Missions and missionaries are at the root of what we have usually meant when we talk as Disciples of Christ about “shared work” as Christian churches.
The calling – and let’s be clear, the employment, for pay – of Walter Scott by the Mahoning Association to serve across the Western Reserve and later down the Ohio River as a traveling evangelist and missionary, was the first Disciples mission project. Both for the nascent Restoration Movement as a whole, and for Ohio Disciples. Barton Stone in 1801 in Kentucky was serving the Cane Ridge congregation; Thomas Campbell in 1809 was serving the new Brush Run church, which ordained his son Alexander in 1812 . . . but the hiring of Walter Scott to preach full-time across a geographic area in 1827 was our first shared mission endeavor.
“A Christian mission is an organized effort to spread Christianity” says one definition. There is extensive literature over the last half-century and more around what it means to be “missional.” Missional, in that somewhat awkward word, is intended to alert us to the importance of being a Christian community that does not so much HAVE a mission (or even a “mission statement”), so much as it IS a mission embodied in what it does, organized and understood to exist in the light of a mission placed before it by God. God “sends,” or in the Latin phrase there is a “missio Dei,” the “sending of God” into the world to proclaim the Gospel.
So the Mahoning (Baptist) Association sent Walter Scott out into Ohio to proclaim a particular way of understanding the Good News through their restoration principles, which they believed God had unveiled for them and that they felt called to share with others. By 1830, the other Baptists around them (Redstone and Beaver and Stillwater Associations among others) had disagreed with their sense of “sent-ness” through a Christianity without creeds & around an open table of communion, and the Mahoning Association disbanded itself rather than be the cause for more conflict – the movement, however, continued to spread through the some 3,000 converts Scott had reached with his missional efforts over the previous three years.
By 1850, Alexander Campbell’s “Millennial Harbinger” publication – which was the form of mission work that he felt called to, supported through subscriptions for this monthly periodical – and those who had heard the preaching of both Campbells and Scott, had led to around 200 or so churches around Ohio, even without counting those which had begun appearing north of Kentucky influenced by Barton Stone’s preaching and his “Christian Messenger” publication. Those churches would meet across “districts,” multi-county gatherings within a day’s horseback ride or so, usually annually or more often depending on population and proximity of congregations, to “be edified” by different preachers than the ones you usually heard back home, and they would take up a collection to promote missional work either in under-served areas of Ohio, or for the new American Christian Missionary Society which first met in Cincinnati in 1849, naming Alexander Campbell their first secretary, which was preparing to send the Barclays overseas as our first overseas missionaries, “first to Jerusalem.”
These districts followed a logic of geography and transportation for their size and arrangement that made some consisting of three counties, or five, or seven; other areas were leftover or lumped together by default, but by 1852 most of Ohio had some form of “district meeting” in one of nine or so districts. And starting in 1843 with his “Island of Guernsey” essay in the “Harbinger,” Campbell had begun to promote the idea of regional church bodies, with limited purposes through a missional function that no one congregation could fill, nor even a district. He pointed to missionaries in the New Testament (the benchmark for Restoration Movement understandings of church) being sent to ethnic groups or wider socio-political regions (to the Galatians, the various house churches of Romans 16, or the seven churches of Asia as John’s Revelation opens), and how Paul and Peter each facilitated the gathering of offerings from those who were blessed with resources, given to those whose openness to the Gospel was limited by their immediate needs.
So it was that the Ohio Christian Missionary Society was called into being in Wooster, Ohio in 1852; a form of church and a platform for missions that allowed weaker and stronger districts to support each other for sharing the Good News mission more effectively all over the state. The district-centered model for Ohio Disciples shifted to a more centralized approach following 1899, after difficulties arose in many districts around the proper management and distribution of missional offerings from the churches. Some were more robust in providing leadership and support in others; the records are scant, but there’s an implication that funds were misused or at least poorly employed in a number of districts, at least to the point that when Robert Moffett proposed that starting in 1900 the church offerings would all go directly to the state office instead of the district first, the new model was fairly quickly accepted across Ohio. Moffett, we are told, worked hard his last two years to communicate and convince preachers and lay leaders around the state of the need for this change, and stepped aside at the transition – arguably to make it clear he was not doing this for his own benefit.
Before 1900, districts kept half of these shared missional contributions, and then in theory sent the remaining half to the state society. After that year, all mission giving went to the state office, and disbursements were tracked and managed for specific approved projects of the Board of Managers of the OCMS, under the guidance of the state secretary who was the full-time employed staffer for the state society.
This system was the main point of reference for local churches in terms of wider mission until word came back to the United States of possibilities and potential in the mission work in China, with a proposal to raise funds across the country in 1912 turning into the “Men and Millions” movement which ran from 1913 to 1919 . . . with some obvious and necessary re-tooling of the message and re-routing of the benevolences during World War I and the global influenza pandemic of 1918.
“Men and Millions” led fairly directly to the birth of the United Christian Missionary Society in 1920, and both new opportunities, as well as leading to a significant split over the role of shared mission giving in the Disciples movement generally, and for Ohio Disciples in particular. (Then “Unified Promotion” (1935) . . . . and ultimately Basic Mission Finance after Restructure, see later installments.)
At each key juncture in our development as a cooperative body, the motive force was missions. Some was homeland based: missions to the cities, to ethnic groups like the Welsh we wouldn’t think of today as missionary audiences, missions to the American frontier that famously was declared closed with the 1890 census, but where new communities and territories becoming states needed to have the Restoration plea shared afresh. But most of it was springing from overseas ministries, the romance and passion and power of telling stories about missionary work in places strange and exotic and different, all without “the light of the Gospel.” [Insert a long digression here about the racism inherent in the early 1900s talk of “darkness” especially in Africa, which has been done better by others elsewhere, so I’ll just let this aside stand inadequately for the wider concern.]
The missionary impulse was at the heart of what grew the church. That almost seems like a tautology. Going to share the Gospel was how the Gospel got going to be shared, right? But I think it’s one thing to talk about how a new local church in one community grows, and gathers in more people from farther out, and then a cluster of congregants who live near each other farther off choose or even are encouraged by the first church to launch a second – and in larger communities, you literally see this work out in names like Second Christian Church, Third Christian Church, and so on. This is something you read in the early Ohio & Indiana history of the Disciples as we grow and spread, in place after place. It’s another thing altogether to build up a local church in part by bringing in people to hear missionary testimonies (“Brother Shelton will come next Sunday to tell us of the work in Tibet!”) or using those stories in print or later lantern shows and slides to encourage giving and offerings sent to state and national and international causes.
I hope it doesn’t sound dismissive or trivializing to point out that in the late 1800s (post-Civil War) through the early 1900s up to the World Wars, in most local churches the sermon on Sunday and possibly Wednesday night was a primary source of not just Biblical interpretation and application, but where you learned about the world, and how you got entertained. Before movies, before radio, and before commonplace literacy, for many households music meant church, awareness of a world beyond your township was the church, and your need to be lifted out of the view behind a mule six days a week, or watching a large piece of machinery keep trying to slice off one of your fingers day in and day out, was obtained by going to church and getting help in envisioning the Sea of Galilee, the Jordan River, the tribes in Africa sitting with Dr. Livingston, and the natives in India sitting by the millions by the Ganges River.
Word pictures were most of the pictures you’d ever have pass through your mind, and to spur your imagination. You may have a family Bible, and some woodcuts or engravings in it, but not always a good reader to help you hear the words; you might see a newspaper or periodical down at the general store, but would you take one home? Maybe, maybe not. The Civil War increased the general, popular awareness of the variety of our national culture (it’s understood that the spread of Christmas trees in homes is largely due to a narrower practice being spread by their adoption in Civil War encampments, then young men coming home, starting families, and keeping it up each Christmas from Minnesota to Florida and on out west). Yet even in the very early 1900s, another part of the United States was an exotic locale, and anywhere over the oceans was nearly for their imaginations what science fiction became in the latter half of the Twentieth Century. To have someone speak knowledgeably about Japan or China, of Argentina or Haiti, was to be taken on a trip you literally would never dream of otherwise.
This is where I think we miss much of what the missionary impulse, and the centrality of missions in the fast-growing days of church traditions like the Disciples of Christ, meant for the membership, and how it served as an engine to drive much more than just missions themselves. It was more than a commandment to share the Good News to the ends of the earth, it was a way of engaging the emotions and the intellect of any and every person in the church. It was exciting in a visceral way that isn’t displacing faith and practice, but encouraging such commitments. And yes, it was how you could raise money beyond paying the preacher or building a bigger church building.
Missions were the engine of the church, and if you take out or shut down the engine of something, it is likely to roll quite a ways on momentum . . . but not forever. Once the momentum is expended, and if you’ve built up some speed previously, that might take a while, but once it’s done, you come to a halt.
Obviously, I’m thinking this might be part of the explanation of our loss of forward motion in the Twenty-first Century. To get us better situated, I want to start in the next chapter to give us a better understanding of what missions has been for us, and why we shut down that particular engine – because the answer is not just going to be “let’s turn it back on the way it was!” That’s not going to work, and I hope to show you why in the next few chapters.
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[Post-postscript: If you are interested in further discussion of the word “missional” you might start with this multi-part blog post by Ed Stetzer:
https://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2014/june/what-does-missional-mean.html ]