The Rise and Fall of the Ohio Region, chapter 7
"The word 'structure' seems unfamiliar to Disciples of Christ"
From Henry Shaw’s invaluable “Buckeye Disciples” (1952), pg. 296:
“The Ways and Means Committee of the Wilmington convention [1899] recommended that a new plan, centralizing the management and work of the Ohio [Christian Missionary] Society, be adopted. Under the new plan, as proposed, there would be one treasurer, and the entire mission work of the state would be under the direction of the corresponding secretary who would be in charge of District as well as State work. The committee recommended adoption of the following proposals:
1. The appeal for funds for the State and District missions shall be sent direct to the churches by the State Secretary.
2. All funds for State and District work shall be sent direct to the State Secretary to be distributed by the State Board.
3. All mission work shall be under joint supervision of State and District Boards.
4. The State Board shall assume the support of all missions now being supported by the various districts.
Robert Moffett, who was retiring as corresponding secretary, pointed out the disadvantages under which the Society had been operation, and how the State Board had been at the mercy of district management. Even though it meant assuming the debts of the district boards, which amount to a great deal in some cases because local management in some districts was not very efficient, Moffett was able to convince the convention of the wisdom of the change. When the new plan was adopted, S.H. Bartlett was elected to take Moffett’s place and charged with the responsibility of effecting the change. This meant the winning over of the district boards, one by one; a herculean task because they were reluctant to give up what they considered their rights and prerogatives. Bartlett accomplished this feat, however, before the meeting of the next convention. The adoption of the centralized plan was a turning point in the history of the State Society.”
That closing observation by Shaw is undoubtedly true. While the OCMS had recording and corresponding secretaries from the beginning in 1852, S.H. Bartlett is the first State Secretary to serve and act in ways recognizable today as a “regional minister,” moving about the state to uplift struggling congregations, help with the placement and removal of ministers at the request of local churches, and to set the direction and pace of projects agreed upon by the annual state conventions then, just as with our regional assemblies today.
Before we leave him behind, I would note that Robert Moffett also tied the adoption of the unified plan to his own retirement, after an effective thirty years of wider church leadership, giving his imprimatur to the plan he had devised and presented to the districts, but making it clear it was not his intention to gather control for himself, as he was taking himself out of leadership just as the centralization of income and outlays was implemented. It was a brilliant and sacrificial maneuver by a truly good church leader, and I honor his memory . . . he’s buried not far from James A. Garfield in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery.
The office in Moffett’s decentralized era from 1852 to 1899 had the responsibility of fiscal management over bodies where there was little or no authority to act. This is where “corresponding secretary” Moffett saw an opportunity to invite the state’s churches to agree to invest in that role, called at first “corresponding secretary” but in fact the next five names to follow were all more often called simply “State Secretary” rather than their evolving official titles (those titles seen following their names in the list below, with the years in service in parentheses).
Given that in any century, an inquiring historian is always more likely to find bad news in the gaps, amidst overstated good news proclaimed at length — it’s clear to me, anyhow, that in 1899 many of the District societies had attempted no doubt honorable mission projects, but the ad hoc and interim arrangements among what was then a largely uneducated and often bi-vocational clergy led to a majority of the district operations being in the red. Putting all the receipts and vouchers through one office was attractive enough to make the historically (and still actually) fractious and independent minded Ohio Disciples cede at least district-level autonomy to the state office.
This solved some problems, and led to others, which I’ll pick up on — in both directions! — next. By the way, the districts and their boundaries wouldn’t be all that unrecognizable to today’s Ohio Disciples, and in fact it was in 1932, nearly 90 years ago, that they were redrawn for greater efficiency in the delivery of services and for the collegiality of preachers, to the district boundaries we STILL use today in the Christian Church in Ohio. One of many areas where what once had a purpose and served us well has been kept, even as practical realities cry out today for reform and renewal.
So the roster of those who served in what would be our role today of “Regional Pastor & President” is as follows:
1899 – 1907 S.H. Bartlett, corresponding secretary (8 year tenure)
1907 - 1910 H. Newton Miller, corresponding secretary (3 years)
1910 - 1931 I.J. Cahill, secretary; later general secretary (21 years)
1931 - 1946 Gaines Cook, general secretary; later executive secretary (15 years)
1946 - 1979 Herald Monroe, executive secretary; later regional minister (33 years)
1980 - 2002 Howard Ratcliff, regional minister; regional pastor; regional pastor and president (22 years)
2002 - 2004 Suzanne Webb, interim regional pastor (2 years)
2004 - 2017 William Edwards, regional pastor and president (13 years)
2017 - 2018 John Richardson, interim regional pastor (1.5 years)
2018 – 2021 visiting Regional Ministers . . . about 2.5 years with four of them sharing the load! Thank you to Rick Spleth, Thad Allen, Eugene James, and Dean Phelps.
2021 Allen Harris begins his stewardship in office as Ohio’s regional pastor and president, April 1, 2021, with an installation ceremony planned for October.
Let’s go back and look at the tenures and roles of Allen’s predecessors, to see how our Ohio understanding of this sort of leadership has both changed, and had some remarkable continuities through the decades.
S.H. Bartlett I would present as our first "regional minister" as such for the Christian Church in Ohio. Under his tenure, the mission and ministry of the churches together in the Buckeye State was gathered into and through one office; previously, the corresponding secretary just helplessly kept track of the various attempts and insolvencies of the districts which received and disbursed the congregations’s financial offerings. Thanks to his predecessor, Robert Moffett, the 1899 plan was presented for Bartlett to then implement, with the support of the now-beleaguered (and often insolvent) district boards. He served eight years, but that first year of convincing the various districts to "pull together" had to have been the most challenging.
He went on as a religious publisher and minister around the state, serving as a "Minister, Church of Christ, for 56 years" from Painesville just after his time in state office to his passing in 1945, laid to rest in Lancaster, Ohio.
His successor from 1907 to 1910 was H. Newton Miller, who some years earlier had been minister in Newark; trivia note - Newark Central Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) has the distinction of having two former ministers buried in God's Acre, the Campbell family & Bethany campus cemetery in Bethany, WV (the other being Dale Fiers, our first General Minister and President of the Disciples of Christ). Miller I've not found a photo of, but his history is fascinating. He was an English professor at Bethany, went back out into parish ministry, then got into state society work after which he became effectively a development officer for Bethany College . . . and ended his career again back on the faculty there! His is the shortest tenure and the least to say about in the centralized era of "regional ministers" for Ohio.
Next is I.J. Cahill, and in his term we see the outlines of regional ministry more precisely as we've known it in living memory here in Ohio. Serving from 1910 to 1931, I.J. Cahill was first called simply secretary (or often in print, "state secretary"); perhaps unsurprisingly after World War I dominated the public imagination he began to be called the state's general secretary -- serving in the office however named a total of 21 years.
Cahill lived out his life in the Cleveland area, returning there after leaving Ohio to work in the general office of the church, and is also buried within view of the tomb of another notable Disciple, James Garfield, in the famous Lake View Cemetery, and not far from proto-regional minister Robert Moffett. Of his service, at his passing, it was said "Cahill possessed those qualities of wisdom and character so necessary for a state secretary. He was a great builder; the right person to follow Bartlett and build on the solid foundation of a centralized program." (You can see where Miller was a much lower-key, less dynamic and memorable figure in office.) Among many other institutional achievements, he was one of the founders of the Pension Fund -- may God be good to him!
From 1931 - 1946 Gaines M. Cook was general secretary of the Ohio Christian Missionary Society; in the post-war era he became more frequently known as executive secretary, serving a total of 15 years before being asked to serve in Indianapolis as the first full-time executive secretary of the International Convention.
Effectively the last executive secretary of the International Convention from 1947 to 1964, he turned that office over to his one-time Ohio protege, A. Dale Fiers, who was already the president of the United Christian Missionary Society and combined the roles in one office-holder, to ultimately became the first General Minister and President of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) with the 1968 General Assembly.
Cook was committed to co-operative work between the churches as a state secretary and in his many boards and commissions for the general church, and in ecumenical bodies as well. He became president of the National Association of State Secretaries (what we now call the College of Regional Ministers), served as a member of General Board of the National Council of Churches, and was the only Disciple to serve as a delegate to all three of the first assemblies of the World Council of Churches.
In Ohio, he was described as “an able and efficient executive,” and he clearly began a process of formalizing and regularizing events and meetings, first and foremost the joint meetings of the O.C.M.S. and the parallel women’s meeting, the Ohio Christian Women’s Board of Missions, which became the Ohio Christian Women’s Fellowship shortly after Cook’s tenure, but likely part of his longer-term intention. These co-ordinated state conventions which Cook helped facilitate and manage, through periods of Depression, wartime, and internal tensions between the “independents” and “co-operatives” growing into open conflict, were no doubt the kind of diplomatic skills the board of the International Convention wanted on the general level, shown by Cook in the state setting.
Gaines Cook, in his final address to the International Convention in 1963, got off an immortal line: "The word 'structure' seems unfamiliar to Disciples of Christ." An orderly passion for structure and organization marked his tenure both in Ohio and in Indianapolis.
Just as Cook had served under Cahill for three years before moving “up” from a state associate position to the executive role, three years before stepping down, in 1943 Cook hired Herald B. Monroe for the Christian education role he had once served in, and then the pattern continued with Monroe stepping up into the position of state secretary. However the title was formally recorded, it was Herald Monroe who became the first regional minister of Ohio under the Disciples’ “Restructure” in 1968, and it was Monroe’s personal stamp which marked the office to the present day, in ways both problematic and providential.