As Historian, Merle Strege
described our Anderson-based Church of God (once known by many as Evening
Light Saints), as believing God had appointed them to a twofold mission. He further
noted their conviction of being under divine mandate to reach a world they
believed had lost its way. Second but not secondary, Strege recognized their felt-mission
to the Denominational System that Warner believed perpetuated divisions within
the one true Body of Christ.
Many a reader has heard someone of our fellowship testify
to having “seen the church” and affirming their having “taken their stand” for
the truth. We honor one man and his publication as being the root source of
that truth. D. S. Warner was the man. The Gospel
Trumpet was the vital publication. Warner’s itinerant ministry anchored the
flagpole on which we flew our banner of holiness and unity, and Warner and his
army of “Flying Ministers” pursued their quest for unity and holiness.
The charismatic Warner led this
diligent charge from about 1878 until his death 12-18-95. The summer of 1887 had
seen Warner invite Enoch Byrum to buy into the magazine and manage the Grand
Junction print shop. This had allowed Warner to return to his traveling
ministry, while positioning Byrum to become heir-apparent to the throne —the
Editor’s Desk where the buck stopped.
Following Warner’s unexpected death,
the youthful Byrum led this increasingly diverse band of disciples until 1916,
when replaced in his seat of editorial power by F. G. Smith, a boyhood convert
of Warner. The Byrum brothers Enoch and Noah Byrum exhibited business forte and
organizational genius, aided by the volunteer workforce initiated by J. C.
Fisher at Williamston. This combined group learned the publishing business and further
supplemented the itinerants forming the “flying ministry.”
They pushed globally in all
directions, establishing multiple preaching points, foreign and domestic. When the
Chicago Missionary Home began reproducing itself elsewhere, this new trending
added additional means of distributing Warner’s “pen preaching.” They also served
as “in-service training centers,” playing a prelude to our current system of theological
education. They now include some of our oldest settled congregational centers, such
as Oakland, CA; Kansas City, MO, St. Paul, MN, St. Joseph, MI., and New York
City.
Filtering Warner’s faith was this
personal-faith-in-God-through-Christ theology that came via Warner’s Anabaptist
and Pietistic roots. The Wesleyan Holiness Movement resulted after certain
Moravians met and witnessed zealously and earnestly to John Wesley. Warner eventually
experienced this “power of God;” tied a secure knot in his rope of personal faith
and linked his message with this Holiness Movement. Consequently, when John W.
V. Smith wrote our Centennial history, he condensed Warner’s ministry into a
vehicle that rode on a dual track (cf. The Quest for Holiness and Unity
(Warner Press, 1980).
As a people, we have now ridden these twin tracks of
holiness and unity for more than one-hundred thirty-five years. During that
time, we have succeeded modestly well at institutionalizing our Church
Movement, at the same time walking through an organizational minefield of
organization while trying to discern the blessings and pitfalls of
denominational organization. We have, however, failed to adequately address the
third component that brought success to Warner and his peers, while giving us a
voice as a Movement, and providing a reason for our existence--our raison
d’etre.
Warner’s peers shared his compulsion to proclaim the
gospel and they scurried about in every direction witnessing through the
“flying ministry.” Believing at first that their time was limited, they rushed
about in all directions burning with the fire of the anonymous Texas oilman who
pushed up to the airport ticket counter, slammed his fist down and demanded a
ticket. When the flustered young agent inquired “where to, Sir?” the hardy
Texan declared, “Anywhere, young man, I have business everywhere!”
The older we have grown as a Movement, the further from
Warner and our roots we have moved; and the dimmer has become our vision of
what drove him and his cohorts. While we search ever more frantically, if we
would better understand Warner and his vision, we must once more feel the
fervor that lifted him on the winds of The Spirit and carried him from nowhere to
launch him everywhere. Longtime Warner Press Editor, Harold Phillips, noted
this entry from Warner’s journal:
Passed by the old schoolhouse
where I gave my heart to God (February
1865).
Thank God for that step.
Oh, how glad I Am it was ever
my lot to become a Christian!”1
Born June 25, 1842, Warner consequently became part of that
westward push beyond the Ohio Territory, five brief years after Michigan
achieved statehood in 1837. Nine years earlier, the 1833 Chicago Treaty had
forced the white-educated Potawatomi chief, Leopold Pokagon, to transfer
several million acres of Native American ancestral grounds into the Great Lakes
Expansion. That opened new highways through Detroit, Chicago and all points
west, thrusting Daniel into the Westward push.
His 1865 conversion transformed his fun-loving skepticism
into serious-minded discipleship.2 simultaneously he joined the
195th Ohio Infantry regiment as a substitute for his older, married brother.
Fortunately, the war’s end freed him to return home, but the nation he went to
serve remained in disarray.
The former schoolmaster, now a discharged veteran and
young Christian, postponed his marriage to Frances Stocking, needing to reflect
upon the life he and Frances would share. He determined to pursue his formal
education, selecting Oberlin College. Throughout Warner’s life he repeatedly reflected
the character of a man of strong opinion, deep feeling, and one that made
decisive choices; not unlike the formidable Oberlin President, Charles G. Finney.
Near Warner’s home, Oberlin also served as a seedbed for
social change; especially for women and blacks. It also provided a center for
holiness led by Finney, the patron saint of American revivalism then in his
last years as President of Oberlin. Daniel openly accepted women and blacks both
as social equals and as leaders, but he resisted Finney’s holiness teachings
for a decade.
In the eight years following Warner’s Oberlin experience,
he preached 1,241 sermons, won 508 converts, and rose quickly among his peers within
the Church of God Eldership of North America. Eventually, he found himself a
thirty-one year old widower en route to Nebraska’s frontier mission fields--a
tribute to his success as an evangelist. Existing in poverty and hardship,
Daniel proved a hearty but successful missionary - church planter.
Following his earlier conversion at the Cogswell School
revival, he joined the newer, frontier denomination newly-founded by John
Winebrenner. Winebrenner, unlike Warner, had already pastored four German
Reformed congregations when he experienced Christ personally. Like Warner,
however, he became an ardent revivalist. In this new-found zeal, Winebrenner
sought and secured help from neighboring Methodist preachers who helped him
evangelize their community.
This collaboration prompted Winebrenner’s eventual
expulsion for “preaching experience.” With his friend, Philip Otterbein,
Winebrenner began sponsoring reforms for personal behavior and pastoral
practice, opposed by a majority of Reformed Churchmen. These so-called “New
measures” and Winebrenner’s continued resistance led to his inevitable exit
from the Reformed Church.
While Lutherans held to their rigid equating of the
sacraments with salvation, Reformed influences moved from heart-felt religion
to legalistic dogma. Thus, the Winebrennarian-Otterbein reform measures renewed
the pietistic practices described earlier by Jacob Spener in his 1675 “Pia
Desideria.”
Spener openly called for bible study in small groups, the
priesthood of believers, practical and personal faith, loving relationships
rather than argument, reforms in theological education, and spiritual preaching.
Renewal of practical, bible-based faith formed the benchmark of Pietism and became
foundational to the Anabapatist stepchildren of the Reformation and the
Wesleyan revivals. This personal walk with God appealed to young Dan Warner.
Warner then spent ten years in successful evangelistic
ministry before experiencing a total metamorphosis. At first, he blamed this
new doctrine of sanctification on a man’s insanity. After scrutinizing it in
the lives of the people he knew best—his wife and family--Warner relented and
sought the experience. Midway through 1877, Daniel confessed, “I am resting on
the promises of God to my entire sanctification.”3
Now preaching both salvation and sanctification, Warner utilized
an additional gift he had discovered--pen preaching. This launched him into a
new orbit of influence, submitting magazine articles, helping edit another
magazine, publishing books, and writing poetry and music. He now journeyed on a
highway that carried him from Rome City and Indianapolis, IN., to Cardington
and Bucyrus, Ohio, to Williamston and Grand Junction, MI. The Grand Junction
years proved Warner a viable publisher, with a vigorous preaching ministry, and
the leading role model for a potentially dynamic reformation.
Warner waxed eloquent when he wrote his verse “Throwing
Ink at the devil:”
. .
.At a point where two lightning tracks lay crossing,
Northward,
southward, east, and west,
God has planted there
a Campbell mortar firing ink at satan’s crest. . .
4
The lightning tracks reference the rail junction pictured on the left, in the rural community of Grand
Junction, MI. It had two strong assets but existed without
modern conveniences of any kind: (1) the strong evangelistic ministry of Joseph
Fisher supported it, assisted by his supportive body of area believers and (2) a launch pad from
which he could fire his gospel missiles global-wide.
Southern Michigan promised cheap fuel to fire his printing presses and offered a
rail junction that made shipments of evangelistic literature possible on a
global basis, often free and sometimes by the ton.
Catalysts like S. Michels and J.C. Fisher paved the way
for relocating to Grand Junction in 1886. Forests provided cheap wood. The new
Kalamazoo-South Haven railroad provided the “two lightning tracks,” by intersecting
the north-south Pere Marquette line from Grand Rapids at Grand Junction!
By 1893, thirty-five adult workers and five children
formed a skilled work force that became the voluntary historic “Trumpet
Family.” By August 1895, Noah Byrum reported 7,500 Trumpets printing
weekly, 3,000 paying customers in North America, 1,500 Trumpets
distributed free to the poor and 850 weekly copies of the German Evangeliums
Posauna, mostly distributed free (Trumpet/8-22-1895). Noting the shipments
of literature sent abroad by the ton, Gale Hetrick concluded this “people who
identified themselves with the publishing work had one goal: to get the word
out” (Laughter Among the Trumpets/27,
emphasis added).
Warner maintained his strenuous preaching pace until 1890
when declining health slowed him to a more studied pace. G. T. Clayton
exemplified the feverish pace of Warner’s itinerant evangelism by traveling up
and down the Ohio River from Pittsburg, preaching and planting churches
wherever his refurbished Floating Bethel could dock. C. B. Mast led a similar
venture. Warner dreamed of creating a gospel train for transporting a mobile
publishing plant nationwide, but he never found sufficient support.
It doesn’t take very much smarts to know that you cannot
know where you are going unless you know where you have been. I dare suggest we
hardly know where we are today as a Movement because we so inadequately
understand where we have been and what was our destination. Jim Lyons
summarized it succinctly when he sent this tweet: “Knowing from where you
came, where you are, and to what destination you are headed is key to knowing
who you are, defining what you do.”
Professor
Smith rightfully capsulized our quest for a meaningful message in holiness and
unity, but I have long considered our pursuit of Warner’s practice as utterly lacking
when it comes to strategizing how to share the love of Jesus with an
increasingly hostile world. Warner and his peers were driven by what I suggest
is a third component that naturally accompanies holiness and unity. While we
were so obsessed with being a “Reformation Movement church,” we simply failed
to recognize that the further from Warner we grew in years, the more we lost his
“sense” of urgency and passion to share God's love with the unchurched.
Some anguish
with our loss of “denominational distinctives” while also viewing “missional” churches and other
so-designated churches as substandard to be avoided. Others are doing all they
know to return our focus back toward Jesus and the mission of the cross as
expressed in Luke 4:16-18 and elsewhere while trying to overcome the apathy and
social disintegration restricting our message and hindering our mission today.
If I
understand anything at all about Warner, it is that he was not only gung ho for
holiness and unity but he was for giving his best effort to reach the greatest number of people in the shortest time possible, using every means available.
I’m not sure we can say that today as a
Movement.
From walkingwithwarner.blogspot.com
this is Warner’s World.
