun his ministry in 1845 at St. John's Church, Jacksonville, Florida. From there, he had moved on to various posts in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana; then he had become an assistant rector at Trinity Church, New York City. While serving there, from 1860 - 1867, he became a serious student of theology, church architecture and hymnology. He began collecting and translating great Christian hymns of various churches, a collection which was published posthumously as Great Hymns of the Church. By translating the German "Stille Nachr! Heilige Nacht!" into the Christmas carol "Silent Night", Bishop Young made a lasting gift to all English-speaking Christians.

The bishop's interest in architecture enabled him to bring the Carpenter Gothis church to Florida. It was a small, simple, inexpensive, easily-constructed, but churchly wooden church building. Richard Upjohn, the architect who had designed New York's Trinity Church had also published a book containing detailed plans and instructions with which small congregations could build churches. Gothic in style, they looked like churches and felt like churches. Bishop Young, while he was at Trinity, had known Upjohn. In Florida he scattered churches built in Upjohn's Carpenter Gothic style over the face of his diocese. In them his people sang praises to God and worshippen in accord with the rites of the Book of Common Prayer.

Bishop Young died in 1885. He had greatly enriched his diocese and his church.