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 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 theMillennial 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 generalcontroversy 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. TheChristian Baptisthad 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 outcryagainst 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.”
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 theMillennial Harbingerfor 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 questionas 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 theChristian Baptistforty years earlier. Almost at the same time Benjamin Franklin turned against the society and made hisAmerican Christian Reviewa 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 hostileinfluences 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 theChristian Standardthat 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 theMillennial Harbinger, correspondingsecretary of the American Christian Missionary Society, and president of the convention. In starting theChristian Standardhe 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. TheGospel Advocatealready was, and theAmerican Christian Reviewwas soon to be, arrayed against all “innovations.” To complicate the picture, theApostolic Timeswas 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 theChristian 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.”
After the dark ages of controversy and organizational stagnation—which were by no means so dark in other respects—came a renaissance in which the Disciples gained a clearer view of their central purpose and a better command of the resources for realizing it. They began to make more intimate contacts with the social and intellectual currents of the time and to escape from the cultural isolation into which they had fallen. Those who thought of this as apostasy from the true faith tended to withdraw, and ultimately did withdraw, into a separate and noncooperating group. The main body no longer took interest in what now seemed trivial disputes about organs, pastors, and the legitimacy of missionary organizations. The new issues which arose were such as were shared by the whole Christian world, so that even their dissensions related them to the main currents of religious thought.
This period saw the continuance of westward expansion, the winning of a second and almost a third half-million members, the creation of new missionary and benevolent organizations, more than a hundredfold increase in giving for missions, new journalistic enterprises, an educational awakening, a new type of evangelism, new outreaches in Christian union and interdenominational cooperation, and some slight beginning of a discovery of social ethics as a field of Christian responsibility.
The “dark ages” had not been stagnant in numerical and geographical growth. That process needed only to be continued. As the completion of the transcontinental railroads brought new land within reach for settlement, and as homesteaders invaded what had been the open range, towns sprang up throughout the West. In town and country, Disciples were there among the first, and churches were planted. After the American Christian Missionary Society was relieved of its foreign responsibilities, it could do more in promoting new work in the West. Soon the Board of Church Extension came to give first aid to the new church needing a house. It was never a log-cabin frontier west of the Mississippi (except Missouri and Arkansas), and building was a different problem from what it had been on the old timbered frontier. Even though the Disciples could draw less support from the East than some denominations, they became relatively strong in most of the Western states and very strong in some, such as Kansas and Oklahoma.
Total estimated membership in 1875 was 400,000. The official figure was 641,000 for 1890; 1,120,000 for 1900; 1,363,533 for 1910.
A new center of journalistic influence began when J. H. Garrison moved his paper, theChristian, from Quincy, Illinois, to St. Louis, on January 1, 1874, and organized the Christian Publishing Company. He had been on the point of moving it to Chicago, when the Great Fire of 1871 intervened. B. W. Johnson’sEvangelist, which had lately moved from Iowa to Chicago, merged with theChristianin 1882 to produce theChristian-Evangelist. By its conservatively progressivepolicy, it became at once a powerful force in leading the Disciples out of the age of sterile controversy and into a wider conception of religion and more active work in its promotion. TheChristian Standard, at Cincinnati, under Isaac Errett, was already exercising a similar influence. As long as Mr. Errett lived, the two papers worked together for the same ends. The relations between these two great editors were always intimate and affectionate. Writing from his deathbed (1888) to his brother editor, J. H. Garrison, who was his junior by twenty-two years, Mr. Errett said:
We have been together from the beginning of this missionary work. We have stood shoulder to shoulder ... and the two most effective instrumentalities in educating our people and bringing them into active cooperation in spreading the gospel in all lands have been theChristian-Evangelistand theChristian Standard; and indeed, upon all points of doctrine and practice and expediency you and I have always worked on the same lines in perfect harmony.
We have been together from the beginning of this missionary work. We have stood shoulder to shoulder ... and the two most effective instrumentalities in educating our people and bringing them into active cooperation in spreading the gospel in all lands have been theChristian-Evangelistand theChristian Standard; and indeed, upon all points of doctrine and practice and expediency you and I have always worked on the same lines in perfect harmony.
A third paper, destined to hold a very prominent place in American journalism at a later date, was plodding its useful way through most of this period with a rather local constituency. This was theChristian Oracle, which began at Des Moines in 1884 and later moved to Chicago. In 1900 it became theChristian Century. For several years thereafter it reflected the liberal spirit of Herbert L. Willett, who was its editor for a time. Coming under the control and editorship of Charles Clayton Morrison in 1908, it soon began to evolve into an undenominational journal of religion.
The real awakening of the Disciples came with the rise of their interest in missions. Legalistic controversy over missionary methods had previously absorbed so much energy that little was left for missionary work. The old society had barely kept itself alive. The Louisville Plan had been a total failure. Into this vacuum came a band of devoted women, led by Mrs. C. N. Pearre, of Iowa City, who formed the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions in 1874. The organizing ability and untiring energy that went into it would have made almost any enterprise a success. The regular meetings of the local auxiliaries and of Junior and Intermediate groups and the publication of the monthlyMissionary Tidingsand other literature constituted a vast program of missionary education. A system of regular dues produced a trickle of dimes which aggregated a torrent of dollars. By 1909 there were 60,000 adult members. Offerings up to that time had totaled nearly $2,500,000. Missions were conducted in Jamaica, India, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and Liberia. There were schools in the backward Appalachian Mountain area, institutes and missions for Orientals on the West Coast, evangelists in thirty-three states, a missionary training school at Indianapolis, and “Bible chairs” at the Universities of Michigan, Virginia, Kansas, and Texas.
In 1875, almost with the founding of the women’s work, came the organization of the Foreign Christian Missionary Society. Its early development was slow, and it was ten years before it had an office of its own or a full-time secretary. By 1881 its annual income had risen to $13,178. It was still sending the gospel only to Christians. It had missions in Denmark, England, France, and among the Armenians in Turkey, and was planning to send (but did not send) missionariesto Italy and Germany. An address by J. H. Garrison, at the convention at Louisville in 1881, appealing for missions to the heathen, led immediately to the establishment of Children’s Day for that purpose. The foreign missionary deadlock was at last broken. Receipts of the foreign society doubled the next year, and G. L. Wharton and seven others were sent to India. Japan was entered in 1883, China in 1886, the Belgian Congo in 1897, Cuba in 1899. A. McLean was an invaluable missionary leader for many years, and an unforgettable personality.
When the American Society was permitted to devote itself wholly to American missions, its energies revived and it had an important part in the expansion that has been mentioned, as well as on the new frontier of foreign populations in the cities. In addition, it sponsored the Board of Church Extension, which at first made only small building loans to new and weak churches but later, as its resources increased, was able also to help some important city churches with their housing problems. George W. Muckley, as representative of Church Extension for nearly forty years, from 1888, linked his name inseparably with this cause.
The National Benevolent Association, 1887, grew out of a purely local impulse in St. Louis, but its work expanded from a single orphans’ home in that city to a long list of institutions for children and old people in all parts of the country. This and the Board of Ministerial Relief showed that the Disciples were awakening to social responsibilities of which they had not previously taken account on a national scale. Ministerial “relief” was found to be inadequate, but it prepared the way for the more businesslike Pension Fund.
At the beginning of this period a new birth in education was as badly needed as in organization and missions. It came, but not as promptly. The colleges had been founded largely as training schools for ministers, and they performed that function better than any other. From the Civil War to the end of the century they were poorly equipped, meagerly supported, and inadequately staffed. Since there were few high schools outside the cities, and the Disciples were 93 per cent rural in 1890, entrance requirements and academic standards were necessarily low. The young preacher who had finished the ministerial course in one of these colleges was supposed to have completed his professional education.
The educational awakening included three things: First, a few men in the 1890’s, then scores and hundreds, went to the divinity schools and graduate departments of the great universities for further training after they had been graduated from the colleges of the Disciples. Second, these colleges themselves gained greater resources, raised their standards, and many of them became excellent institutions. Third, with well-trained men now available for faculties, there arose some graduate schools of sound quality in connection with a few of the Disciples’ colleges. This advance proceeded slowly and on an uneven front. Some colleges became better than others, and some became better sooner. Some died because they could not meet the more rigorous demands of the modern age, including those of the standardizing and accrediting agencies; and some with small resources and low academic standards continued to render valuable service in educationally retarded areas. Most of the improvementin the colleges came after the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1897 there were forty-five educational institutions, including five “universities” and twenty-five colleges; and the total of their endowments was $1,177,000. Six years later this amount had been doubled. Thirty years after that, these doubled endowments had been multiplied by ten—and seventeen of the forty-five schools had disappeared.
The establishment of the first “Bible chair” at the University of Michigan by the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions was a piece of educational pioneering which led to great developments and became the Disciples’ most original contribution to American education. There was a touch of genius in the discovery of the obvious fact, hitherto apparently unnoticed, that the students in state universities, which were growing enormously, offered a constituency for religious education, and the further fact that there were more young Disciples in state schools than in their own colleges. Bible chairs were established at many other state universities, some under the auspices of state missionary societies, others under independent boards. Some developed into schools of religion in which several denominations cooperated. The one at the University of Virginia became an integral part of the university. The whole development showed that the education of the future lay leaders did not rest wholly with the Disciples’ colleges, indispensable as these were, but could be promoted by using also state or other endowed institutions.
Similarly, the education of the ministry gained vastly by utilizing universities and theological seminaries maintained by others. Before 1909 there was already a beaten trail from some of the colleges to Yale Divinity School, and the numbers who traveledit later ran into the hundreds. Many went to Union Theological Seminary in New York, and others to Harvard, Princeton, Hartford, or Vanderbilt. The University of Chicago, which opened its doors in 1892, furnished a seat of learning in the Middle West and therefore nearer to the geographical center of the Disciples. Though its divinity school was at first nominally Baptist, it appealed definitely to students of all denominations and successfully sought ways of evading the restriction of its faculty to Baptists. The Disciples Divinity House was established, 1894, in affiliation with the university and its divinity school, and at once a large number of students came, many of whom were mature men already in the ministry but eager for graduate study. Through all these means, by the end of the period here under consideration, the educational average of ministers among the Disciples had been greatly raised and their intellectual horizons vastly widened. The improvement of the colleges was one of the causes and also one of the consequences of this.
The old differences of opinion about the organ and the missionary society continued, but there was no longer any interest in controversy about them. The opposing element ceased to cooperate with the “progressives” and was moving toward separation, which had become an accomplished fact, for all practical purposes, years before it was registered by the separate listing of the statistics of the “Churches of Christ” in the religious census of 1906.
New issues arose which afforded topics for lively debate in the papers, at preachers’ meetings, and atthe Congresses which met annually after 1899. Chief among these were higher criticism, the reception of the unimmersed, and federation. Since federation was the only one of these that called for collective action, and since it had very strong support as soon as it was proposed, it had full and frank discussion in the conventions also, as the other two questions did not.
“Higher criticism,” or the study of the Bible by critical methods of historical and literary analysis, began in Europe early in the nineteenth century. By the middle of the century, controversy had grown hot, especially because the new method did not assume the inerrancy of the Bible, as the older orthodoxy did, and because some of the results of research cast doubt upon the historicity of some parts of the Bible. American scholars reacted, positively or negatively, to the higher criticism during the two decades after the Civil War. It became fairly well known by name, though not well understood, and there were some famous heresy trials. But Disciples did not become generally aware of it until the 1890’s. Professor J. W. McGarvey, stalwart opponent of the new methods, began in 1893 his Biblical Criticism Department in theChristian Standard. With acumen and acrimony he denounced every new conclusion or theory about such things as the authorship of Deuteronomy and the latter part of Isaiah or the date of Daniel as an attack upon the faith and the work of “enemies of the Bible.” This weekly page was widely read and much discussed. It gave great publicity to the subject and, by its caustic tone, its pungent personalities, and its identification of higher criticism with infidelity, added bitterness to what would in any case have been a very real divergence of opinion. “Few scholars and few studentswere permanently influenced by the department,” says McGarvey’s biographer and long-time associate, W. C. Morro.
Disciples were vitally interested in this battle of the Book, for they had always claimed to be, in a peculiar sense, a Bible people. Many of them remembered the first of Alexander Campbell’s “rules of interpretation”: in studying any book of the Bible, “consider first the historical circumstances of the book—the order, the title, the author, the date, the place, and the occasion of it.” The young men who had been going to the Eastern universities and seminaries had become acquainted with the new methods of Bible study, which were directed to these very questions. The opening of the University of Chicago, just three months before the beginning of Professor McGarvey’s antibiblical-criticism page, gave an immense impetus to this trend, for its president, Dr. W. R. Harper, was the most conspicuous exponent of these new methods in the United States, with extraordinary gifts for teaching and for publicity as well as for research. It might almost be said that it was Dr. Harper who put higher criticism on the map in the Middle West. Dr. Herbert L. Willett, who had been a student under Harper at Yale, became a colleague in his Semitic Department at Chicago and dean of the Disciples Divinity House. During several years he devoted much of his time to extension lecturing and the holding of institutes on the Bible. His popularity and success in this field were sensational. For most Disciples, Willett became the personal embodiment and symbol of the new biblical learning. He carried the flag with complete boldness, and his brilliant and winsome figure became a shining mark for the counterattack.
The papers were inevitably involved in the higher criticism controversy. TheChristian Standard’sposition was never in doubt. It was against it, not only on Professor McGarvey’s page, but on every other page as well. TheChristian-Evangelistwas cautiously liberal editorially. Its editor was not a technical scholar in this field, but his mind was always alert to discover new truth. He was hospitable to the critical methods and was not alarmed by their results, even though he did not personally accept all of them. For several years he had Dr. Willett write for the paper the weekly article on the Sunday school lesson. This showed editorial courage, rather than caution, but it was part of a consistent editorial policy that did as much as a university could have done for the education of the Disciples.
“Open membership” had few advocates during the period under consideration, but there had already begun to be lively discussion of baptism in relation to the problem of union. When Thomas Campbell wrote theDeclaration and Address—the event marked by the 1909 centennial as the beginning of the Disciples—he had not yet adopted the immersion of believers as part of the basis of union and communion. But after that practice was adopted by the Brush Run Church, it became an integral part of the program of the Campbells and it was a pivotal point in Scott’s technique of evangelism. The “Christians” in Kentucky generally practiced immersion but considered it a matter of opinion and did not insist upon it. Those who merged with the Disciples yielded on this point and became strict immersionists. Campbell’s reply to the “Lunenburg letter” showed that he regarded the pious unimmersedas Christians. Later developments showed that he would also commune with them as Christians. But he would not have favored admitting them as members, even if such a proposal had been made.
The first Disciple to argue for the admission of the unimmersed was Dr. L. L. Pinkerton, in 1868. Pinkerton, a medical doctor as well as a preacher, was a remarkably free spirit and may be called the first thorough “liberal” among the Disciples. He also challenged the theory of the inerrancy of the Bible, though he probably never heard of the higher criticism. Apparently no other Disciple of his time shared his views about either baptism or the Bible, except John Shackleford, co-editor with him of theIndependent Monthly, a breezy magazine which lived less than two years.
W. T. Moore, a missionary in England for the Foreign Christian Missionary Society, about 1885 became minister of West London Tabernacle, an independent church having many unimmersed members. Defending himself against criticism in a convention to which he was reporting during a visit back home, he suggested that baptism might cease to be a barrier to union if it were agreed to recognize as baptized persons those who had already been sprinkled, whether as infants or as adults, but to practice only immersion thenceforth. In spite of the high regard in which he was held, this opportunistic proposal found little favor. At the Congress of Disciples in 1901, Dr. Moore renewed and elaborated this proposal, that a united church be formed at once with all Christians as members and that only immersion should be practiced thereafter.
Robert L. Cave, an eloquent Virginian, who was pastor of Central Christian Church, St. Louis, in 1889 issueda pronunciamento widely at variance with the generally accepted views of Disciples, and of other evangelical Christians, on many points and demanded a vote of confidence on that basis. Failing to get it, he withdrew, followed by nearly half of the members, and established the Non-Sectarian Church. This was the outstanding heresy case of the period. But Dr. Cave’s rather casual treatment of baptism was such a small item in the sum of his heresies that it was scarcely noticed, and the whole episode produced a conservative reaction even in the minds of moderately progressive leaders. The editor of theChristian-Evangelistat once launched a doctrinal revival, the permanent record of which is the volume entitled,The Old Faith Restated. Dr. Cave’s advocacy did more to retard than to advance the acceptance of liberal ideas, including ideas about baptism.
In the 1890’s the religious papers began to print contributions discussing the function of baptism and questioning whether it is indispensable. R. T. Matthews, a professor at Drake, said that some of the unimmersed “are in essential union with Christ.” John Shackleford denied McGarvey’s statement, in the first edition of hisCommentary on Acts, that “faith without immersion is dead.” J. J. Haley, when pressed to declare categorically whether he thought baptism necessary, gave the Delphic answer that baptism is “as necessary as an ordinance can be,considering what an ordinance is.” Thomas Munnell, former missionary secretary and one of the most honored veterans, wrote a long article, in theNew Christian Quarterly, April, 1894, arguing that the requirement of baptism be waived in the interest of union. In the correspondence columns of the weeklies, there were expressions of the opinion that a Christian union movementwhich excludes from its churches a large proportion of those whom it regards as Christians is both illogical and futile. These were the opinions of a small minority, and there were vigorous replies. In 1901 Dr. H. L. Willett published a little book,Our Plea for Union and the Present Crisis, which was a bold argument for open membership.
Along with much discussion, there was some action, but only a little within this period. J. M. Philputt was minister of a church on 119th St., New York, which from about 1890 to 1900 received the unimmersed as “members of the congregation,” not of the church. “We receive them,” he explained, “not as Disciples of Christ but simply as Christians.” This distinction proved embarrassing. The practice drew too much criticism and it was abandoned. Similar “associate membership” arrangements were practiced for some time at South Broadway, Denver (B. B. Tyler); at Central, Denver (W. B. Craig); at Shelbyville, Kentucky; and elsewhere. At Hyde Park, Chicago (now University Church of Disciples of Christ), Dr. E. S. Ames in 1903 led the church into receiving unimmersed persons as “members of the congregation.” Though the distinction between the two classes of members seldom came to attention it was not formally abolished until 1919 when the church became,de jureas well asde facto, an open-membership church. Long before that, in 1906, the Monroe Street Church, Chicago, of which Charles C. Morrison was pastor, had become the first church among the Disciples to receive into full membership the unimmersed members of other evangelical churches. When Morrison took over theChristian Centuryin 1908, he promptly made it an outspoken champion of liberal views, including open membership.
As the last item in the record of changing views on baptism within this period, it may be noted that at the Centennial Convention at Pittsburgh, 1909, Dr. S. H. Church, a grandson of Walter Scott, delivered an address in which he held that baptism is a matter of opinion in regard to which there should be individual liberty.
The movement for federation among the Protestant denominations quickly won the favor of all Disciples except the most rigidly noncooperative, but these were many, and their voices were loud. The impulse to federation came from the new sense of the social responsibilities of the churches which became acute in the latter part of the nineteenth century. It was first proposed by the Presbyterian General Assembly as a means of getting some united action by Protestants without compromising their denominational differences and independence. After a decade of desultory discussion and some local organizations, a national Federation of Churches and Christian Workers was formed in 1901. The next year this body proposed a conference of official representatives of denominations to consider the feasibility of a federation of the denominations as such. It was at this point that the matter came before the Disciples through a brief speech by the secretary, Dr. E. B. Sanford, at the Omaha convention in 1902, following an eloquent address on Christian union by E. L. Powell. A resolution of approval was introduced by J. H. Garrison, who supposed—naïvely, as he afterward said—that it would be adopted unanimously. J. A. Lord, editor of theChristian Standard, objected that joining such anassociation would be “recognizing the denominations.” The resolution was adopted, with only a small opposing vote. But the war was on, with the two papers already ranged on opposite sides. For the next four or five years, federation was the hot spot of controversy in conventions, ministers’ meetings, and the press. The Disciples were represented, however, at the Interchurch Conference on Federation, at Carnegie Hall, New York City, in November, 1905, where a constitution was drafted. A mass meeting called during the Norfolk convention in 1907 approved the constitution, with only one dissenting voice, and elected representatives in the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America. The first meeting of the Federal Council was held at Philadelphia, February 2, 1908.
Thus the Disciples were in the Federal Council from its beginning. They also cooperated from the start with the Foreign Missions Conference of North America (1907) and the Home Missions Council (1908). Union as an objective had not been forgotten; but, while there were barriers to immediate union, cooperation with other Christians in the promotion of practical Christian ends had come to seem, to the great body of Disciples, both safe and wise.
The completion of the first hundred years was celebrated by a Centennial Convention, at Pittsburgh, October, 1909. This was a gathering of unprecedented and still unequaled size. It quickened the interest of Disciples in their own history and heritage. Coming so soon after they had embarked upon these large ventures in cooperation, it directed their minds not only to the numerical and institutional success of their own movement but also to the path of common service and the hope of unity that lay ahead. It was a trueinstinct that directed the choice of the centennial of theDeclaration and Addressfor this observance rather than, for example, the promulgation of Walter Scott’s “uniform, authoritative method of proclaiming the gospel,” or the dissolution of the Mahoning Association. This choice expressed the feeling that the essence of the movement is not in its separateness or in its “particular ecclesiastical order,” but in its call for union upon the will to do the will of Christ.
Growth in numbers had been very rapid during the first eighty years. It was not unusual to hear the confident prediction that at this rate they would soon “take the country,” and it seemed disloyalty to doubt that the rate of increase would continue. But the population of the country was also growing very rapidly, though not so rapidly as the Disciples. So long as there was an open frontier—that is, until about 1890—and even later, while the heavy westward migration continued, the Disciples outran the general population increase. But so also did the Methodists and Baptists. Immigration from Europe brought tremendous reinforcements to Roman Catholics and Lutherans, none to Disciples; and Disciples gained by conversion almost none of these immigrants or their children. The nation was becoming increasingly urban, while the Disciples remained more rural than other large communions. Inevitably there were diminishing returns in growth.
There was a high point in 1910. It was higher still in 1914, with an abrupt drop of nearly 300,000 to 1915, and a fair rate of growth thereafter. An improvement in statistical methods probably explains the greater part, though perhaps not all, of the apparent loss in 1915. Certainly there was no great disastrous event in that year. Perhaps some of the “Churches of Christ” were included in the count until 1915. Here are the figures since 1900:
With the recognition of many fields of responsibility besides home and foreign missions and the consequent multiplication of societies, each having an annual “special day” to promote its work and raise its funds, a good deal of rivalry and confusion ensued. There were not enough days to go around. For example, the Foreign Society bitterly opposed the claim of the new American Christian Education Society (1903) upon the third Sunday in January as Education Day, because this interfered with the exclusive occupancy of January and February in preparation for Foreign Missions Day, the first Sunday in March; but it could do nothing about it because the latter was an independent and theoretically coordinate society. Moreover, the conventions were conventions of the societies rather than of the churches.
The first step toward remedying this condition was the appointment of a “calendar committee,” at Buffalo in 1906, to devise a plan for reducing the number of special days. There was no immediate result. At New Orleans in 1908, the constitution of the American Christian Missionary Society was amended to providefor a delegate convention in which every church, whether contributing or not, should have elected representatives. So much parliamentary confusion attended this action that it was not carried into effect. The Centennial Convention of 1909 appointed a standing committee to consider unifying all missionary and philanthropic work under one or two boards. The committee’s intimation that it would recommend a strictly delegate convention to which all societies should report touched off a long and heated discussion. “Delegate convention” became, for the more conservative element, a symbol of apostasy, as “higher criticism” and “federation” had been a few years earlier.
The formal report of the committee was made at Louisville in 1912, and the vote was almost unanimous in favor of a general convention to be composed of elected and accredited delegates from the churches. The convention of the following year, at Toronto—which was supposed to be composed of delegates but was not, because few churches sent them—ratified the delegate plan which it failed to exemplify. In subsequent conventions also there were few delegates. The delegate system failed not because of opposition but because of indifference to it. The vast majority of churches did not elect delegates, and habitual convention-goers continued to go whether they were delegates or not. At Kansas City, 1917, a new constitution was adopted, which, while retaining the delegate feature, made it meaningless by giving equal voting power to all members of churches who were in attendance. (It was like having an elected Congress with the provision that any citizen who cares to attend its sessions shall have all the powers of a congressman.) But with alarge and representative “Committee on Recommendations” serving as an upper house, the plan works surprisingly well.
A national publication society, to be owned by the brotherhood and operated for its benefit, seemed desirable to many. A committee was appointed in 1907 to study the problem. Mr. R. A. Long solved it by agreeing, in December, 1909, to buy all the stock of the Christian Publishing Company, publishers of theChristian-Evangelistand of books and Sunday school materials, and place it in the hands of a self-perpetuating board of directors, all profits to be appropriated to the missionary and other enterprises of the Disciples. The fears of a regimentation of opinion by an “official” journal and publishing house have proved groundless. The Christian Board of Publication is, in fact, no more “official” than are the Disciples’ colleges, which have exactly the same kind of ownership and control. But the brotherhood does get the profits, which have totaled much more than Mr. Long’s original gift.
Mr. Long was also the prime mover in, and the largest donor to, the Men and Millions Movement, the aim of which was to enlist a thousand men and women for religious service and to raise six million dollars for missions and colleges. The campaign, beginning in 1914, was interrupted by the war, but its financial goal was finally reached.
The unification of missionary agencies had been suggested at least as early as 1892 and discussed at intervals thereafter. Before it was accomplished, the separate societies had already reformed some of the evils of the old system by establishing a joint budget committee to make the securing of funds for the various interests cooperative rather than competitive, andby stressing weekly giving for missions as part of each congregation’s financial system instead of relying upon spasms of appeal on special days. Conditions caused by World War I doubtless precipitated the consolidation of the societies. In 1919 the home and foreign missionary societies, the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions, the boards of church extension and ministerial relief, and the National Benevolent Association were merged to form the United Christian Missionary Society. F. W. Burnham was its president until 1929.
Some Disciples, without being opposed to societies on principle, had long been critical of much that the societies did and the way they did it—their “cold institutionalism” and “bureaucratic methods” and their concern with so many things other than winning converts by the simple plea of faith, repentance, and baptism and organizing churches according to the ancient order. The United Society fell heir to these hostilities and aroused more. One result was an increase in the number of “independent agencies.” These have a loose bond among themselves as the “Associated Free Agencies.” TheChristian Standard, chief journalistic critic of the organized work, publicizes these agencies and, together with the Christian Restoration Association, lends them its support. The annual North American Christian Convention appeals primarily to those who stand aloof from the United Society and support the independent agencies.
The remarkable improvement of the Disciples’ colleges has been an indication of the widening intellectual outlook of the communion and also one of thecauses of it. The increase of endowments was only one aspect of the improvement, but an essential one. In the first thirty years of this century, the total of their endowments rose from $3,300,000 to $33,000,000. There was similar betterment of buildings, libraries, and equipment. Academic standards were raised, and faculties were better trained for their specific tasks. The transformation of Bethany College, beginning with the administration of President T. A. Cramblet, from the decadent and moribund state into which it had fallen to its present admirable and flourishing condition, is an example of what several colleges achieved. Drake, Butler, Phillips, and Texas Christian University gained honorable prominence in their states and beyond. These four developed graduate schools for the ministry, or raised toward full graduate status the departments they already had. The College of the Bible, at Lexington, entered upon a new epoch. Transylvania, always prominent in Kentucky, resumed the ancient name which identified it as “the oldest college west of the Alleghenies.” There were also casualties among the colleges. As costs increased and academic requirements stiffened, some were forced to close down. Cotner was one of these.
Meanwhile, much larger numbers of the younger ministers have been taking advantage of the resources of other universities and seminaries. Hundreds have gone to Yale Divinity School, hundreds more to the Divinity School of the University of Chicago and the Disciples Divinity House. The pastors of the great majority of the larger churches at the present time are men who have had such education. Likewise the faculties of the Disciples’ colleges and of their graduate schools for the ministry are composed, almostwithout exception, of university-trained men. The “cultural isolation” of the Disciples has definitely ended.
The Congresses of the Disciples, which began in 1899 and were held annually until about 1925, were a valuable means of adult education for ministers. These were gatherings for the discussion of religious, theological, and social problems which could not properly come before the conventions. They were characterized by great freedom of utterance. At first, all phases of opinion were represented, but as the more conservative element gradually dropped out, the congresses lost much of their value.
Through all these agencies, the liberalizing effects of the newer learning were widely diffused. One aspect of this was that a great number of ministers accepted the so-called “modern view” of the Bible, based upon historical and critical methods of study, in place of the theory of inerrancy and level inspiration. Proof texts lost something of their finality. The pattern of the primitive church seemed somewhat less sharply drawn, and the duty of restoring it in every detail less axiomatic. Christian truth and duty were seen as far more extensive, and far less simple, than the conversion formula and the restoration of the ancient order as these had been conceived. In this atmosphere of opinion, the stress was upon union, while the concept of restoration seemed to require reinterpretation to give it continued validity. All this had begun to happen in the previous period; but now it happened on a large scale, reaching many important pulpits, the colleges, the missionary executives, the missionaries themselves.