Channing Moore Williams, a farmer’s son, was born in Richmond, Virginia, on July 18th, 1829, and was brought up in straitened circumstances by his widowed mother. He attended the College of William and Mary and the Virginia Theological Seminary.

Ordained as a deacon in 1855, he offered himself for work in China, where he was ordained as a priest in 1857. Two years later, he was sent to Japan and opened work in Nagasaki. His first convert was baptized in 1866, the year that he was chosen as bishop for both China and Japan.

After 1868, he decided to concentrate all his work in Japan, following the revolution that opened the country to renewed contact with the western world. Relieved of his responsibility for China in 1874, Williams made his base at Yedo (now Tokyo), where he founded a divinity school, later to become St. Paul’s University. At a synod in 1887, he helped bring together the English and American Anglican missions to form the Nippon Sei Ko Kai, the Holy Catholic Church of Japan, when the church there numbered fewer than a thousand communicants.

Williams translated parts of the Prayer Book into Japanese, and he was a close friend and warm supporter of Bishop Schereschewsky, his successor in China, in the latter’s arduous work of translating the Bible into Chinese.

After resigning his jurisdiction in 1889, Bishop Williams stayed in Japan to help his successor there, Bishop John McKim, who was consecrated in 1893. Williams lived in Kyoto and continued to work in the opening of new mission stations until his return to the United States in 1908. He died in Richmond, Virginia, on December 2nd, 1910.