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History of the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, Virginia Conference

by A. P. Funkhouser

CHAPTER XIII

THE CHURCH IN RECENT TIMES

It is now a little more than a half-century since the close of the great American war. To the Church of the United Brethren this has been an epoch of expansion.

If two lines be drawn from Philadelphia, one to the northwest corner of the state of Washington, the other to the southwest corner of California, the space between will nearly coincide with the territory covered by the church. The old population to the east, northeast, and southeast is of non-German origin, and no effort has been made to introduce United Brethrenism in that section. The space within the angle at the apex is where the Church arose. Until a time quite recent, the movement of the American people has been almost exclusively westward. Except in a very slight degree the membership has not migrated into New Jersey, New York, or New England, and not in numbers sufficient to found churches. Neither has the Church ever been introduced into the plantation region of the South, although a reflex wave of settlement of recent date has placed a few congregations in that part of Virginia east of the Blue Ridge. But descendants of the original United Brethren have moved westward very numerously, and in doing so have established new conferences all the way to the Pacific shore.

As has been pointed out elsewhere in this volume, it was once the general opinion among the Brethren that preaching could be done by men who made no preparation for it and who gained their livelihood at something else. The laity listened, but did nothing toward the support of the preacher except to feed him and his horse when he came around. This was doing no more than they would have done for a stranger. At length there was a rising demand for a change, and the time came when it had to be reckoned with.

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"No wonder the transition to a paid ministry was slow and hard. The people themselves made money very slowly, and it was their idea that if the preacher had enough to eke out an existence, he was abundantly supplied. So the idea has grown slowly that the minister should be made comfortable with a support sufficient to enable him to equip himself and do the best work possible, and that this support is his of right. Unfortunately, the idea does not yet prevail among us that it is not the minister's business to see after the collection of his own support, and that it is the privilege and duty of the laity to see that the minister, who is the servant of all, be given this support promptly."

As to how the church of to-day compares with that of 1850, a correspondent expresses the following opinion, which may be colored by the pessimism that is liable to accompany old age: "Three log buildings were owned by the Church, which elsewhere worshiped in schoolhouses and private homes. There are now twelve good churches and a half-interest in four or five others. The increase in membership is 300 to 400, but no greater than the increase in population. The circuit covered what is now embraced in three circuits, a part of another, and also a station. Piety will have to be discounted fifty per cent."

The first church paper was the "Mountain Messenger," appearing at Hagerstown, Maryland, in 1833, and edited by W. R. Rhinehart. Next year he sold out his equipment and moved to Circleville, Ohio, where he began editing the "Religious Telescope," the circulation of which was about 1200 copies. In 1845 David Edwards was conducting the paper on a salary of $350 a year and his house rent. He wrote editorials on national peace, and against slavery, secret orders, liquor, and tobacco. The church publishing house begun here in a very modest way in 1834, was moved twenty years later to Dayton, Ohio, and has since developed into one of the most complete establishment of its kind in the Union.

A church paper to represent the Virginia Conference was agitated as early as 1847. By a vote of 18 to 4, it was

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resolved, "that this conference, from the fact that the Religious Telescope, our church paper, is calculated to hinder, rather than promote, the church within the bounds of our conference, in consequence of its containing abolition matters from time to time, take into consideration the propriety of publishing within its own borders, a religious paper for its own benefit." The following year it was resolved, "that we regard ourselves as having been misrepresented in the columns of the Telescope during the past year." The evidences quoted were the article, "Right Side Up," by the editor, Mr. Edwards, "which we regard as saying, substantially, that the wrong side was up at the time being;" and by "Zethar," concerning " 'a religion more refined and less repulsive to the feelings of the fashionable,' which, with its connection, we regard as saying of us that our resolution proposing to 'consider the propriety,' etc., approbated upon our part the refinement and fashionableness related to slavery."

These resolutions show, after all, that the Virginia membership was sensitive on the topic of slavery. That this membership was but a small part of the total membership of the church, and that it was resident in a locality not thoroughly permeated by the slave labor system, were the conditions that prevented a schism, comparable to that which took place a few years earlier in the Methodist Episcopal Church.

"The Conference News" was finally established as the local organ of the Virginia Conference, but it was discontinued in 1911.

As to the province of a denominational paper, the projector of this book made the following observations:

"Debate is inherent in democracy. As the highest form of government, democracy demands the highest intelligence and the soundest morality. The Puritan experiment in government provided the town meeting and the schoolhouse by the side of the church.

The United Brethren in theory is the most democratic church in America. Have we made the full, intelligent,

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and general participation of our people in church government one of our distinctive characteristics? Our highest law-making body is made by the direct vote of our people, and yet how few voted in the recent election.

The forum must be our church paper.

The General Conference is one-half ministers (of whom one-half follow the leaders) and one-half laymen, few of whom have given thought to church problems or taken an active part in legislation. These will come with good hearts but feeling the need of more information. If there is lack of vision, where's the wonder?"

For many years instrumental music in church worship was held in great disfavor, and so late as 1865 there was a rule against its use. Neither were there any choirs, and ministers never thought of reading their sermons. It was about this time that that stern conservative, Bishop Edwards, protested against placing an organ in the Sunday school at Dayton, Ohio. This prejudice has faded away, as has also the prejudice against mustaches and long beards among the ministers.

So late as 1845 the Church was taking little interest in frontier and foreign missions, the reasons being thus summed up by a minister who began preaching about the time mentioned: "A want of information concerning the state of the world, and the little interest the preachers feel on the subject. There is not the taste for reading among us there ought to be. Intelligence, liberality, and virtue generally go hand in hand." And yet foreign missionary work was begun in 1854, and in the home field still earlier. There are now missions in Japan, China, Africa, the Philippines and Porto Rico.

A mission in Germany was opened in 1869. As a people mainly of German origin, the United Brethren would seem eminently suited to arrest the coming back of the thinly disguised Teutonic paganism which has been so painfully in evidence since 1914. Even in the youth of Otterbein, the German Reformation of the sixteen century had spent its force. He was himself aware of the wave of rationalism that was spreading mental and moral ruin

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in its haughty and self-sufficient march over Germany. The established churches of that land were forced into a subservient attitude toward the state. This is why Spener, himself a Lutheran, sought comfort in separation from the ruling elements of life. This explains why he and his followers sought to promote inward piety in the restricted fellowship of kindred souls.

The earliest history of the United Brethren Church is Spayth's, and it did not appear until 1851. It has been followed by several others, and by many volumes on biography and reminiscence.

A church paper to represent the narrowing German-speaking element was started in Baltimore in 1841. The General Sunday School Board appeared in 1865, the Board of Education and the Church Erection Society in 1869, and the Woman's Missionary Association in 1875.

The most momentous changes took place in the quadrennium, 1885-9. A revised Confession of Faith and a new Constitution were drawn up in 1885, and voted upon by the Church in November, 1889. Lay representation now took effect and the rule as to secret orders was modified. The time limit was removed in 1893. The vote in the General Conference in favor of the changes was 110 to 20. It produced the first and only schism that has yet appeared among the United Brethren. Of the 20 members voting in the negative, 14 withdrew from the Conference. Among them was Bishop Wright. They and their followers believed with entire sincerity that they could not see their way to an acceptance of what they held to be a serious departure from the old standards. This wing claimed to be the real United Brethren Church, and the litigation which ensued was not finally settled until 1895. The Old Constitution wing of the United Brethren is an entirely separate church organization, but has no distinct official name. In adhering to the Constitution and Confession of Faith as observed by the whole denomination prior to 1885, the Old Constitution wing adheres to the ban against secret orders. Some differences in church government

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and management have arisen in the past thirty years, and a careful conservatism marks this branch in financial and other matters. The Old Constitution United Brethren are particularly strong in the West, yet have a membership of 1500 to 2000 within the limits of the Virginia Conference, grouped in the Augusta circuit and the Highland and North Fork missions. The number of preaching places is about 20. This church has a college and publishing house at Huntington, Indiana, and from the latter issues a church paper, "The Christian Conservator."

With the one exception of the Disciples of Christ, the Church founded by Otterbein and Boehm is the largest of the American-born branches of Protestantism. It has steadily attracted to its fold persons of other than German descent, and that element in its membership is not inconsiderable in point of number and influence. The fathers of organization were averse to founding a new church, and for a while the United Brethren were quite favorable to a union with kindred denominations. This feeling is now much less in evidence owing to a growth in denominational pride.

The United Brethren Church no longer bears a distinct impress of foreignism. In this particular, not even the divorce from the German language is so significant as its refusal to espouse non-resistance as an article in its creed. An overwhelming majority of the American people detest war as much as do the Quakers and Mennonites. But they believe that when war is thrust upon a people, it is as much the duty of that people to take up arms as it is the duty of the private citizen to resist the outlaw who wantonly assails him. They note an inconsistency in the man who pays war taxes or buys bonds for war purposes, yet is unwilling to enroll as a soldier.

There is a broad distinction between the Germans of the Germany of to-day and the German emigrants to America in the eighteenth century. The former have been hypnotized and indoctrinated by their autocratic leaders into an implicit belief that their national welfare rests on

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ruthless force and wholesale plunder. Genuine Christianity had no place in the program marked out by these leaders. On the other hand, the Germans who came to America in the half-century 1725-75, were essentially a religious and democratic people. Many of them were pacifists. All the non-resistant denominations in America, not excepting even the Quakers, are directly or indirectly of German origin. But the non-resistant sect becomes in some measure a cave of Adullam for the slacker in civic duty. In pacifist churches of a German origin may be found congregations almost wholly of non-German blood, the influence leading them here being an easy way to shirk military service.

The Moravians hold non-resistant principles, and their missionaries were able to persuade many a war-party of Indians to turn back. Yet they cheerfully paid taxes for the cause of American independence, and when their town of Bethlehem was in danger of attack, they fortified and provisioned it, and armed themselves. In the same war Quakers and Mennonites furnished money and provisions, and many of them became soldiers. In that conflict the greatest American general except Washington was a son of Quaker parents.



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