The Rise and Fall of the Ohio Region, chapter 18

Disciples Missions – part 5

Getting back to Disciples missions and our local context -- Ohio Disciples had a number of “mission” projects in our first half-century, 1852 to 1899, beyond simply establishing new churches. We have some records of Welsh missions in Youngstown area, and special funds created to maintain these outreach efforts; only a little better documented are German and Bohemian (Czech) missions in the Cleveland area, with the German-language outreach effort struggling but then contributing to the origins of the Cleveland Christian Children’s Home in 1900.

One of the first coordinated efforts of the Ohio Christian Missionary Society (OCMS) was a “county seat program” of church planting, under early state secretaries Robert Moffett and I.J. Cahill. They called for a Disciples of Christ congregation in every county seat in Ohio, and between 1890 and 1920 around 350 churches were organized (if not in every county seat town) under state society guidance, with 100 of them supported by the OCMS, mostly through salary support for “missions” preachers. Alanson Wilcox estimated in 1917 from reports received in the state society offices that the cost per new member in the previous year was $12! On that same pragmatic note, he pointed out that the 100 mission churches of the previous two decades were now contributing $12,000 a year to missions.

After the 1899 reorganization of the OCMS into a structure that leads fairly directly to our current “regional” body, there were also relief efforts under the overall category of missions: a church in Marietta was destroyed by a tornado in 1902 which was rebuilt by the state society, and the massive floods across Ohio in 1913 were met with a swift special offering of $7,000 which was distributed between seventeen severely impacted churches.

Intriguingly, even at this early de-centered period, Wilcox closes his discussion of Ohio missions and the work of the state society by adding: “Every year churches are guided through serious problems of indebtedness or strife and scandal.” You could say there is a missional aspect to this sort of mutual aid as well. Yet it is crucial for our understanding today to realize that there was literally no clear source of standing for holding ministerial office, or a designated authority to which one could appeal in this era, circa 1920. If there was a problem, a conflict, or outright unethical or even criminal behavior (assuming the church did not want to appeal to the civil authorities, which generally was the case) within the local church between factions, or a source of conflict between lay leaders and a called or hired preacher, there was no course of action even as a general guideline along which a congregation could follow.

There were traditions, no more: you could contact the state secretary and ask them for guidance, at least after 1899. They would write letters, but they very rarely came to visit and try to help sort things out on site. A common response to needing to find a new preacher when your previous one had left was to contact “our” college presidents, at Bethany or Hiram or perhaps farther afield like Butler in Indiana, or the College of the Bible in Lexington, Kentucky. Remember that seminaries as such largely did not exist at this time; post bachelor degree training was not even recommended for ministers until after 1935, and not “required” as at least a formal guideline until after 1968. There were some Disciples preachers in Ohio between the 1880s and the Depression who chose to go to places like Chicago, Yale, or Vanderbilt for “divinity school” advanced training, but they were few; only a small number of congregations asked for or expected such ministerial preparation from their preachers at this time – by 1950, even in Ohio it was estimated that only about half of all serving ministers had bachelor’s degrees. An M.Div. was the exception, nowhere near a rule.

So if you were a ruling elder in the early decades of the Twentieth Century, and your local church needed a minister, or you were in conflict with your minister, you wrote the state missionary society secretary, to a college president or respected faculty member of a Disciples related school, or you wrote a letter to the editor of one of the major publications of the day (“Christian Standard,” “The Christian-Evangelist,” “Apostolic Review,” “Gospel Advocate,” or the “Christian Oracle” later “Christian Century”) and hoped either the editor or subsequent writers in response would provide you some guidance. That was how most churches could hope to be “guided through serious problems of indebtedness or strife and scandal” outside of their own resources. Also, if you’ve never run into the phrase “ruling elder,” please keep it in mind, as that office or role will be important in our narrative very shortly.

As you can tell, state secretaries still were operating within some fairly tight budgetary and availability guidelines of their own, given that they had been serving ministers while state secretary up to 1899. It was only after 1900 that the state secretary became a full-time society staff member in Ohio. College presidents and certain key faculty members of those Disciples schools such as a Bible chair holder were the most common invited speakers at dedications for new church buildings, at state conventions, or for significant local anniversaries, and they often were consulted before they left on how a particular local church could or should handle a congregational situation.

With the end of World War I and the impact on young adults of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic into 1919, colleges started to ramp up their recruitment and admissions outreach from 1920. There were opportunities ahead, but only for higher education institutions that were active and engaged – and it’s in the next few decades we start to see across the United States a decisive shift away from church-affiliation to most post-secondary schools pursuing an independent status, usually through actions to limit denominational influence on naming the members of the board of trustees. This was all of a piece with the need to recruit new students beyond the membership of their founding tradition, and to fundraise outside of denominational restrictions.

And it was in the 1920s that camp and conference outreach becomes a feature of state society life, a multi-origin history that is rightly understood to begin with the old fashioned camp meetings of the frontier, with more recent roots in the Chautauqua movement which was itself an outgrowth of the Sunday School movement; since 1874 there has been a Disciples of Christ presence during the original Chautauqua Institution summer season in western New York State. Lakeside on Lake Erie actually has Methodist camp meeting roots back before its 1873 founding; it became Lakeside Chautauqua as part of the movement which developed all over the eastern United States of religion-based summer education and enrichment. The Chautauqua programs were intended to serve as teacher training conferences for Sunday school teachers, to improve their basic knowledge and skills and also to provide more and better content through those teachers to their students in the local churches.

Youth conference programs were a logical next step in providing a path towards building up the next generation of Sunday school teachers, but they quickly became co-opted by church-affiliated colleges looking to expand their recruitment of likely high school students. At the same time, they certainly served as affordable summer escapes from the (un-air-conditioned) towns and cities, a low-cost version of the summer resorts so popular along the urban East Coast, escaping in summer months up to the Catskills and or deep into the Berkshires. Church groups like Disciples of Christ state societies followed the lead of Methodist annual conferences in the Midwest getting into the Chautauqua or conference action; for Michigan Disciples, Crystal Lake Camp recently celebrated a centennial, founded in 1918, while Methodist camping in Michigan had a longer history going back to 1860 with their Crystal Springs Camp, recently closed and sold after 160 years of service - https://umcamping.org/news/crystal-springs-decommissioning/

For all the various strands of history weaving into their rise, the youth conference movement within the Disciples of Christ stands out in the 1920s as a movement for encouraging enrollment and attendance at movement colleges, a way to prepare a generation of young adults for church leadership whether college educated or not, and a place where calls to ministry or even missionary service overseas could be affirmed and uplifted. As already mentioned, the colleges slowly backed away from the “leadership conference” events as they pursed an ever-wider audience beyond church membership narrowly defined, and seminary education started shaping up in our tradition through programs at Butler or Drake or Kentucky or TCU called variously a “School of Religion” or “College of the Bible.”

These developments left the budding youth leadership conferences squarely in the hands of the state societies. State secretaries saw them as an ideal way to directly engage with those who would become the new generation of ministers, whom they more and more had a hand in placing with congregations seeking a preacher, and more generally to form a rising generation of church leaders into supporters of co-operative work. The open split of our movement in 1926 at Memphis, and the parallel push to to open up independent Bible colleges (Kentucky Christian in 1920, Cincinnati Bible College in 1924, Johnson Bible College effectively in 1927, Lincoln Bible College in 1944), increased the pressure to find ways to build up a generation of young leaders who would support a cooperative model of church life beyond the limits of local church autonomy and ruling elder governance.

Along with communion every Sunday and baptism by immersion, one of the few points of reference shared among our Disciples of Christ congregations is the summer youth camp experience. It has been a powerful unifying experience for the life of our regional churches. This had begun, as I’ve described here, before the open split began in 1926 between cooperatives and independent Christian Churches/Churches of Christ; as World War II ended, along with a push by independents to establish independent Bible colleges, independent church camps began to be launched once wartime gas rationing and building permit restrictions ended. A major development was when Round Lake Christian Camp held its first full camp season on a congregationally-owned parcel of land in Ohio with the summer of 1949, just north of Loudonville. Cooperative minded Disciples tended to call theirs “youth conferences” while independent Christians spoke more of “Christian service camps,” but both had as a key element the invitation to Christian service at week’s end, having spent much of the week’s program holding up a call to ministry, or a call to missionary work, as a paramount opportunity for Christian youth.

I suspect this all may well have something to do with why Herald Monroe as state secretary of the OCMS in 1949 went looking for a camp property. The existing Christian Youth Fellowship conference programs at Hiram College and at Lakeside and Wilmington College and Camp Oyo (near Portsmouth, a former CCC camp) had been booming before the war and were blossoming anew with the peace, the new Chi Rho camps for junior high age youth had overcome the initial resistance to putting younger children into a camp setting, starting at a borrowed facility south of Zanesville, and to bring this all together would be a project around which Ohio’s cooperatively minded churches could rally. With our own Ohio Disciples camp and conference center, the schedule and planning could be our own, as we built a program to identify up-and-coming leadership and train more widely church leaders who would affirm cooperative missions.

To give you another sense of how Camp Christian in 1950 fits into the larger Disciples missions picture, let me introduce part of the Crystal Lake story here. Since Michigan had long been a resort destination in the north for summer vacationers out of Chicago and Detroit (see most of Hemingway’s early short stories), they got into the Christian Assembly business very early on as well. Crystal Lake is a large inland lake but very near Lake Michigan, and the Christian Churches of Michigan obtained an assembly ground on the shores of this resort area in 1918.

This created an opportunity for the newly organized United Christian Missionary Society (UCMS) in 1920 to begin sending their missionary candidates up during the summer to Crystal Lake for orientation and training. Through the 1950s, this was a small perk we could give as a church body to those who were taking on the challenge of sharing the Gospel in distant places.

You can also see that there is a common thread of who was a missionary and how it was done: mostly younger middle-class white Midwesterners, going into the developing world to learn strange languages and preach Good News to those who had yet to hear it.

After the early 1960s, this model changed dramatically. The developing world where we had been accustomed to sending missionaries for almost a century started to point out that they now had their own churches, they had raised up their own seminaries, they had their own indigenous preachers. What they needed was a different sort of ministry partner, specific skills from the developed world in certain areas. There were now also many new paths for people to take towards involvement in overseas missions. The former direct pipeline from youth conference to church-related college to seminary or missionary work was not so linear, nowhere near so direct: the former models of mission development began to both fragment, and to contract.

But for another generation, the CYF conference and Chi Rho camp model remained strong. And the missional link on the last day and closing worship, inviting commitments to full-time Christian service whether in a call to ordained ministry through seminary, or for overseas missionary work, was still present, but it started to shift, incorporating other forms of service (military enlistment, police or fire service training) and different senses of calling (internships with church groups), as not just the number of seniors stating a call to ministry or missions declined, but the opportunities to fulfill such a call began to decrease.

Missionaries and youth conference were twin poles of the world of Disciples outreach and missions for Buckeye Disciples. Yet as Ohio World Budget evolved into Ohio Disciples Outreach, the missionary connections became fewer and farther between; the vivid engagement for young people with Christian missions through returning missionaries telling their stories faded; the number of congregations having “Living Link” missionaries naturally dropped as the number of missionaries in total went from hundreds to dozens.

Camp, in this transition, became the single pole of a flatter world of Disciples missions. Disciples Peace Fellowship interns tried to fill the gap, but without the same appeal to distant lands to see and strange customs to understand. In the congregations, the in-person regular missionary talks were replaced with filmstrips, then videotapes, and finally brochures and posters and envelopes. When you have less than a hundred in such service, and those shared between the Disciples and the UCCs, there simply are fewer of them to travel around (or itinerate) back home, whether to churches or camps.

https://www.globalministries.org/missionary_visits

Meanwhile, Ohio Disciples missions within the state had been largely kept to a minimum by design. With the death of P.H. Welshimer in 1957, the last ties between the independent Christian Churches and cooperative minded Disciples of Christ congregations frayed, and had mostly snapped well before the formal break with Restructure in 1968. But the inertia built up through the 1920s and 30s and continued after the war into the late 40s and 50s in trying not to alienate “the Welshimer faction” with co-operative mission projects around the state. This concern kept Ohio as a state society mostly out of the missions business into the 60s and 70s. New church establishment continued to be the primary form of mutually acceptable missions in Ohio, and the support of clergy doing new church plants, along with facilitating the purchase of property for new church buildings, was almost the entirety of Ohio missions expenditures during this period.

There were efforts, to be sure: multi-point charges were discussed and encouraged in the pre- and post-war era (Hocking Valley Parish the one such continuing effort, and there were only ever a handful of them); campus ministries had a presence in regional efforts along with ecumenical councils in cities and for the state; Cleveland Christian Children’s Home has been important across the region since 1900. The memory of certain locations in overseas missions, such as Bolenge Hospital in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, still had some narrative power, and its name was tapped for capital campaigns in the 1990s, but in large part, missionary work overseas was largely displaced in promotional materials by anti-racist/pro-reconciliation efforts, and the Reconciliation program of the general church from the 1970s onward.

The Christian Women’s Fellowship, an attempt of the post-war period to fill the gap left by the end of the Christian Women’s Board of Missions, tried to use global awareness and cultural education as a proxy for missional engagement -- but the emphasis on causes and issues could not match the personal connections of missionary partners and shared first-person stories. It was too general, rarely specific . . . and the specifics tended to be about pain and tragedy, with triumphs altogether too rare.

“Disciples missions,” on the congregational level in Ohio, began to become a fundraising tag, a handy rubric and rationale for sharing offerings, as the connections they were meant to represent stretched and frayed and snapped. For most of our local churches, the only real personal missional tie felt on the local level, in and among the congregations, was to camp -- to their congregational campers if they themselves had not been to Camp Christian -- and to their shared responsibility for that one identifiable place where missions were made real, where stories involving people we knew could be told.