Joseph K. C. Pillai

In 1930 the Rev'd William Newton was also consecrated by presbyters as the bishop for this church. The Rev'd Charles Leslie Saul (southern England based in London) and the Rev'd Gordon Pinder (northern England based in Preston) were in 1936 consecrated by +Newton as his successors with +Pinder taking the office of primus. Bishop Saul was determined to obtain the formal English episcopal succession for this church and he petitioned Dr. B. Charles Harris to bestow it. Finally, on 17 September 1944 Dr. Harris served as chief consecrator when he sub-conditione consecrated Primus Pinder and Bishops Saul and K. C. Pillai (who had been cons. in 1937 by +Pinder and +Saul) to the episcopal bench. This event annoyed Primus Hall, who was Anglo-Catholic in orientation and ironically as head of the FPEC, disapproved of such a protestant church group as the ECofE obtaining the Holy Orders of the Free Protestant Episcopal Church.

On 17 September (not 17 November as commonly reported in various accounts) 1944 at St. Paul's Evangelical Church of England, Outwood, Bishop Benjamin Charles Harris, assisted by Bishop Hugh George de Willmott Newman, consecrated Gordon Pinder (Primus), Charles Leslie Saul, and Joseph K.C. Pillai into the Historic Episcopal Succession. These were the then bishops for the Evangelical Church of England, which had up till then only consecration of its original bishops by presbyters. Dr. Harris, long time nonconformist chaplain at a mental hospital in Abbots Langley, had been consecrated FPEC bishop for Essex on 25 July 1916 by Dr. Martin. One result of this consecration was that Bishop Pillai (1901 to 1970), who was the ECC bishop for India, eventually moved to the USA and in 1968 became the first bishop of the American Episcopal Church now known as the Anglican Province of America. On 23 August 1997 the Protestant Episcopal Reformed Church, the name by which the Evangelical Church of England was lastly known by, was formally dissolved, its last Primus Dr. Saul (1947 to 1991) having died on 7 June 1991 at the age of 85.