Julia Chester Emery’s best-known legacy is the United Thank Offering, a fundraising ministry of the Episcopal Church Women, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build churches and support mission work all over the world. Above from 2013 on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation: Michael Smith, the Bishop of South Dakota, wearing the feathers of a Sioux chief, presided over the consecration of the new St. James’s, Cannon Ball, North Dakota, as supervising priest John Floberg held up a famous UTO blue box. For 40 years Emery presided over the Woman’s Auxiliary (now ECW) of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society, the formal name of The Episcopal Church. (St. James’s lost its old building to a teenage arsonist three years earlier, but those blue boxes full of thanksgiving coins helped rebuild it better than ever.) Had she been alive last year when the oil pipeline confrontation broke out at Standing Rock, few would have been surprised to see her there, praying and encouraging the women, eating the Native food, sleeping on the ground in a tipi – and bringing funds to help. (Mary Frances Schjonberg/Episcopal News Service)
The Daily Office 
