Journey to the CRA: More Missionary Societies and a Proposal for Consolidation

The term ‘Evangelical’ is derived from the Greek word euangelion (εủαγγέλιον), which is generally translated “good news” or “gospel” in English. Believers as far back as Martin Luther in the sixteenth century were sometimes described as the “evangelical church” (generally with a lower-case letter) to distinguish them from the Roman Catholic Church because of the evangelicals focus on the Bible—specifically the gospel. By the time of the eighteenth-century revivals known as the Great Awakening, however, a specific movement identified as the “Evangelical” (with a capital letter) tradition emerged from the preaching and writing of George Whitefield (1714-1770) and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758). Their focus on the gospel and the necessity for every individual to encounter Christ through salvation became a pivotal aspect of those who would later be known as “Evangelicals.”

While modern evangelicalism has come to mean a variety of different things—to the extent that some have said it no longer means anything[1]—it’s undeniable that the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement developed within Christianity as an Evangelical Movement in the original and truest sense of the word. The goal of reaching the lost world for Christ had been the driving force that both gave birth and meaning to the Restoration Movement.  

Thus, when the movement ascended to a place where a national convention could be held in 1849, just seventeen years after the merger between the Stone and Campbell fellowships, the issue that took center stage in the gathering was the creation of the American Christian Missionary Society (ACMS), an organization that would focus on world evangelism.[2] To the dismay of many, however, the international evangelistic efforts of the ACMS fell short of expectations when their missionaries in Jerusalem and Jamaica were forced to return home as a result of inadequate finances and their missionary to Liberia died shortly after his arrival on the field. Moreover, these difficulties were exacerbated with the outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865), especially when the ACMS (headquartered in the northern city of Cincinnati) alienated those in the Confederate States by promoting “loyalty resolutions” in 1861 and 1863. These resolutions, which were approved at ACMS meetings in which no southern delegates were present, essentially renounced the society’s neutrality and condemned all who resided in Confederate States for their failure to maintain allegiance to the Union.[3]

In the years that followed the war, an effort was made to reorganize the ACMS and make it more appealing to all within the movement. For the first time, the General Convention assembled in a location other than Cincinnati, as it convened in Louisville, Kentucky (something of a neutral site), in 1869. At this convention, a group of twenty leading figures within the movement unveiled what became known as the “Louisville Plan” as a reconfiguration of the ACMS. The Louisville Plan briefly renamed the ACMS the “General Christian Missionary Convention” and established a pyramidal structure for financial and representative support. The hope was that the local churches would provide funds to a district missionary organization and the district organizations would retain half of the funds while sending the other half to a state missionary organization. The state organizations would then retain half of their receipts and send the remainder to the General Christian Missionary Convention. From the outset, the plan was a colossal failure. The society’s funding reached new lows as soon as the plan was implemented, and it was soon abandoned.[4]

The concern for world evangelism, however, did not subside. In a report from the “Committee on the Cooperation of Women in the Mission Work” delivered at the 1870 General Convention in Indianapolis, James Challen (1802-1878), an aged and respected leader in the movement, called for the recruitment of women into “active labor” in support of missions. Thomas Munnell (1828-1898), the Corresponding Secretary of the ACMS (then known as the General Christian Missionary Convention), added, “Recognizing that, as a people we have never opened the way for the women of our churches to unite in any broad enterprise with us, we propose to invite their vast, though unemployed, abilities to ‘labor with us in the gospel,’ both as solicitors among ourselves and as missionaries in suitable fields.”[5] These endorsements, along with a resolution in the 1872 General Convention to reestablish the movement’s missionary work, led to the formation of two additional organizations designed to promote world evangelism.

In early April 1874, Carolyn Neville Pearre (1831-1910), the wife of a minister in Iowa City, Iowa, conceived of an idea to call upon the women of the movement to create their own missionary society. Numerous denominations in the latter half of the nineteenth century had already formed women’s missionary societies, but Pearre (pronounced Pa-ree) would lead the way in establishing the first women’s society that served both foreign and domestic missions, employed both men and women, and was managed entirely by women.[6]

Pearre began her pursuit of a women’s missionary society by contacting several notable women in the movement for their support. She also corresponded with Thomas Munnell of the ACMS, inquiring about whether the movement was ready for such an endeavor. Munnell responded by writing, “This is a flame of the Lord’s kindling and no man can extinguish it.” The most noteworthy national exposure to the emerging women’s society, however, came from an editorial, “Help Those Women,” written by Isaac Errett (1820-1888), editor of The Christian Standard, and published in the July 11, 1874 edition of the periodical.[7]

At a meeting of the ACMS during the General Assembly in Cincinnati, the Christian Woman’s Board of Missions (CWBM) was officially formed in the basement of the Richmond Street Christian Church on October 21, 1874. The first foreign missionaries of the CWBM, Dr. and Mrs. W. H. Williams, were sent to Jamaica in 1876 and numerous other missionaries were sent around the world and to domestic locations where needs existed. The CWBM succeeded in raising funds and ultimately dispersed 947 missionaries around the world to establish churches, hospitals, and schools, including the College of Missions (1910-1927) in Indianapolis as a graduate-level training institute.[8]

As the CWBM was forming at the General Assembly of 1874, W. T. Moore (1832-1926), minister at the prestigious Central Christian Church in Cincinnati, assembled a committee of men interested in foreign missions to confer and pray about the possibility of creating a society that would focus on international missions. The initial meeting, at which the Foreign Christian Missionary Society (FCMS) was conceived, was at the Richmond Street Church, but a subsequent meeting of the committee convened in Indianapolis the following summer to prepare a tentative constitution for the FCMS. On October 22, 1875, at the General Convention in Louisville, the committee met with an influential group of the movement’s leaders to present their proposal. Following a brief address by Isaac Errett, “it was decided with unanimity” that the FCMS would be organized “to preach the gospel in foreign lands” and Errett was named the FCMS’s president. Archibald McLean (1849-1920), who was both a long-time president and historian of the FCMS records that “There was a consciousness of God’s presence, a conviction that what was being done was in line with the divine purpose” as the FCMS was formed.[9] The first of many missionaries to be sent by the FCMS was Henry S. Earl (1831-1910), who established a successful ministry in Southampton, England, in 1875.

Though formed with the support and approval of the ACMS, “the three societies carried on their work independently and prosperously for more than forty years.”[10] Yet, at the 1876 General Convention in Richmond, VA, a resolution was unanimously agreed upon that envisioned a “time when such a general cooperation of our churches shall be secured as may enable us to resolve these organizations into one, efficient for domestic and foreign work.”[11] This initial desire to unite the mission organization remained dormant for nearly forty-five years, but at the 1917 International Convention (the newly adopted name for the annual General Assembly) in Kansas City, a Committee on Unification was appointed. Two years later, at the 1919 International Convention in Cincinnati, the committee proposed the merger of the three missionary societies with the Board of Church Extensions, the National Benevolent Association, and the Board of Ministerial Relief to form a single organization known as the United Christian Missionary Society (UCMS).[12]

In the intervening forty-five years between the founding of the FCMS and the proposal for consolidating the missionary societies and other agencies, the movement’s membership had witnessed a series of significant digressions from the views of Scripture and denominational authority that had traditionally been espoused within the movement. These deviations from the movement’s conventional beliefs and practices were so momentous that the proposal to create a single authoritative agency overseen only by a twenty-two-member board seemed to be nothing less than a denominational takeover set on promoting the new ideas throughout the Restoration Movement’s churches. In the next issue, we will explore the development of the new ideas and their impact on the movement.