Robert Hallowell Gardiner III

Upon retiring from the Brotherhood of St. Andrew for health reasons, Gardiner took some time to recuperate, then plunged himself into ecumenical work, especially with his friend Bishop Brent. 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. By the following April, he had helped secure the participation of eighteen American Protestant churches, and plans had been made to start formal communications with the Roman Catholic Church, the Old Catholic Churches and Orthodox Churches.^[6] However, it took another ten years before the American Episcopalians, who had funded the idea of the Faith and Order Conference, could transfer that role to an organization representative of Anglicans, Lutheran, Orthodox, Reformed and other European and American churches. 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.^[7] In the summer of 1914, Gardiner wrote to Cardinal Gasparri, and received a favorable reply from the Holy See.^[8] However, as delegates gathered in Constance, Switzerland in August, 1914, World War I broke out, dashing their hopes (and forcing Gardiner and other delegates to flee before German railroads closed, although German authorities accorded them special protection as they traveled to Cologne and then London).^[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. However, Bishop William T. Manning nearly blocked formal Episcopal participation in the conference, until George Wharton Pepper and Rev. Arthur Seldon Lloyd went to work.^[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. Communications with Archbishops Platon and Tikhon also continued through Stalin's persecutions, and with the Catholic church (often with the help of fellow attorney George Zabriskie and his Catholic contacts in New York City).^[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. Ecumenical dialogue proved more fruitful in Adelaide, Australia, and in 1920 the Lambeth Conference issued its "Appeal to all Christian People". 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. Thus, Gardiner helped organize another world conference that gathered in Geneva in August 1920, with Bishop Charles Brent elected Chairman of the Continuation Committee, George Zabriskie Treasurer and Gardiner as secretary. 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.

Although the Continuation Committee met several times, and secured participation of Orthodox Churches, Gardiner did not leave to see his dream's fulfillment, for he died before the committee's second formal meeting in 1925, which set the date for the World Conference on Faith and Order for Lausanne in August 1927. Gardiner had fallen seriously ill from overwork on April 22, 1922. By that November, he had recovered enough to report to the Continuation Committee that he had spent $7800 out of his own pocket (that would increase to $12,074.24 by year's end). However, his own Church's finance committee failed to make any appropriation for the World Conference in the budget for 1923, 1924 nor 1925. A.C.A. Hall and Frederick C. Morehouse of his own Episcopal Church opposed church unity and their denomination's participation in the Federal Council of Churches (the House of Bishops rejecting such participation in 1919). Still, however, he persisted in bringing together for dialogue many people who had no intention of conversing with each other, and he received good news just before Easter, 1923—reports from group conferences of the Y.M.C.A. and Anglican, Baptist, Congregational, Churches of Christ, Disciples of Christ, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Mar Thoma Syrian, Methodist, Old Catholics, Polish Marianite, Presbyterian, Society of Friends, South India United and even Roman Catholic churches. The following March he wrote "Difficulties are a joy, for they give one the chance to put out his full strength in the effort to try to overcome them, as long as the Lord gives me health and strength I am going to stick to my job."^[12]

Gardiner died at his home, Oaklands, on June 15, 1924, after a week's bout with pneumonia. His wife was convinced that he did not know he was dying, for he kept talking in a dream about letters he had wanted to write, even as she gathered their children around his bed. Zabriskie in the United States and Canon Bate in England continued his work, using their scholarly, linguistic and administrative talents to the full, as had Gardiner.^[13]