Cynthia Pearl Maus and regions in the Disciples of Christ, pt. 3
The shape of regions through the definition of youth conference
Before Cynthia Pearl Maus, the kinds of ministries we call “Christian education” today were demographically only aimed at children.
Sunday schools and Vacation Bible Schools existed long before 1900, and in the years leading into World War I there was an explosion of children’s ministry programs in American Christianity, but the idea of “youth” as a separate category didn’t quite exist yet within the formal church structures. There was a movement developing, though, outside of denominational influence, in the 1880s and 1890s, called “Christian Endeavor,” aimed at this new category of “youth.”
As has been much written about, the concept of “teenagers” is a Boomer artifact, a result of the post-World War II explosion of marriage, family, and growing children. Kids went through their “teen” years before, but we didn’t think about teenage as a category before that. Likewise, in 1919, breaking out “youth” or “Young Adults” or “Young People” was a new concept in what the Disciples of Christ called the Bible School programs, both for local churches and for our then still radically de-centered general units.
As a matter of fact, the new “Young People’s Conference” week-long program which Maus pioneered in 1920 was the very first united program of the new United Christian Missionary Society (UCMS); you can call it our first true general ministry of the Disciples of Christ.
You can read the first two parts of this reflection over the role of Cynthia Pearl Maus and her development of the “Young People’s Conferences” across our church at:
https://knapsack.substack.com/p/cynthia-pearl-maus-and-regions-in
https://knapsack.substack.com/p/cynthia-pearl-maus-and-regions-in-f51
There I also sketched how her idea for a week-long Young People’s Conference came to fruition in the summer of 1920, neatly overlapping with the formal establishment of the UCMS out of the American Christian Missionary Society (ACMS) and an assortment of national boards, brought together from a variety of locations in Midwestern cities. The UCMS actually began in Cincinnati, but moved to St. Louis due to the influence of wealthy Disciples and all-around philanthropist R.A. Long (he who incorporated the Christian Board of Publication in 1911, built out of J.H. Garrison’s privately owned publishing house which he purchased to help create a denominational outlet), and came finally to Indianapolis in 1928 as the College of Missions buildings in Irvington opened up as Butler University moved north to their current Fairview Park location.
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The summer Young People’s Conferences became a point of relative stability in the definite confusion of church institution boards merging and reforming, seven in sum if you include the Disciples’ Christian Endeavor Board. That addition was crucial, because the Christian Endeavor organization, nationally, was an independent group, an early parachurch organization akin to what we know of today as Cru or Intervarsity or Fellowship of Christian Athletes. They had their own funds and officers and were in effect independent, so the UCMS Bible School Department’s intention was to create something unambiguously OURS, which became the Young People’s Conferences.
From a starting point in Maine in 1882, Christian Endeavor societies numbered 67,000 in 1906, with over four million members. Most Disciples congregations in the World War I era that had newsletters mention a “CE Society” meeting in their church. These societies were led by youth, and sent dues to an international Christian Endeavor worldwide organization, often purchasing published material from that source for their activities and studies.
Among the Disciples of Christ, the internal model of “Christian Youth Fellowship” or CYF groups would not come into being until 1938, formally defined as a “senior high” fellowship, akin to the Christian Women’s Fellowship (CWF, now Disciples Women, founded in its current form in 1953 but descended from the 1874 Christian Women’s Board of Missions) and Christian Men’s Fellowship (largely inspired by the Layman’s League movement in the Lutheran churches after 1917; our own Layman’s League groups formed in the 1920s and 30s spearheaded what became CMF as the CWF developed in the 1950s). Chi Rho and camp programs based on that junior high, later middle school program, started in Ohio and spread rapidly across the Disciples, their own growth only limited by the number of weeks available, with most weeks of the summer already taken by the CYF conference events.
When Dr. Robert Hopkins of the ACMS Bible School Department asked Cynthia Pearl Maus to hold her first Young People’s Conferences as the initial program of the newly united UCMS, he was putting into motion more than he knew. The Young People’s Conferences were co-educational, spread across the country (being US focused at first, but they would soon reach Canada, too), and co-opted the energy behind the Christian Endeavor model for the organizational church. They literally became the vanguard for what Disciples meant when they talked about “the wider work” of the church. Missions had an existing constituency, one about to undergo some stresses developing around questions of “open membership” and baptism; temperance movements were approaching the logical conclusion of their efforts with national Prohibition and a certain uneasiness as to what those well-oiled campaigns would do once they had succeeded in passing the Volstead Act (which they did in October of 1919). Young adult ministries were an ideal platform through which the wider church could appeal for unity around a new common purpose.
Which they were, but a UCMS budget crisis would derail those plans. The initial cluster of independent bodies that united as the UCMS found that the organizers had committed the Disciples of Christ to an ecumenical effort called the “Interchurch World Movement,” which to sum up a very complicated series of events was [deep breath] a Rockefeller Foundation and family effort to bring together Protestant “mainline” church bodies into a single organization, which due to steel industry strikes in 1919, other union disruptions, controversy over how churches and unions should or could work together, and how all of these developments resulted in challenges to the Standard Oil vertical integration model . . . it all caused John D. Rockefeller, Jr. to walk away from what essentially he had started, leaving the denominational bodies holding the bag. A very big bag. (T.W. Phillips, Jr. said “Told ya so,” also another story. His dad and John D. Rockefeller never got along, mostly because Phillips wouldn’t sell out to him.)
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Before it was all over, some of the “united” UCMS bodies took steps to make themselves independent again, but everyone took a hit, budget-wise. That included the Bible School Department of the UCMS, and the second year of Young People’s Conferences were told they would have to handle their finances themselves. Yet the new model was taking off like a rocket (okay, that’s an anachronism since Goddard’s first rocket was 1926, but it’s coming).
Honestly, I cannot figure out how Maus did it, but she was the Mausolina, and somehow she got performance bonds raised — mostly from the youth themselves, she says — and booked the locations and carried forward the effort into Year Two across the continent, in no less than six places but possibly a few more. As I showed in a previous post, by 1924 there are seventeen Young Adult Conferences across the United States, from California to Kansas, from Washington state to Kentucky (the first year New York location fell away quickly).
What I can infer from the spotty records is that the UCMS, other than in the person of Maus herself, quickly let go of their remarkably successful program, caught up as they were in the ongoing tangle of settling “Interchurch World Movement” debts and the growing tensions which would lead to the 1926 walkout at the Memphis International Convention (what we called General Assemblies back then) of the group that would become the independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ. Young People’s Conferences were successful and growing, but they were not controlled or operated by any UCMS office . . . leaving open the question “who was in charge?”
The short answer is “the state societies.” Ultimately, that would become the right answer, but in fact it is (understandably) more complicated at first. As I said, Maus got performance bonds through the fundraising by the youth themselves, but that unwieldy method of reserving campgrounds or locations quickly was picked up in large part, but not entirely, by colleges in general and Disciples colleges in particular. Ohio’s history in this is instructive as to the whole: Hiram College sponsors a Young People’s Conference, but so does Wilmington College, not a Disciples-related school. Camps Oyo and Philo were independent camp facilities that chose to get into the game, resulting in the historic Phyo Conference merged from those two, and Lakeside Conference Center would host their first one in 1929 . . . but under the direct guidance of the Ohio Christian Missionary Society and their executive secretary, Gaines Cook, as conference director. Bethany College will jump in (possibly in 1923, definitely by 1924), Phillips University, and Texas Christian University all would host conferences before the 1920s were out.
Yet over the long haul the colleges did not choose to stay as primary sponsors of these events. You can see why it was initially of interest: a church body across an area would bring together for you a group of likely future students. This is why Disciples colleges had church relations directors who often worked out of the Admissions office. And I saw the tail end of this when I first came to Ohio in 1989: the CYF Conference model had a Mid-Winter counterpart, which alternated between a church-based weekend in each of our (then) four conferences, and the regional Youth Conference each year between, which itself alternated between Hiram and Bethany. They were scheduled to fall during Spring Break for the campus, and we’d sleep on floors in student lounges and such, but eat in the cafeteria and use the recreation spaces as well as an auditorium or two.
What I watched over the next few years was this model come apart, because — Jeff’s opinion and memory, which others may well challenge — the college as a whole didn’t really want us anymore. CYF youth weren’t key to their student recruitment strategy, or they’d be bending over backwards to keep us there: in fact, they actively discouraged us from coming and ultimately those events ended. Even as they got smaller, the campus was less willing to flex to allow such an event, or would tell us we needed to pay per head what other groups would do. Individual staff and faculty would welcome us, but if you were involved with logistics, you could see, feel, and hear it: we were an inconvenience.
I’m saying this not to beat on the colleges, but to show how this last echo of the old Young People’s Conference was dying in terms of how Disciples related colleges saw our high schoolers. Earlier eras needed students, and the conference model was itself selective — it was not y’all come.
Here I also have some family memory tied into the model, because my mother’s father attended Young People’s Conference at Eureka College in the mid-1920s, and my mother attended two in the early 1950s (she also was a counselor at Merom on the Wabash two summers). Mom also attended some sort of national CYF program one summer in Indianapolis, probably the summer of 1953, mostly held at Central Christian Church downtown.
What I heard from Mom was how you packed dresses and hose and pearls, along with a swimsuit (“that had to cover everything” she said) and some clothes for athletic games which she got a medical note to get out of. But the Young People’s Conference, as has been previously noted, had a curriculum, you got credits, and there were senior certificates that supposedly carried some kind of advantage in college if you did all the requirements. It was highly structured, very educationally oriented, with lots of content delivered about what the church was doing and how you might get involved in it, because along with getting a look at college life — when less than 10% of youth were going to even start, let alone complete college — you were given a chance to consider a call to some form of Christian service, whether ministry, teaching, or as a missionary. Friday night’s Consecration Service was literally all about that: consecrating those who put their names into the offering plate on Thursday or Friday morning as planning to enter a ministerial path or work towards missionary service overseas.
There was no evangelistic preaching, and no consideration of confessions of faith or baptism, because again, the original Young People’s Conference model, built on the foundation of the School of Methods for Sunday school teachers, was aimed at youth who were already baptized, already members, already showing promise. As far as I can tell from the print record, there was no quota, per se, but the idea that you’d “send all your youth” was not on the table. You sent your best so they could get better; you were equipping your youth group leaders to engage in mission and to lead others into service.
My mother was already planning to become a teacher, like her father and aunts, and she was recognized at her senior Consecration Service on that last Friday night at Eureka, but she said it was always clear that just going into an education program was not as prestigious as saying you felt a call to ministry, or to the mission field. Those were the students who were the focus of the last night’s program, and the Saturday farewells, and it was simply understood as such. She also said she considered Eureka, but going to Eastern Illinois was cheaper and closer to home, so there it was (and she did make a career out of education, early and late). Eureka did not benefit directly from the program with either my mother or grandfather.
All of which is to say that while Disciples colleges and other educational institutions helped step into the institutional gap for the Young People’s Conference movement from 1921 onwards, they never saw a major admissions benefit from the investment, and most stepped back during the 1930s from their role as the Depression tightened budgets everywhere.
But Ohio shows clearly in the “First Annual Lakeside Preparatory Conference” of 1929, with the executive secretary of the Ohio Christian Missionary Society (OCMS) as director, how the state societies became the real source of ongoing support for the burgeoning program. “Preparatory Conference” because the focus was, again, on preparing young adults for adult roles in the church, but the word was most commonly used for “preparatory” for college life, and that meaning is certainly there. It also shows a variation from the UCMS terminology, indicating how the state society, or what we’d call today the regional church, was taking the reins.
Gaines Cook as director was not a model every state society or region would follow, but it became a signature element of the Ohio society camp & conference program. The executive secretary of the state society would lead and guide the week, identifying and encouraging and mentoring those showing signs of interest in Christian ministry, or towards missionary service.
I suspect it comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been reading this series that it is this element which makes the conference model so significant in the life of the Disciples of Christ: it has been said many, many times in my hearing since I came to Ohio in 1989 that “most” or “over half” of our ministers in this region got their call to ministry out of their time at Camp Christian, during CYF conference. (There’s a sub theme about finding your future spouse at conference which is related, but beyond my scope here today.)
Without getting into the numbers, the role of the consecration to Christian service at Friday night’s vespers for future Ohio Disciples leadership cannot be overestimated. I think those numbers have changed, with other implications for our common life, but the essential impact of young leaders finding their first steps into service at a Young People’s Conference is not only central to what has happened in Ohio, but has been the case in many other regions as well.
That alone might justify my attempt, at the outset of this three essay reflection, to tie Cynthia Pearl Maus to the way the Disciples of Christ ended up with the kinds of regional ministries we have today — her brainchild, the offspring of her passionate efforts in the era from 1915 through her retirement in 1931, the vocations arising from her vision for youth leadership development, gave us a huge cohort of clergy, missionaries, and church lay leaders who literally were “the church at work” in the following decades, on down to today.
But that’s not it. Or rather, not all of it. Call those vocations and ordinations and ministries half of the story, anyhow. Let me turn back one more time to Ohio.
“On Holy Ground: 50 Years of Camp Christian” was written by minister and Christian educator Martha Everhard, a giant in the Ohio Region whose role in many ways echoes that of Cynthia Pearl Maus with the general church. She just passed away this past spring. Her book came out in 1998 to help celebrate the coming 50th anniversary of the Ohio camp & conference facility outside of Magnetic Springs, Ohio.
Camp Christian, Rev. Everhard tells us, came about because Herald Monroe, who succeeded Gaines Cook as executive secretary of the OCMS and as director of what had become four CYF Conferences, plus Chi Rho camps, was sick of getting jerked around by campground staff all over Ohio (my words, not hers; I’m summarizing). Schedules changed, meals weren’t coming up to snuff, and staffing was not what he could have wanted.
And — this is me, now, not Martha, but I doubt she’d argue the point — Herald Monroe got what he wanted. He wasn’t getting it at the varied locations where the different conferences and camp weeks had ended up, as some of the colleges were no longer welcoming even in 1948; especially then, as the GI Bill was filling campuses with returned veterans for whom the government paid well.
So he went looking, and found the inactive Camp Schonthal of the Columbus Jewish Community Center. They had shut down due to gas rationing during the war, and were busy building a big new community center on the east side of Columbus, with a camp planned closer to their neighborhood off Hoover Reservoir, so they sold their acreage and 1926 pool and cabins to the OCMS. It became Camp Christian in 1949. I like to think along Maple Dell Road today on a Friday night about how the Camp Schonthal youth and staff watched for three stars to appear signaling the beginning of Sabbath, for almost fifteen years; this, too, is part of our heritage. Anyhow.
The Ohio Region bought a camp. And built it up, and out, and it grew, as the Baby Boom sent ever increasing numbers of youth. Herald Monroe was right: it was more efficient, and also cost-effective, to have your own facility, manage your own staff, even to BE your own staff. CYF Conferences continued and grew, Chi Rho camps expanded, and much more to come.
Meanwhile, that split beginning in 1926? The independents launched their own colleges, their own Bible colleges, their own missions, and they didn’t want preparatory conferences, especially to send youth to learn about Disciples colleges or the cooperatives’s mission projects: so in 1949 the independents in Ohio, not wholly split outwardly, launched Round Lake Christian Service Camp. Yep, it was mostly the Maus model, but aimed differently, and called “Christian service camp” not “CYF Conference.” There are many locations between Ohio and Oklahoma and adjoining states where the same story can be told. The youth programs split well before any other outward division could be traced.
And what after 1968 would be the Regional Ministries of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) — they still had almost the same level of autonomy and independence our congregations had and still do have. Their Commissions on Ministry and staffing models and ways of being regions were and are wildly different. I teach Disciples history & polity online through Phillips Seminary’s CMLT program, and I am CONSTANTLY telling students not to assume something in one region is how it works in another.
Except for: CYF conference. And in a wholly pragmatic sense, in having a camp & conference facility.
If you grew up Disciples, you don’t even see the quirk. We always say “camp & conference.” I’ve served in three regions, consulted in a dozen, and it’s basically always that way. Do you see now why “conference” is always in there? That was the spark, it’s the secret sauce, it’s the well in the woods from which we all draw water. But to have conference weeks, it became almost definitive that a region to be a region had to have a camp & conference (see the tic, now?) facility. You may have an office location with some history or cachet, but most regions don’t. It’s just the office of the region; it may have moved a few times, but it’s no biggie. We don’t have bishops, so we definitely don’t have a cathedral in which to put the bishop’s chair, the cathedra for a bishop to be seated upon. That’s not our center, not in any region.
Yet while it is not EVERY region, it’s most of them: we have a camp. A camp often called a conference center even in deference to being called “camp.” With a history of consecration and devotion and vocation, flames lit, candles flickering (if you’re lucky, an echo of Sabbath star watching just behind you), a circle gathered and special songs to be sung.
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Those conference centers are, in a very real sense, our cathedrals. They don’t have Salisbury’s spire or Riverside Church’s tower; they have bells but their stories are as often from train engines or riverboats as from churches, mounted near the ground and not high in the sky. The biggest gathering space isn’t a nave, it doesn’t even have a roof. There is our mystical heart, the spiritual center, the invisible cathedra in which only Christ is expected to sit, those camp & conference centers which bring us together, and whose memory binds us when we are apart.
Young People’s Conference made us this way. This is who we are; what we are becoming is yet to be seen. CYF and Chi Rho have to be explained, increasingly, to new ministers; commissioned or under care for ordination, few now bring their sense of call from a Consecration Service on a Friday at camp. If we lose that, and we are, who will we become? These are questions many regions are asking as we see camps & conference centers shuttered, closed, sold.
Perhaps a better question is this: who is our next Cynthia Pearl Maus, the Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ruth or Deborah come to tell us about the next new way of being prepared for service, with a wild and different model for bringing people together as Christian leaders? Maus never intended to shape a regional ministry model. She was seeking to use her gifts in a challenging time, and met a rising need with a model that was innovative, but built on an already existing foundation, taking it one step farther in service to the whole church.
Cynthia Pearl Maus’s children are all around us. I think another Maus-like pioneer is very near to us, and I pray we are ready to listen, and build with them.