Notes — No. 3

Back again for another installment that documents my reading of Lloyd Cline Sears’ The Eyes of Jehovah (Gospel Advocate Company, 1970), a biography of James A. Harding. I have no overarching plan with these posts; I am simply using them to share excerpts from the book that I find worthy of reflection or comment.

Chapter 4, “Apostolic Evangelism,” contains a lengthy digression dealing with Harding’s views on what Sears refers to as the “pastoral system” (later referred to in the polemical literature as the “located minister”). It is hard to imagine now because the office of located minister is found across the breadth of the theological spectrum in the Churches of Christ (outside of a vanishingly small number of churches that officially oppose the practice), but conservative opposition to the located minister was one of the marquee issues in the division between the Disciples of Christ and the Churches of Christ at the end of the 19th century.

Alexander Campbell and other first-generation leaders discerned in the New Testament a tripartite structure to the ordained ministry of the Church: elders, deacons, evangelists. Elders (which term Campbell and the others understood to be synonymous with presbyters, bishops, overseers, pastors) were the spiritual leaders of a congregation. The apostolic writings also entrusted them with the teaching office in the church. Campbell set a high bar for the men who would hold this office, suggesting educational qualifications that would strike most contemporary readers as odd (e.g. Campbell believed that elders should be fully conversant with the Greek text of the New Testament, and should have committed large portions of the Greek text to memory). Deacons were the servants of the church, as suggested in the Acts of the Apostles.

Evangelists carried on the apostolic charge to spread the gospel. This they did by seeking out opportunities to preach wherever those might be found, and by establishing and “setting in order” churches in towns and farming communities all over the frontier areas that they covered in their travels. Crucially, Campbell, Scott, and the others understood the evangelist to be an itinerant, one who travelled around doing his work. Once he had set a church in order, he moved on, leaving the governance of the church in the hands of the elders. (You might see shades here of the concept of “evangelistic oversight,” and you’d be right to do so.)

In the second and third generations of the Movement, this model began to change. This change took place for two basic reasons. One of these has to do with the character of the American religious scene in the mid-19th century; the other has more to do with the demographics and internal dynamics of the Movement itself. For the sake of brevity, and of allowing Harding himself to have the floor, I will delay that discussion until my next post. The prime years of Harding’s ministry took place as this transition was underway, so he had a front row seat and thus provides an incisive critique of it.

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It is the duty of an evangelist, Harding held, to establish new congregations and to remain with them, if possible, until they are self-supporting. This might take only a few weeks, or the opportunities might be so great as to justify many years.

“Whenever a congregation is resolutely and lovingly determined to meet every Lord’s Day to study the scriptures and break the loaf, attend to the fellowship and the prayers, no matter how small it is, it may be left. Though the evangelist should visit it from time to time that it may be strengthened and increased in numbers.”

But the New Testament distinction between the work of the elders (the scriptural pastors) and the evangelists, Harding felt, was being rapidly lost.

“The elders do not feed the flock of God,” he declared; “they call preachers to do the work for them and they pay them for it. Preaching thus becomes a ‘bread and butter’ calling. Hence, too often instead of going forth full of the spirit of self-sacrifice, determined to work for Christ and his kingdom, we see preachers engaging in an inglorious scramble for place. Hence, we hear of preachers whining about the younger ones crowding them out, and the younger ones talking about qualifying themselves ‘to hold the best pulpits’….It seems to me that nearly all the ills that afflict the body grow out of the elevation of one man to the pastorate.”

The growing custom of churches to invite preachers for “trial sermons,” to have them “trot across the stage to show their gaits and good qualities,” then reject them all and call a man from an already “settled pastorate,” was never known to the early church, Harding contended. It sent out preachers instead of calling them in.

“Professional preachers,” Harding declared, “will never evangelize the world. Their hearts are set in them to seek fine pastoral positions, and to secure the charge of flocks that yield an abundant fleece, as a rule… The ‘Pastor’ is not a necessity; he is a fungus growth upon the church, the body of Christians, dwarfing its growth, preventing the development of its members; and until the church gets rid of him it will never prosper as it should.” (Eyes of Jehovah, pg. 65)

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I’ll leave it there for now, and return to this topic in my next post. We will, of course, also pay attention to how this plays out in the thinking of John T. Lewis, who did his own share of writing on the pastor system.

Notes — No. 2

We continue working our way through Lloyd Cline Sears’ The Eyes of Jehovah this week.

Chapter 3, “Living by Faith,” contains a narrative of James A. Harding’s preaching endeavors in the years following the death of his first wife, Carrie, in 1876. By all accounts, his financial situation was dire, requiring him to resume teaching school in order to supplement a meager (to say the least) preaching income. Sometime shortly after Carrie’s death, he entered into an arrangement with a Mr. Hodgkins, “a wealthy banker friend” (Eyes of Jehovah, pg. 36), whereby Hodgkins supported Harding’s work financially. While at first Harding saw this as a boon to his ministry, he gradually came to change his mind:

“Numbers of times I went to him for money and he always let me have it with pleasure. But after a while my mind was especially attracted to the verses in the Philippian letter: ‘In nothing be anxious; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God…And my God shall supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.’

“So I resolved that I would not go to him any more for money, and I never did. Sometimes the temptation to do so was very great, but I did not yield to it; and I got along just as well, met every obligation just as promptly, and had the consolation of knowing that I was trusting in God and not in man.

“Some time afterward this brother said to me, ‘How is it that you do not come to me any more for money?’ I explained to him the reason–that I had been trusting to man rather than to God and that henceforth I expected to go to the Lord with my wants, and look to him for what I might need.”

Eyes of Jehovah, pg. 37

In this, we see the seeds of Harding’s understanding of “special providence.” (For the purposes of this Note, I’ll not elaborate further where others have covered the subject fully.) But what is sometimes missed is that Harding’s opposition to the missionary society grew out of his understanding of special providence. Sears elaborates:

“To permit financial considerations to interfere with his freedom, to Harding was unthinkable, and this was his first objection to the Christian Missionary Society which had been recently organized [in Kentucky], as its sponsors claimed, partly to give ministers financial security.

“‘When I was a young preacher,’ Harding said later, ‘and when my understanding of the missionary society was much less clear than it is now, I refused the best offer financially I have ever had in my life, an offer to work for the Kentucky Christian Missionary Society, because to accept it would be to curtail the liberty I had in Christ. At first it was proposed to me to work in a certain district in the state; and when I demurred, I was given the liberty to preach anywhere I pleased in the State. But I wanted the liberty to preach anywhere in the world where I could do the most good, in any place in which God in his providence might call me. I was accustomed to pray to God to lead me daily where I could do the most good. I was unwilling to give up the liberty to pray thus, and refused the offer. God is the only competent guide and supporter of those who work for him… He knows exactly what each of us needs, concerning which all men are more or less ignorant.

“….The offers of the Missionary Society were refused, he said, because the Society expected to direct his work. ‘For my part, I had rather look to the Father for support and trust him to direct the work.'”

Eyes of Jehovah, pp. 38-39

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John T. Lewis was a student of Harding’s at the Nashville Bible School in the years between 1898 and 1901: “When I listened to one of Brother J. A. Harding’s lectures…he could make a speech. I’ve come out of that old chapel many a time inspired to go out and convert the world.” Commenting on the very first protracted meeting he ever held (east of Woodbury, Tenn., in August 1902), Lewis remarked, “I caught the Harding idea, and it was one of my most successful endeavors.”

In the interest of brevity, I will leave it there. More can be said, though. Harding’s understanding of special providence and its effect on how he viewed the missionary society can be transposed, several decades later, to Lewis’s understanding of the proper relationship between the church and parachurch organizations and institutions. Until next time.

Notes — No. 1

Early on in his biography of James A. Harding, Lloyd Cline Sears includes some reminiscences from Harding about Benjamin Franklin:

Years after Benjamin Franklin’s visits in his home Harding recalled with gratitude his influence, and that of others, on his life: ‘I knew Brother Franklin well. I read his paper when I was about ten years old, and read it eagerly till he died, about nineteen years later. I was with him in a number of protracted meetings… Alexander Campbell, Barton W. Stone, Benjamin Franklin, and David Lipscomb, I think, have done more for apostolic Christianity than any other four men since the Apostle Paul died.‘

The Eyes of Jehovah: The Life and Faith of James Alexander Harding, pp. 9, 10.

This might sound shocking to our ears: we have grown unaccustomed to hearing this sort of talk in our own time, and we have forgotten how common it once was. We have forgotten a time when it was non uncommon for church members to name their children after these men, and other well known evangelists. But Harding was unselfconscious in acknowledging his intellectual and spiritual debts.

So too was John T. Lewis. In the Introduction to his 1932 work The Voice of the Pioneers on Instrumental Music and Societies, Lewis cites Ecclesiastes 12:11: “The words of the wise are as goads; and as nails well fastened are the words of masters of assemblies, which are given from one shepherd” (quoted from the 1901 American Standard Version, Lewis’ typical text). Drawing on these words, especially the phrase “masters of assemblies,” he writes:

I consider the pioneers of the nineteenth-century Reformation ‘masters of assemblies’ — the ‘Milky Way’ — in the galaxy of the ecclesiastical heavens — unequaled by any inspired group.

Voice of the Pioneers, Introduction (Nashville, Tenn: Gospel Advocate Company, 1932)

Again, shocking to our ears. But might we acknowledge that Lewis had good reasons for this attitude? For one, he learned it from his teachers at the Nashville Bible School, notable among them James A. Harding. For another, he learned it through a self-directed, multi-year reading and study program in the literature of the first two generations of the Movement, in particular Alexander Campbell’s Millennial Harbinger, which we can reasonably suppose that Lewis had read from cover to cover. We might go as far as to say that, in the debates among the churches in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s over a variety of issues — from prayer posture and the headcovering to Christian participation in warfare — perhaps only L. L. Brigance possessed a better command of the literature of the pioneers that was disputed in these arguments. Be that as it may, both men displayed a facility with the sources that their opponents could not match.

The memorial issue of the Gospel Guardian, published one year following Lewis’ death, includes a photograph of an aging Bro. Lewis, standing in his office in the Ensley church building, with his set of Millennial Harbinger volumes. In the mind of this writer, there are few images that better capture the essence of Lewis’ mind and scholarly disposition than this one.

Update

A couple notes on current projects for those who still find their way here:

• Back in February, before the COVID-19 lockdowns descended upon us, I had the pleasure of appearing on a panel at the University of North Alabama sponsored by the Alabama Association of Historians. I and my fellow presenters dealt with the life and legacy of T. B. Larimore. My paper was an adaptation of the most recent blog posts you see here, dealing with the 1897 open letter exchange between Larimore and O. P. Speigel.
• In regards to the ongoing research into John T. Lewis and the Birmingham churches, research has given way to writing. I am currently at work on a draft chapter that deals with Lewis’s boyhood, early education, and religious formation in the congregations that straddled the Williamson and Rutherford county line in Middle Tennessee, covering the years from his birth in 1876 to his enrollment as a student in the Nashville Bible School in September 1898.

Later.

Update

Here’s an update:

First, Birmingham and John T. Lewis. I’ve been hard at work as time allows over the past few months reconstructing the early history of the Birmingham churches, prior to the arrival of John T. Lewis in the fall of 1907. Recent excursions in the journals (Gospel Advocate and Firm Foundation) have brought me much closer to the origins of the Fox Hall church and the (still mysterious) North Birmingham church. I have also uncovered considerably more context for the Pratt City meeting that Lewis and J. M. Barnes held late in the summer of 1907, all of which has pointed to a stronger conservative presence in Birmingham than previously thought. I’ve also had some good conversations recently that have turned up more information about JTL’s work in Canada while he was a student at the Nashville Bible School. Slowly but surely, things are coming together. It is my hope to be able to publish a narrative of these years (1885–1907) by the end of the year.

Second, an announcement. As we’ve done for the past two years, I will again be joining John Mark Hicks, Mac Ice, and Jeremy Sweets for a series of talks about the history of the Nashville churches at this year’s Summer Celebration on the campus of Lipscomb University, July 1–3. I will be discussing the division that took place in the Woodland Street Christian Church, located in East Nashville, in the fall of 1890, resulting in the establishment of the Tenth Street Church of Christ. Woodland Street, some of you will recall, became embroiled in the larger dispute over the missionary society in the 1880s and the division occurred over that issue. I’ll be back here with more specific information about the date and time of those talks.

[UPDATE: For those of you who are in town for Summer Celebration, our sessions will be held on Thursday and Friday, July 2 and 3, at 3 p.m. Both sessions will again be held at the Avalon house on the Lipscomb campus. Hope to see you there.]

On “the fruitfulness of co-operative endeavor”: J. A. Lord in Birmingham, 1907

James Alexander Lord (1849–1922)

In November 1907, J. A. Lord, editor of the Christian Standard, traveled south to attend the annual meeting of the Alabama Christian Missionary Cooperation, which was held in Jasper that year. He came away excited and very optimistic about the prospects of the progressive churches in Alabama, especially those in Birmingham and Jasper (where a new, pro-society church had just been established).

I’ve been doing a lot of research of late focused on establishing the context for John T. Lewis’ arrival in Birmingham in the fall of 1907, a point at which Castleberry’s He Looked for a City disappoints. For Castleberry, the Fox Hall church simply exists. He is not interested in describing its origins or the larger religious context of Birmingham. In his telling, Lewis stepped into a vacuum when he held that first meeting in Pratt City in August-September of 1907.

But this was simply not the case. Consider what Lord has to say about Birmingham:

This whole Birmingham story, so full of inspiring details, that pages might well be devoted to it, is a demonstration of the most striking character of the fruitfulness of co-operative endeavor in the great industrial and commercial centers of America. These churches and their preachers are devoted to the preaching of the simple gospel and to planting churches of Christ at every vantage-point in this whole growing congeries of manufacturing and commercial communities, which will be fused into a city of half a million people in less than twenty-five years. From the present rate of growth, and with the present outlook, some fifty churches of Christ will be planted here in the next quarter of a century. And let it not be forgotten by brethren who have been slow to fall in with co-operative methods of evangelism, that none of these churches would have been in existence if their fears had possessed the Birmingham workers, or their inadequate theory of church expansion had been carried out. One thousand people of Birmingham and vicinity are now enlisted in and are committed to the spirit of the Restoration plea, who would be out in the world, or scattered among the denominations, if the anti-co-operative views of those who opposed missionary societies had prevailed. In no important center of population except Nashville, Tenn., have the anti-co-operative ideas resulted in churches of Christ of any strength of membership or influence, and a full understanding of the facts will show that even Nashville is no exception to the rule.”

(Excerpted from “Southern Convention Notes,” Christian Standard 43.50 [December 14, 1907]: 2071.)

This was Lord’s third trip to Birmingham as editor of the Standard. In this excerpt, he is talking about the five progressive (i.e., pro-society, pro-instrument) churches that existed in Birmingham, four of which had been established in the seven years prior to Lewis’ arrival.

Ironies abound here, of course. At the very moment Lord wrote these words, the young John T. Lewis had just arrived in Birmingham to begin his work with the Fox Hall church. (Counting Fox Hall, of course, would bring the total number of Stone-Campbell churches in the city to six.) While Lord’s “fifty churches of Christ” never materialized, Lewis—beginning with that single, tiny church—was ultimately responsible for more than thirty churches in the Birmingham District based, albeit, on an “inadequate theory of church expansion” that Lord thought would never work.

Moreover—and not to put too fine a point on it—while the first decade of the twentieth century was a flush time for the pro-society churches, never again would the expansive spirit of A. R. Moore, O. P. Spiegel, J. A. Lord, and other progressive leaders in Birmingham be fully recaptured by them.

Finally, regarding Lord’s comments about Nashville. What does he know about the situation in Nashville that he’s not saying here?

Housekeeping

A momentary break from historical posts for a bit of news.

1. In July, at the annual Lipscomb lectures, I will join John Mark Hicks, Jeremy Sweets, and Mac Ice for a second round of presentations and discussion about the history of the churches of Christ in Nashville. Last year’s presentations were well received (you can find mine here) and we look forward to a good session again this time around. I’ll be discussing the local and theological contexts of the 1938 Hardeman Tabernacle Meeting. Hope to see you there if you’re in town.

2. None of this means, of course, that I have abandoned John T. Lewis and Birmingham. Work continues there on several fronts. I’m currently digging more deeply into the origins of both First Christian Church and the Fox Hall congregation. Additionally, a big thanks is in order to Phillip Owens, of the Shannon church in Birmingham, for the opportunity to work with a large quantity of JTL’s personal papers and photographs in his possession.

3. Lastly, I want to mention what a privilege it has been over the past few weeks to help in the effort to preserve the congregational records of the Riverside Drive Church of Christ. As some of you know, Riverside Drive closed its doors at the end of March after 77 years of ministry in East Nashville. The congregation’s records are extensive: there is a lot of detailed information going back to the very beginning (February 1937), and a full run of bulletins starting in the early ’50s. I hope to share some of this material with you in the coming weeks as there is lots of interesting material vis-a-vis the larger history of the Nashville churches. UPDATE: I’ve posted some photos of the interior of the building over on my Tumblr.

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading.

Clippings from Recent Research

“The church must be free to be poor in order to minister among the poor.”

William Stringfellow (1928-1985)

In the November 19, 1964 issue of the Gospel Guardian, editor Yater Tant reviewed a (then new) book by lawyer and Episcopal theologian William Stringfellow titled My People Is the Enemy. The review is a fascinating glimpse into the way that social and cultural issues of the day were addressed in the Guardian, and is (if I may be allowed to say so) worthy for our consideration today.

I give you here the review in its entirety, taken from Gospel Guardian 16.28 (November 19, 1964): 4, 9. Wording in bold is so in the original.

“My People is the Enemy”

This is the name of a most challenging book published last summer by Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. The author is William Stringfellow, one of the leading Episcopal laymen of the day, and a lawyer with an international reputation in his field. He articulates a question that is coming increasingly to trouble the minds of thoughtful denominational leaders—and which has most serious implications for the churches of Christ.

Mr. Stringfellow examines the whole idea of modern religion’s involvement in the ‘social’ questions that trouble our generation. The churches of our day, he opines, are engaged in everything from playgrounds to politics, and from rental housing to racial revolutions. But have they put their eggs in the wrong basket?

He thinks maybe they have.

This book clearly warns the churches against plunging into ‘all sorts of social work and social action’ and thereby neglecting their basic reason for existence, ‘the proclamation and celebration of the gospel.’ In their efforts to alleviate man’s physical distress, and to relieve his want and hunger, Stringfellow argues that the churches have so ‘watered down’ the gospel as to make it lose its power.

He writes:

‘If the gospel is so fragile that it may not be welcomed by a man who, say, he’s hungry, unless  he first be fed, then this is no Gospel with any saving power; this is no word of God which has authority over the power of death.

‘The Gospel, if it represents the power of God unto salvation, is a word which is exactly addressed to men in this world in their destitution and hunger and sickness and travail and perishing—addressed to them in a way which may be heard and embraced in any of these, or in any other, afflictions.’

Stringfellow, who left Harvard Law School several years ago to live and practice his profession in the Harlem ghetto of New York City is particularly critical of what he calls the ‘urban church concept’ of Christianity.

‘The premise of most urban church work,’ he declares, ‘is that in order for the church to minister among the poor, the church has to be rich, that is, to have specially trained personnel, huge funds and many facilities, rummage to distribute and a whole battery of social services. Just the opposite is the case. The church must be free to be poor in order to minister among the poor.’

‘The church must trust the Gospel enough to come among the poor with nothing to offer the poor except the gospel.’

A church rich and affluent can hardly do that; a church poor and humble can. The gospel of Christ, as it is, is adapted to man as he is—miserable, hungry, frustrated, lonely, overburdened with grief, anxiety, and a sense of futility.

The churches of Christ have traditionally understood this. There has been very

Fanning Yater Tant (1908-1997)

little of the ‘social gospel’ emphasis among them. Not until lately. But now we are witnessing a significant change. A strong undercurrent of ‘social gospelism’ is becoming quite evident. A tremendous proliferation of ‘orphan homes,’ just when the denominational churches and social welfare agencies were turning from them to other and more acceptable forms of child care was but the beginning, and was but a symptom of the real trouble. Vast sums have been spent and are being spent in a wide variety of ‘social project’ efforts among the churches of Christ. They range all the way from summer camps to homes for unwed mothers to rehabilitation farms for wayward boys and hobby shops for restless housewives. There is a subtle (and probably unrecognized) loss of faith in the power of the gospel. These social projects are not the spontaneous fruit coming from the hearts of dedicated Christians; they are supervised ‘organizational projects’ of congregations. And they are frankly being promoted as ‘bait’ to intrigue the interest and soften up the resistance of the non-Christians! The ill-housed, ill-clad, and ill-fed are not going to be interested in the gospel; we must first see that they are well-housed, well-clothed, and well-fed!

Denominational churches have tried this approach. And now Stringfellow’s is only one thoughtful voice among many that are being raised to question the assumption. At the very time when our brethren are turning toward these social projects, the discerning ones in denominational circles are questioning the validity of this entire point of view. It is built on a false premise … or so Stringfellow contends.

We believe the conservative [i.e. non-institutional] congregations will not quickly adopt the ‘social gospel’ approach to win people to Christ. And it is quite possible that many even in the more liberal churches will question it. But for all of them, both conservative and liberal, this new book by William Stringfellow ought to be ‘required reading.’ It can be ordered from the Gospel Guardian. The price is $3.95.

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Icon of Stringfellow, hanging in the chapel of Bates College (ME), his alma mater.

A few comments about this piece. First, if it seems confusing that FYT would be reviewing a book such as this, we should recall the very open editorial policy that he pursued for the Guardian during this period. Side-by-side comparison with the Advocate from the same period is instructive. Tant and his writing staff from time to time dealt with topics—in the form of discussions of race and other social issues, book reviews, etc.—that would never have appeared in print in B. C. Goodpasture’s Advocate. We might not always agree with their conclusions, but the fact that the discussions ran at all is significant.

A couple of observations should be made about the content of the review. First, Tant quotes Stringfellow thus: “The church must be free to be poor in order to minister among the poor. The church must trust the Gospel enough to come among the poor with nothing to offer the poor except the gospel.” Tant then observes: “A church rich and affluent can hardly do that; a church poor and humble can.”

In a single sentence, Tant gets at the crux of the enduring socioeconomic divide in American Protestantism. Those of us who are well off (and well educated) may genuinely want to help the poor, but we rarely want to give up what we have (“be poor”) in order to do that. We want to be able to help while still enjoying all of the advantages that come with our class status. Tant and other non-institutional thinkers in the churches of Christ in the 1950s and ’60s saw in that truth the genesis of so many parachurch/institutional projects.

Moreover, they saw that these projects were born out of a certain awkwardness. It was the awkwardness that came when a group of people who were busy crossing the tracks socioeconomically looked back at the place and people from whom they had so recently come. Many genuinely felt bad for those they had left behind and wanted to help. In their response they ended up mimicking the behavior of members of other middle-class Protestant denominations. Institutional projects such as Childhaven and countless others allowed the affluent (or recently middle-class) church member to help, while simultaneously keeping his distance. In so doing, they completely missed the way in which they constructed a divide between themselves and the poor.

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A final word: I would be remiss not to note the at-first-glance odd pairing of Stringfellow and Tant. These days, Stringfellow is read admiringly among certain, but not all, progressives in the churches of Christ. I dare say that he is largely unknown among conservatives. That’s interesting, though, because Tant clearly saw an affinity between Stringfellow’s argument in My People Is the Enemy and the non-institutional argument that he and his writers were making in the Guardian in the ’60s, so much so that he could call it “required reading.” I have to wonder: how might one of our editors evaluate Stringfellow’s book today?

 

Death on a Saturday Evening

As I said the other day, it is the human stories that one encounters in the Advocate that really have moved me in this process.

In May 1938, Cled Wallace (1892-1962) came to Birmingham to hold a meeting for the Bessemer church. We don’t know much about the outcome of the meeting as far as the usual measures. J. R. Ezell (1886-1966), elder and preacher for the Bessemer church, did not submit the normal tally of baptisms and restorations. Neither did Wallace submit a report of his own.

The August 4, 1938, issue of the Gospel Advocate gives us a possible explanation. There we find the following obituary from the pen of John T. Lewis:

John Morgan Queen was born August 14, 1899; run down and killed by an automobile May 7, 1938. He had just driven up to the church where Cled Wallace was conducting a meeting in Bessemer, Ala., got out of his car, and started across the street, when he was hit by a passing car, and never regained consciousness. He was baptized by the writer February 8, 1928, and was married to Miss Gladys Dobbs, August 11, 1933. From the time he obeyed the gospel till his untimely passing he was an interested, diligent student of the Bible, and never missed an opportunity of talking to his friends about the importance of obeying the gospel and living the Christian life. He was a good song leader, could make good talks, and would do anything he was called on to do in the work and worship of the church. In all my association with him I never heard him use a vulgar word or tell a smutty yarn. He kept the scriptural injunction: “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” — JOHN T. LEWIS.

We can only speculate as to how devastating this must have been for the members of the Bessemer church. Does a church continue a meeting after an event of this sort or just call it off? It’s difficult, in our day, to understand the enthusiasm that would have surrounded a gospel meeting in Queen and Lewis’ day. Perhaps Queen’s enthusiasm is also foreign to us.

Something else strikes me here. Lewis’ obituaries in the Advocate really are models of restraint. They lend dignity to the lives of their subjects; they do not detract from them with wordiness or flowery vocabulary. Not that anyone ever receives formal training in obituary composition, but there’s probably a lesson there for us.

Lewis also never fails to pass up an opportunity to teach with an example. Queen, he tells us, was a model of what the Scripture means that says, “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life” (Proverbs 4.23).

Missing Persons Report

For much of its history, one of the chief features of the Gospel Advocate was its “News and Notes” section. By doing nothing more than watching how this section of the paper developed over the years one can learn a lot about the paper as a whole, as well as about the self-image of many in the Churches of Christ.

For the most part, “News and Notes” consisted of reports from preachers and congregations about gospel meetings, changes of address, and other newsworthy items. By and large, it makes for bland reading, at least for the casual reader.

Every now and again, though, a note of pathos breaks through. A few such items have appeared along the way in my Birmingham research. Here’s one from the March 6, 1930 issue of the Advocate:

Mrs. Harry L. Parker, Route 7, Box 76, Birmingham, Ala., February 20: “I am wondering if any of the readers of the Gospel Advocate could give us any information about a brother and sister in Christ, Mr. and Mrs. B. A. Austin. Brother and Sister Austin are young people about twenty-eight and twenty-four years, respectively. They labored with the congregation at North Lewisburg, Ala., for about one year. They were formerly from Southwest Missouri. They were members of the Christian Church there, but took up work with this congregation, knowing only the church to give God all glory. On December 26, 1929, they left here with household furniture on an open truck (White’s), bound for some place in Missouri, promising to even write us on their journey. But we have never had a single line from them and are anxious about them. We do not know their former home address. Any information through the Advocate or otherwise will be appreciated by the whole congregation here.”

Whatever happened to Mr. and Mrs. B. A. Austin? Did the good people of the Lewisburg church ever hear from them? We don’t know. There’s no followup, at least not in the Advocate. But the note of concern — something not heard very often in “News and Notes” —  in Sister Parker’s letter stands out. In it, we get a tiny glimpse into the lives and feelings of the people who filled the Birmingham churches in John T. Lewis’ day.

That’s been one of the real gifts to me of engaging in this research. It’s easy to get lost in chronological minutiae — Who was preaching where? When was a given church established? — or in the doctrinal conflicts that expended much of Lewis’ energy. Items like this, though, have the salutary effect of reminding me that there are flesh-and-blood human beings behind all of this. Countless people who never occupied a pulpit or wrote for the papers lived and died, married and raised children, in these churches. Our opportunities to hear their voices are rare and are a gift to be treasured.