In addition to changing the name of the Commission, the 1868 General Convention explicitly resolved to send missionaries to the South to ascertain why Black people had left The Episcopal Church; make the established schools more auxiliary to missionary work by placing them under direct control of clergy; and train Black men for ministry. 

Nevertheless, support for the Commission of Home Missions to Colored People declined in the next triennium.  In 1872, the House of Deputies Committee on the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society estimated that contributions for Home Missions to Colored People had declined by thirty percent, hampering its operations and making any expansion of them difficult if not impossible.  Still, the Commission supported forty teachers and 2,200 students in the South.  The Committee urged General Convention to resolve a “hearty, united, and systemic support” for Home Missions to Colored People by all of the church members and an increased effort towards pastoral and missionary work over educational work.

Two years later, in the Tenth Annual Report, the Commission noted that the number of schools within its purview had increased to thirty-one, serving 3,000 scholars with fifty-four teachers. In the Twelfth Annual Report, published the year before the Commission’s dissolution, the number of schools and missions had increased to thirty-seven.  These schools provided practical and religious instruction to meet the spiritual and social needs of those who had been enslaved; prepared Black students for paid labor, political involvement, and the ministry; and they provided clothing and books, gathered by the Commission and forwarded to the teachers and missionaries, to people in need.

The Episcopal Church, however, questioned whether a separate organization was necessary for the aid of and evangelism to Black Americans.  In 1877, General Convention consolidated responsibilities within the Board of Missions, opening a pathway for the elimination of Home Missions.  At the same time, the Commission itself often discussed if it was necessary for the work being carried out.  Not only were donations for the purpose of educating and evangelizing to freedmen and freedwomen decreasing, possibly due to funding fatigue from primarily Northern donors, but the racist stereotype of laziness and the need for Black Americans to take responsibility for helping themselves haunts reports and speeches from this period. 

Whatever the impetus, Home Missions ended in February of 1878 and the Committee on Domestic Missions took over its role.  From this point, the Domestic Committee raised funds and disbursed them to Bishops and institutions for “Work Among the Colored People,” as it was termed in Spirit of Missions.  It also further reduced the focus of the previous work, reporting that there was no need for contributions towards the secular education of Black children, as that responsibility was being assumed by the States.  Instead, its priority was theological education to build a “well-educated Ministry of color” for evangelism, and it urged donations to sponsor ministry candidates in their studies.