From Cowley to Cambridge.
How an English-born brotherhood
found its home in America.
The Society of Saint John the Evangelist was founded in 1866 in Cowley, England — the first stable brotherhood of men to live under religious vows in the Anglican Communion since the Reformation. Within four years of that beginning, a founding member had crossed the Atlantic and was ministering in Boston.
In the decades that followed, the Society sent brothers to India, South Africa, Japan, Canada, and Scotland, and eventually built the monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that has been our home for nearly a century. This is the shape of that story.
On the Feast of Saint John the Evangelist — December 27, 1866 — a small group gathered in the village of Cowley, near Oxford, England, and made their first vows together as members of a new religious society. They were priests of the Church of England. What they were beginning was, in one sense, entirely new to their tradition: the Anglican Communion had not seen a stable brotherhood of men living under religious vows since the monasteries were dissolved in the sixteenth century.
Their leader was the Reverend Richard Meux Benson — a scholar, a mystic, and a parish priest who had spent long years learning what it means to be fully given to God. With him stood Charles Chapman Grafton and Simeon Wilberforce O’Neill. They chose the name Society of Saint John the Evangelist for their new community, honoring the feast day on which it came into being.
[Read more → The Founders]
The Society was never imagined as an English institution only. Within four years, Father Grafton had crossed the Atlantic and was ministering at the Church of the Advent in Boston. The Society’s presence in America grew from there — through rented rooms and modest houses, through pastoral work and spiritual direction, through years of prayer in places that were not yet permanent — until it took root in the city that has been our home ever since.
[Read more → The Early American Years]
In the 1930s, the Society built the monastery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that remains our home today. The land was given, in part, by the art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner. The design was entrusted to Ralph Adams Cram, one of the great ecclesiastical architects of his era. The result — the Monastery Church of Saint Mary and Saint John — is a building whose stone and silence speak of permanence and prayer. The Guesthouse, which welcomes guests to this day, was built as a memorial to Mrs. Gardner.
Our other home is Emery House in West Newbury, Massachusetts — a different kind of quiet. A farmhouse, meadows, hermitages, and the Merrimack River running nearby. It has been part of our life since the 1930s, when two sisters, the Misses Emery, offered it to the brothers in a gesture of hospitality that was never forgotten.
[Read more → The Monastery and Emery House]
The Society’s history encompasses far more than Cambridge and Boston. Brothers went to India, South Africa, Japan, Canada, and Scotland. For more than a century, there was a parallel congregation in England — in Cowley, where everything began — that continued long after the American community had found its own permanent home. That congregation came to a quiet and peaceful close in December 2025, when its last member died.
[Read more → The Wider Society]
We are a smaller community today than at our height. We have not understood smallness to be failure. The brothers who live here now pray the Daily Office, welcome guests, offer retreats, and seek God — as this community has always done, in the ways that have always been ours. The story that began on that December day in 1866 is still being written.