ORGANIZATION AND TENSIONS, 1849-74
As the Disciples grew and spread, the need of organization on a national
scale was felt. There were still lingering doubts as to whether fidelity
to the “ancient order of things” permitted such organization. But the
prevailing decision was that meetings of “deputies, messengers or
representatives” of the churches might properly be held if they would
remember that they are “voluntary expedients” and “have no authority to
legislate in any matter of faith or moral duty” but exist only “to
attend to the ways and means of successful cooperation.” These words,
quoted from a resolution adopted by a conference on cooperation held at
Steubenville, Ohio, in 1844, express the policy that became permanent.
Mr. Campbell himself, laying aside any earlier prejudice against what he
had called “popular schemes” among the denominations, urged “a more
general and efficient cooperation in the Bible cause, in the missionary
cause, in the educational cause.” But so long as the Disciples had no
agency of their own for foreign missionary work he recommended (1845)
that they support the Baptist Missionary Society. And when, in the same
year, D. S. Burnet and other brethren in Cincinnati organized an
“American Christian Bible Society,” he felt that this action was
premature, that it was not sufficiently representative of the whole
brotherhood, and that more could be accomplished with the available
funds by contributing them to the (Baptist) American and Foreign Bible
Society. He was no isolationist, and he bore no grudge against the
Baptists, in spite of the acrimonies that had accompanied the expulsion
of the Reformers from Baptist churches and associations a few years
earlier. He also endorsed the Evangelical Alliance as soon as it was
formed in 1846.
The demand for a national convention that would represent the whole body
of Disciples found voice through most of the influential journals. All
who urged a convention spoke of it as a meeting of “delegates” appointed
by the churches. To those who still objected that conventions and
missionary societies were no part of the “ancient order,” Mr. Campbell
replied that in such matters of method and procedure the church is “left
free and unshackled by any apostolic authority.”
National Organization
The first national convention of Disciples met at Cincinnati, October
24-28, 1849, with 156 representatives from one hundred churches in
eleven states. Some came as delegates with credentials from their
churches. Others represented districts. The Indiana state meeting had
elected messengers. But many ministers and active laymen were present
who had no formal appointment and no credentials. Since these were
well-known brethren, whose standing as representative Disciples no one
could deny, and whose right to an equal status with the elected
delegates it would have been embarrassing to challenge, it was voted to
enroll all present as members of the convention. So this first national
convention, though projected as a delegate convention, became a mass
meeting.
The organization of a missionary society was the principal business of
the convention. The name first chosen was “Home and Foreign Missionary
Society,” but this was immediately changed to “American Christian
Missionary Society,” because “the missionary cause is one”—a truth that
was rediscovered in 1919. The society’s name meant that it was to be an
American agency for missions throughout the world, including America.
Alexander Campbell was elected its first president, and he was
re-elected annually as long as he lived.
No sooner had the convention been held and the society formed than the
opposition to both flared up again. Jacob Creath, Jr., who had been
opposed to the convention from the beginning, wanted to have another
convention to discuss the legitimacy of conventions and societies. Some
others argued that “the church is the only missionary society and can
admit no rivals”; but these also objected to any arrangement for united
action by the churches, so that, in their view, each congregation would
have to be a separate missionary society. The criticism of conventions
and societies on the ground that there was no New Testament command or
precedent for them did not seem to have much popular support at this
time, and it soon died down. But a few years later it became a highly
controversial issue, and finally a divisive one.
The first venture abroad was the Jerusalem mission, led by Dr. James T.
Barclay. Even before the convention met and before the society was
formed, Dr. Barclay had been pressing the cause of foreign missions upon
the Disciples, had suggested Jerusalem as a field, and had offered his
services. He was a man of fine culture, with a college degree from the
University of Virginia and a degree in medicine from the University of
Pennsylvania, and the depth of his piety equaled the ardor of his
devotion to the cause. The selection of Jerusalem as the scene of the
first foreign missionary effort was based chiefly on sentimental
considerations. Since the gospel had first been preached “beginning at
Jerusalem,” it seemed fitting that the world-wide proclamation of the
“gospel restored” should also begin there. Dr. Barclay and his family
reached Jerusalem in February, 1851. After three and a half years of
work, not entirely unfruitful but on the whole disappointing, he
returned with the report that conditions did not warrant the continuance
of the mission at that time.
Soon after, the society attempted to plant a mission among the Negro
freedmen who had migrated to Liberia. This colony on the west coast of
Africa had but recently declared its independence, which had been
recognized by most of the powers—except the United States. A Negro
slave, Alexander Cross, was bought, freed, educated, and sent to
evangelize among his own people; but he died of fever on the coast of
Liberia before he could begin his work. In 1858 J. O. Beardslee, who had
been a missionary in Jamaica with another communion, became a Disciple
and returned to that island under the auspices of the American Christian
Missionary Society. His work produced no notable results, but it may
have helped to open the fray for the more substantial work in Jamaica
some years later. These three—Jerusalem, Liberia, and Jamaica—were the
only foreign missionary efforts in the twenty-five years during which
the society undertook to conduct both foreign and home missions, and all
three were counted as failures.
Growth, Journalism, Education
During the quarter-century to which our attention is now directed, the
American Christian Missionary Society did something toward sending
evangelists to neglected areas and planting churches on the frontier.
State societies did more. But the work that produced the very
substantial growth in this period was done chiefly by churches and
evangelists acting independently, by county and neighborhood
cooperation, and by individuals who were following the westward tide of
migration. While churches were being established in the new Western
territories and states as fast as population flowed into them, there was
also a steady increase of membership in the Central states, where the
movement had had its beginnings. After a tour of Indiana in 1850, Mr.
Campbell reported that “our people” in that state were second only to
the Methodists in numbers, resources, and influence. Their standing in
Kentucky at that time was certainly no worse. Development east of the
Alleghenies was relatively slow and slight, except in Virginia and North
Carolina, where early visits and preaching by Disciple ministers had
proved fruitful. These two states would have been even stronger if they
had not lost, while the Western states were gaining, by the westward
current of migration. In other Eastern states there were some notable
old churches, some of which originated under Haldanean, Sandemanian, or
similar influences and became affiliated with the Disciples, but they
did not greatly multiply.
The total numerical growth from 1849 to 1874 was not merely substantial;
it was amazing. By the middle of the nineteenth century, after twenty
years of separate existence, the Disciples had about 118,000 members. In
the 1850-60 decade their numbers were almost doubled to 225,000. For
1870, the figure is given as 350,000. By 1875 it was probably close to
400,000. This growth is the more remarkable because it was accomplished
with very little help from promotional organizations and with very
little general planning.
The abundance and vigor of the periodicals devoted to the defense of the
faith and the dissemination of news of the churches did much to make up
for the lack of more official agencies of cooperation. The editors had
no authority, but they exercised wide influence in the spread of ideas
and the promotion of acquaintance among the Disciples in scattered
communities. James M. Mathes published the _Christian Record_ at various
places in Indiana, with some intermissions, from 1843 to 1884. By far
the most influential editor, aside from Campbell and Errett, was
Benjamin Franklin, a collateral relative of the famous Dr. Benj.
Franklin.
Our Ben Franklin began his long and notable editorial career in 1845
with a paper which, beginning as the _Reformer_ and passing through
several changes and mergers, became the _American Christian Review_. He
was a powerful supporter of the missionary society until, after serving
as its secretary for a short time, he turned against it and became the
most effective opponent of organized work. More important than this was
the sledge-hammer evangelism that he carried on incessantly, with the
spoken as well as the written word. Completely without formal education,
he developed a clear and trenchant style which does not need his
biographer’s apologies. The favorite theme of his writing, and the sole
theme of his preaching, was the “plan of salvation” and the plea of the
Disciples for that simple gospel and the restoration of the church on
the apostolic pattern. A volume of his evangelistic sermons, _The Gospel
Preacher_, was the handbook for hundreds of other preachers and kept its
popularity for half a century. One must know Ben Franklin, and realize
how many there were like him, though built to a smaller scale, to
understand how the Disciples grew so fast in this pioneer period—and why
they ran into some difficulties later. Franklin also helped to save the
Disciples from division over slavery and the Civil War by urging that
the sole business of the church is to preach the gospel. In doing this,
he also helped to fasten upon them the idea that the church must be
neutral on all social and economic questions. A Christian “should make
his money according to the laws of business and spend it according to
the laws of God,” said one eminent minister.
About 1850 there arose a great zeal for founding colleges. In several
states the Disciples had become strong enough, or felt sure that they
soon would be strong enough, to support a college. Schools were needed
to train ministers, to provide an educated laity, to hold the loyalty of
the young people of their own families and win others, and to make their
fair contribution to the culture of new communities in which there was
little provision for tax-supported education.
In 1845 the Disciples had three colleges: Bacon, at Harrodsburg,
Kentucky; Bethany, at what is now Bethany, West Virginia; and Franklin,
near Nashville, Tennessee. Within a year or two before or after 1850, at
least nine colleges and institutes were established, most of which still
live. These included: Kentucky Female Orphan School, Midway, Kentucky;
Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, which became Hiram College, Hiram,
Ohio; Northwestern Christian University, which became Butler University,
Indianapolis, Indiana; Walnut Grove Academy, which grew into Eureka
College, Eureka, Illinois; Christian College (for girls), Columbia,
Missouri; Abington College, Abington, Illinois, which later merged with
Eureka; Berea College, Jacksonville, Illinois, which died young;
Arkansas College, Fayetteville, Arkansas, which met the same fate; and
Oskaloosa College, Oskaloosa, Iowa, which had thirty useful years before
it was dimmed by the brighter light of Drake University.
The percentage of survival in this list is unusually high. It was much
lower among the colleges started during the next twenty or thirty years.
The cost of maintaining a good college, according to the standards of
that time, was very little in comparison with present needs, but it was
more than most of the eager college founders thought it would be. Many
schools were started which had not a sufficient constituency. Others
were brought forth by the local pride of an optimistic young settlement
and withered away when its hope was deferred or its boom collapsed—for
while Chicago and Kansas City grew miraculously, many a “future
metropolis” of the Middle West remained a village. Few of the new
colleges were adequately financed, even for a modest beginning. The
mortality rate was therefore high. The Disciples were not alone in this.
Other denominations lost many infant colleges. By 1865 there was a
general complaint about the reckless multiplication of weak colleges.
Moses E. Lard expressed the mind of many when he wrote: “We are building
ten where we should have but one. One great university, with a single
well-endowed college in each state where we number fifty thousand, is
sufficient.”
One is rather surprised to find, running through several issues of the
_Millennial Harbinger_ in that same year, a discussion as to whether the
Disciples needed a good theological school for the graduate training of
the ministry. W. K. Pendleton, Campbell’s son-in-law (twice) and his
successor as president of Bethany College and as editor of the
_Millennial Harbinger_, argued that there was need of a school to give
ministers a professional education beyond what the colleges can or
should furnish. Isaac Errett agreed with Pendleton. Ben Franklin,
naturally, opposed. Nothing was done. For another thirty or forty years
the Disciples continued to consider training for the ministry as a phase
of undergraduate education.
“We Can Never Divide”
Through these years the slavery issue was mounting to the crisis of war.
All the churches were deeply stirred. Methodists, Baptists, and
Presbyterians divided. Congregationalists, being practically all in the
North and therefore all on the same side of the question, did not
divide. The Episcopal Church peaceably divided when the country was
divided by secession, and as peaceably reunited when the country was
reunited. Disciples were nearly equal in numbers, North and South. They
might easily have divided, but they did not.
Alexander Campbell’s sentiments were against slavery and he was never a
slaveholder, but he lived in a slave state and had little sympathy with
radical abolitionism. Much of the patronage and financial support of
Bethany College came from the South, and he tried to keep the college
neutral on these controversial issues. The first graduating class of
Northwestern Christian University (Butler) was made up of a group of
students who withdrew from Bethany in sympathy with a young man who had
been expelled for making an antislavery speech after the public
discussion of that question in the college had been forbidden. Campbell
had elaborated his position in a series of articles in 1845: slavery is
not condemned in the New Testament; therefore holding slaves is not
sinful _per se_ and cannot be a ground for withdrawing Christian
fellowship; masters must do their full Christian duty toward their
slaves, though it is admittedly very difficult to maintain a fully
Christian attitude toward a person while owning him as a slave; slavery
is economically bad and morally dangerous; and the policy to be followed
in any situation is a matter of “opinion” and therefore within the area
of Christian liberty.
That useful distinction between faith and opinion, which was fundamental
to the Disciples’ program for union, now saved them from division over
slavery and war. All political and social questions were to be treated
as matters of opinion on which Christians might differ without dividing.
Fourteen ministers in Missouri, including J. W. McGarvey, published in
1861 a “pacifist manifesto” urging Disciples to take no part in the war.
They did not argue that war is always wrong or anti-Christian, nor did
they discuss any moral issue of the war that was then beginning. Their
whole point was that “our movement” would suffer disastrously if its
members were to take arms against each other. Few Disciples were guided
by their advice. Most of them, North and South, apparently felt that
their attitudes in a great national crisis could not be determined by
the consideration of what might happen to “our movement”—or else they
thought that the movement could stand it, as it did.
The first national convention after the outbreak of war, meeting at
Cincinnati in October, 1861, took a ten-minute recess so that its
members, not as the convention but as a mass meeting, might pass a
resolution of loyalty to the national government. Two years later the
convention itself adopted a stronger resolution deploring the “attempts
of armed traitors to overthrow our government.” But even this produced
no division. It was a Northern convention because, under war conditions,
there could, of course, be no representation from the South. Southerners
realized that the resolution was merely an expression of Northern
opinion, which they already knew; and many Northerners soon came to feel
that it was a mistake for a sectional convention bearing a national name
to pass a resolution purporting to express the sentiments of all
Disciples, including the half of the country which could not possibly be
represented. The organizational weakness of the Disciples became a
strength in maintaining unity when the slavery issue and civil war
threatened division, for there was no court to rule out any church or
section and no convention empowered to set up standards or to pass any
resolution that would have the force of law for the churches.
“We can never divide!” shouted Moses E. Lard in his quarterly. If war
could not divide us, he said, nothing ever can. But something could—and
did. Disciples cannot divide through the exclusion of one element by
another in control of denominational machinery, because there is no such
machinery with power of exclusion. But it is possible to divide by
voluntary withdrawal. If there is no power to put any church out, there
is none to keep it in if it wants to go out. That is what happened some
years later.
The Period of Controversy
The issues upon which division actually occurred had already arisen
before the Civil War and they were so hotly debated in the years
immediately after it that 1866-75 is sometimes called “the period of
controversy.” The principal topics which were discussed with greater or
less heat during this period were these: open or close communion; the
title, “Reverend”; the “one-man system” of the pastorate; the alleged
introduction of a creed; the use of the organ; and the missionary
societies. Only the last two of these had any lasting importance as
divisive issues. The first four merely illustrate the heightening
tension between the strict constructionists and those who favored what
they considered reasonable expedients to meet changed conditions.
When the Reformers were being excluded from Baptist churches and
associations, they were accused of many things but not of departing from
the Baptist practice of close communion. One must conclude that they had
not yet departed from it. In 1828 Mr. Campbell objected to admitting the
unimmersed to the Lord’s Supper even occasionally, because he thought
this would logically require admitting them to church membership. But
the restriction upon the communion was gradually relaxed, without much
talk about it, until Isaac Errett could write in 1862, when the question
was debated at length in the _Millennial Harbinger_, that probably
two-thirds of the churches welcomed to the Lord’s Supper all who
considered themselves qualified to commune. The solving text was that
each should “examine himself and so let him eat,” and the standard
formula came to be, “We neither invite nor debar.” There was, in fact,
very little general controversy on this subject. In time the close
communion practice disappeared so completely that most Disciples in the
United States do not know that it ever existed and are somewhat shocked
to learn that it still prevails in the British churches.
The presentation to Mr. Errett of a silver door plate with “Reverend”
before his name precipitated a brief but lively argument. Aversion to
this title had been common among the earlier restorers of primitive
Christianity. The _Christian Baptist_ had said many a caustic word about
clerical pretensions of dignity and usurpations of power, of which
“Reverend” was considered a symbol. But as Disciples came to have more
and larger churches and a ministry more clearly distinguished from the
laity, they became less sensitive about a title which, in practice,
meant only that its bearer was a minister. The title long remained
unpopular, but the issue faded out.
Protest against the “one-man system” had a similar motive but more
substantial ground. The enlarging function of the pastor and the
somewhat diminished prominence of the lay elders, as town and city
churches with settled full-time ministers multiplied, evoked a futile
resistance to the passing of those frontier conditions under which lay
leadership for the churches had been successful. “Mutual edification”
had been considered by many to be an essential part of the ancient
order. No division came from this difference in practice and
terminology, and the difference itself tended to disappear. One of the
ultraconservatives gave the reason when he wrote: “Brethren, no system
of edification can be scriptural if it doesn’t edify.”
When Mr. Errett, as minister of a new church in Detroit, issued for
public information a brief “Synopsis” of the Disciples’ position, there
was an outcry against it as a “creed.” Strangely enough, the chief
critic, Moses E. Lard, had himself put forth “sixteen specifications of
fundamental principles.” This episode is worth noting only because it
shows how keen the legalists were to find proofs that the Disciples had
become degenerate and had gone off after “innovations.”
Not Divided—Yet
The organ question, unlike the four issues that have been mentioned, cut
deep, lasted long, and contributed to division. Protestant opposition to
instrumental music in public worship began with Zwingli and Calvin (who
were also strict restorers of primitive Christianity) and reappeared
among New England Congregational churches in the eighteenth century. It
did not become important among the Disciples before 1860, because there
were few organs. About that time, L. L. Pinkerton said that he was the
only preacher in Kentucky who favored the use of the organ and that his
church at Midway was the only church that had one. The organ in public
worship was, in truth, an “innovation.” The case against it was
completely stated by J. W. McGarvey in the _Millennial Harbinger_ for
November, 1864: The organ is not merely an aid to singing, like
hymnbooks or a tuning fork, or a convenient accessory to the church
building, like a stove, but is a distinct and novel element in worship;
no element in public worship is legitimate unless it is explicitly
authorized in the New Testament; instrumental music is not so
authorized; therefore it is not legitimate. The crucial question was
whether the New Testament does, as he claims, undertake to specify all
the permissible elements of public worship. And the answer to that
question is part of the answer to the larger question as to what is to
be restored in the restoration of primitive Christianity. Back of that
lies the still more basic question as to the nature of the New
Testament. Churches did not disfellowship each other over the organ
question, but many congregations divided on it.
The most serious of all the controversies was about the missionary
societies, national and state. Those who sought in the primitive church
a model for all the procedures of the church, as well as a blueprint for
its structure, found no justification for societies. There had been some
protests when district and state meetings were first proposed and more
when the national convention and missionary society were organized. This
opposition had waned, but it was revived in the 1860’s with new vigor
and new journalistic champions. The war, the loyalty resolutions,
acrimony over the organ, the failure of the society’s three foreign
missions, and the widening social and economic gap between the plain
people of the country churches and the more sophisticated
townsfolk—these all helped to bring in an era of ill will. Cultural
isolation and the lack of educated leaders in this middle period favored
the tendency toward a narrow legalism. The death of Alexander Campbell
on March 4, 1866, after he had been president of the American Christian
Missionary Society for more than sixteen years, made it possible for its
opponents to dig up and reprint under his name the antisociety
fulminations of the _Christian Baptist_ forty years earlier. Almost at
the same time Benjamin Franklin turned against the society and made his
_American Christian Review_ a powerful weapon of attack. The main
onslaught was not against the management of the society but against the
idea of having any society at all. However, all these hostile influences
were the more damaging because the A.C.M.S. was not, in fact, doing much
work.
To satisfy the critics and prevent the threatened disruption, a
completely new plan of cooperation was devised by a committee of twenty,
including both society and antisociety men. The product of its labors
was the “Louisville Plan,” which was adopted almost unanimously by the
convention of 1869. Under this plan the A.C.M.S. ceased to function. Its
place was taken by a system of general, state, and district conventions,
with boards, secretaries, and treasurers springing from and reporting to
the three levels of conventions. In theory, it was a closely knit fabric
of delegate conventions, the General Convention being composed of
delegates from the state conventions, these of delegates from district
conventions, and the district conventions of messengers elected by the
churches. The wonder is that the antisociety men accepted it for a
moment as (Ben Franklin’s words) “a simple and scriptural plan.” They
did not accept it long, and even the friends of the society were cool to
it. “Scriptural” or not, it was incredibly cumbersome and impractical.
Receipts for national missionary work fell off from about $10,000 to an
average of less than $4,000 a year for the next decade. Missionary
cooperation had to take a fresh start; and so it did with the beginning
of the next period.
It was largely due to Isaac Errett and the _Christian Standard_ that the
Disciples did not become a legalistic and exclusive sect. The paper was
founded at Cleveland in 1866—its first issue carried the news of
Alexander Campbell’s death—and it was moved to Cincinnati in 1869.
Errett was already a man of power and distinction. He had been pastor,
author, co-editor of the _Millennial Harbinger_, corresponding secretary
of the American Christian Missionary Society, and president of the
convention. In starting the _Christian Standard_ he had the active
support of General Garfield and three of the Phillips brothers of
Newcastle, Pennsylvania. The new journal at once threw its influence
boldly on the liberal side of all the controversial issues that have
been mentioned. The _Gospel Advocate_ already was, and the _American
Christian Review_ was soon to be, arrayed against all “innovations.” To
complicate the picture, the _Apostolic Times_ was established with an
impressive list of editors—Lard, Graham, Hopson, Wilkes, and
McGarvey—who aimed to heal the incipient division by taking what they
considered a middle-of-the-road position, against the organ but for the
missionary society.
The service of Isaac Errett would have been less significant than it was
if it had been only the championing of the progressive side in certain
controversies. What was more important was the breadth of his spirit,
the depth of his religious life, and the power of his leadership away
from a cramping legalism and toward a broader spiritual culture. In an
article entitled “What Is Sectarianism?” in the _Christian Quarterly_,
January, 1871, Mr. Errett restated the aim of the Disciples of Christ as
union upon Christ, not upon our own interpretation of the Bible or on an
exact pattern of the “ancient order of things.” J. J. Haley later called
this article “the Declaration and Address brought down to date.”