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Rising to Greatness, 1910–1970
Philip Cook arrived as rector in 1910, when San Antonio’s nearly 100,000 residents had made it the largest city in Texas. Cook found St. Mark’s, however, still being run as “a village church,” despite having close to 1,000 communicants. He established pledging as a way to project income, set up annual budgets, began regular newsletters, built an auditorium adjoining the rectory and expanded church programs in general. Four years after his departure he was named Bishop of Delaware, the first of ten St. Mark’s rectors to be named bishop while at St. Mark’s or soon after leaving. Cook also served as president of the National Council of the Episcopal Church in the 1930s.

Cook’s next seven successors may have also had relatively brief tenures, but they could build on the professional management he established for the fast-growing congregation. St. Mark’s served Sunday dinners to soldiers based in the city as part of its ministry to them during World War I. The music ministry continued to grow under the direction of Oscar J. Fox, whose extracurricular composition of lyrics to cowboy songs made him the first to draw national attention to Texas music themes. The St. Mark’s basketball team began winning a series of citywide Sunday School championships.

By the prosperous mid-1920s, St. Mark’s, with more than 1,500 communicants, was in need of larger facilities. In 1927 the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, John Gardner Murray, was on hand for the dedication of a new auditorium and parish hall adjoining the church on the enlarged site of the old rectory and auditorium. The Depression, however, brought difficulty in paying the construction debt. The shadow of foreclosure vanished in 1935 thanks to a fundraising campaign that successfully invoked the memory of Robert E. Lee and other early members of St. Mark’s.

As World War II approached, St. Mark’s, with 2,300 communicants, recovered its prosperity. Future President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Bird Taylor were married at St. Mark’s in 1934 under the dynamic rectorship of Arthur McKinstry, a social activist who soon succeeded a predecessor at St. Mark’s, Philip Cook, as Bishop of Delaware. During the war, weekly dinners and numerous programs ministered to the large number of servicemen and servicewomen based in the city.

In 1949, St. Mark’s concluded a long-planned expansion that increased seating capacity in the nave to some 800 by adding a narthex at the rear of the church building and sealing the old side entrances. A Gothic tower with a carillon was built and the interior of the church was renovated. Lenten Luncheons were begun for the general community in 1951, and became an annual tradition. The St. Mark’s communicant level of 3,102 made it the largest Episcopal church in the country outside New York City. A national Episcopal magazine termed St. Mark’s “one of America’s great churches.” The rector presiding over this era was Harold Gosnell, whose twenty-year tenure had begun in 1948 and ended when he was selected to become Bishop of the Diocese of West Texas.

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