General Assembly 2025, Day 3

The road to Memphis and "Beyond" for the Disciples of Christ

Don’t go looking for two previous posts: I got here late. Day 3 is my second post on the General Assembly 2025.

The Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) General Assembly, formerly biennial and now intended to be triennial, but 2028 is in limbo (tune in tomorrow afternoon, Tuesday July 15), began on Saturday without me, and I drove down Sunday but traffic stops along I-40 meant I got in after evening worship was over. I had done an earlier overview, preview sort of post on our Disciples’ General Assembly ethos, which you can read here:

https://knapsack.substack.com/p/general-assembly-2025-preview

From my room, the view was just a tiny bit disorienting — if you didn’t know Memphis, which I really don’t — looking at a giant dang pyramid. Seriously.

The next day, Monday July 14 (and Happy Bastille Day to all my Francophile friends), I heard a masterful analysis of pastoral theology and ancient empires and the American Nile, on whose banks we currently sit, which warrants another entry all its own. But Rev. Dr. Lee H. Butler, Jr. formerly of Phillips Theological Seminary, with which I am proud to be associated these days, spoke about “theological narcissism” in ways that helped contextualize the presence of a pyramid near to our deliberations. Hold that thought.

What I did, during what was a lunch break in the very full schedule for the day, was to venture out into the Mississippi valley heat to make a small pilgrimage. A history geek’s venture back to 1926, yes, some 99 years ago, when the Disciples of Christ as we were organized then to hold “International Conventions” were met in Memphis, and at a convention hall built in 1924, dedicated 1925, torn down in the 1960s, with a new convention center built on the same spot. So our 2025 General Assembly is held essentially on the same corner the 1926 International Convention was.

Looking northwest at the corner of Main St., which is now a pedestrian mall with trolley tracks, and Poplar St. crossing in front of us.

This is the previous convention hall from roughly the same angle, as built and dedicated in 1925, so it was a new building in 1926.

Inside of today’s Memphis Convention Center is this interpretive panel, and a series of terra cotta plaques which were on the south face of the old convention center, and here in 1926.

There are nine of them, heading south towards downtown, mostly unnoticed, as they probably were in 1926, too. But I noticed.

Ironically, the famed “walk out” of 1926 went right past this symbol, an irony lost on all concerned. Yes, I’ll explain.

Heading south, past Court Square, to a corner just on the south side of the downtown core, about a half mile from the convention center.

The vacant courtyard in front of this more modern bank building, in 1926, was…

The Pantages Theatre, also just built in 1925, later the Warner Theater, also torn down in the 1960s.

So here’s the irony of it all. A major faction of the Disciples of Christ walked out of the International Convention, and went down Main St. a half mile to hold a separate meeting in the Pantages Theatre, where they planned what the next summer, in Indianapolis, would be the North American Christian Convention. Effectively, they began the split between independent Christian Church/Churches of Christ and the "co-operative” Disciples of Christ. The formal complete split was after the Disciples approved “Restructure” in 1967 for the first General Assembly in 1968, but it began and was inevitable after the “Memphis walk out” started the road to separate institutions and organizations. It was and has long been presented as the eruption of building tensions around education of ministers, the acceptance of modernism in a number of ways from science to Biblical study, and the complicated question of “open membership,” particularly in the overseas mission field, but as a stalking horse for more domestic concerns. The argument generally presented is that traditionalists, conservatives, couldn’t take it anymore, and walked out. In other words, the split was the fault of the co-operatives, the Disciples, who forced them to it.

Except: the Pantages Theatre was rented six months earlier for that week, while the International Convention was to be held in the Memphis Convention Center, up Main Street. The division was already pre-determined. Those pressing for a split had essentially already made up their minds; the Memphis walk out was a bit of theatre, and not just at the Pantages.

I could write more about it, but I walked the mile there and back reflecting on what could have been, and why it wasn’t, and how those pressures and divisions and departures shape us today. Then I walked into a Moral Monday protest, and I’ll tell you about that irony atop irony for my Memphis pilgrimage tomorrow.

Good night!