Camp Meeting / NAC

I’m going to our “NAC” in a few days--umpteenth time since my first one. I was 16 and had never been anywhere. Convention and Youth Convention combined in Anderson that year--1944; I went to hear Dr. E. Stanley Jones. I grew up attending Grand Junction from a babe in arms in 1927 or 1928. Rich Willowby said it right when he wrote, “Nothing is more Church of God than camp meeting!”

In 1947, I listened to Spanish preaching for the first time, hearing Brother Toyfolla at Sumerset, TX Mexican CM. It was 1951, I believe, when I visited Hope, AR and Earl Gladney hosted several of us. In 1952, my family and I found ourselves at Eastland, TX, where we examined the remnants of J. T. Wilson’s Eastland Bible Training School. I have now lived long enough to see that property sold to the city of Eastland for city development and the Texas Camp Meeting is anybody’s guess.

In the early 70’s, I hard Willard Wiilcox describe the N CA Diamond Arrow camp the Cathedral of the Pines. The name stuck. Since then, I have visited other camp sites like the Ontario fellowship that meets on the Free Methodist grounds at Thames. In the meantime, my wife and I have been on our Anderson grounds and heard public announcements of “between 38,000-42,000 present.

That very first national encampment met in 1883--Bangor, MI. Willowby described that meeting on the Harris Farm, two miles north of Bangor. Sebastian Michels handled dining details. They offered free meals, everyone contributed, and Sebastian handled the tab.

The following year of 1884, a few dozen turned into a few hundred. One man walked 170 miles, from Ohio I believe. In 1885 200-300 people met; they erected 19 tents. They experienced 230 consecrations and 200 claimed sanctification. By 1890, thousands were driving in, requiring a large tabernacle, a large tent, two other locations, with accommodations for simultaneous services.

In 1992, they relocated to Grand Junction. This July, I will attend the 116th annual CM at Grand Junction, still working in the Dining Hall, working with historian Dale Stultz, and promoting the new Old Main coffee table volume of our early history.

The grounds have changed dramatically since I ate Sunday dinner picnic style on the grounds back by the cemetery where D. S. Warner is buried. I remember our area leaders like Joe Cironi, L. S. Shaw, “Dad” Hartman (the unofficial Bishop), O. L. Yerty, noted for his healing practices.

I thought Hershel Rice was the greatest I ever heard, when he came as a young graduate on his honeymoon--early 30s--until I hard Boyce Blackwelder, the NC firebrand. I have other memories, such as my “first love” at twelve, and the year the “Storey Brothers” joined me in lugging a watermelon from South Haven to Grand Junction, hitch-hiking the 11 ½ miles both ways.

This was what all people of the Wesleyan and Holiness heritage did quite naturally; it was not a Church of God phenomenon (as Wallace Thornton reminds us, Radical Righteousness, Schmul, 1998,39ff).

Francis Asbury pioneered Methodism in America, riding horseback 45 years, traveling 270,000 miles, preaching 16,500 sermons, and presiding over 240 annual conferences and ordaining 4,000 preachers. At his death, he left 2000 ministers, 200,000 Methodists, and several thousand Canadian Methodists, plus a whole string of us non-Methodist cousins.

It seems Presbyterians promoted and led the earliest camp meetings, men like James McGready and Barton Stone. Without doubt, the most famous camp meeting was that 1801 meeting at Cane Ridge, KY. That in 2001 celebrated its second centennial with “The Great Gathering 2001” (Restoration Movement history).

Those people were self-reliant frontiersmen that seated their families in wagons, loaded their bedrolls, gathered available flour, meal, meat and vegetables, and headed for Cane Ridge (near Paris, KY north of Winchester-Lexington). They cooked on open fires and slept in their blankets beneath their wagons, beginning the 19th century phenomenon called frontier camp meeting.

By 1805, camp meeting had become what Asbury called “Methodist’s harvest time.” He called for Methodists to conduct 600 camps by 1810. Thus, camp meeting became predominantly Methodist oriented with the Methodist Episcopal church the largest denomination in the US by 1830.

Peter Cartright experienced conversion in an 1801 camp meeting and became a leading camp meeting preacher for the next half century. Sojourner Truth, an illiterate black female slave, escaped slavery and became an exponent of holiness, abolition, and women’s rights, before retiring in Battle Creek, MI. She holds the Cereal City’s first claim to national fame for moving to the city where I currently reside.

I am blogging this became CM has fallen by the wayside--times change--and I’m sorry that so many miss so much of what was very important in our support system. Today I can email and message with people around the world, and do, but it is so important that we relate to one another. This is not a world for people to live in alone, yet many younger people fail to see how this relates to our concepts of congregationalism, family, etc.

This is not a time and place for Lone Rangers and independents. We are individuals, but we no longer live as frontier people who really needed their camp meetings. However, people fill chat rooms, they occupy bars, et al. Why? Because we still need eyeball to eyeball conversation; we still need the touch of a friendly hand; we still need to drink coffee together, or share a watermelon heart together.

We are a world neighborhood and our world will be a better place in which to live when we can get over being afraid of each other. Moreover, we can eliminate many of our enemies, one by one, by making friends with them.

North American Convention, for Tommie and me, is a place where the church checks its pulse beat and gets a health check up and a great place to meet some of our “church” friends--not our only friends by any means. . .
Peace and Grace, Wayne

Family of Faith

“You may have heard by now but I wanted you to hear from me. We have started the leadership transition process at WPC. I step down as president at the end of this week (May 31).” s/Jay Barber

Those words stirred waves of nostalgia and I remembered how Jay replaced my beloved friend and former parishioner, Marshall Christian. Marshall resigned and Jay has done a fantastic job. However, I go back a bit further--tutored by a faculty of A. F. Gray, Otto Linn, DSW Monroe, Mac/Irene Caldwell, et al. They transformed my life.

There, under the finest faculty in the church of that day, I was grounded in sound theology, a bible-based education, with cutting edge Christian Education, all wrapped up in an orientation of Christian service.

PBC/WPC was small enough that we “knew them” as sensitive, caring, competent contributors to us and to the larger church. Their names prompt recall of many more through the years (Marshall and Jay, for example).

I remember 1950 when Cal and Marty Brallier received their call from Anderson to prepare for Africa--5 years. Marty, her sister Ruth, and my wife, sewed feverishly for days, preparing and packing Cal and Marty for their 5-year stint--without return.

On occasion, my wife will yet discuss those days with me, and the urgency with which they had to prepare. And I still choke occasionally when I recall the posted notice telling us the Brallier’s buried that first-born in African soil.

These names, and many people just like them, are part of my Church of God faith family. Our congregational polity is not about a denominational hierarchy that I submit to in Anderson. Like the retiring Jay Barber, or long deceased O. F. Linn (as modest a man as I ever met), or Ron Duncan, for that matter - they are us, and we are a family of faith, united in the Body of Christ.

We stand equal at the foot of the cross, under the banner of the Lord Jesus. We are interdependent--interrelated congregations. As pastors, we may be gifted differently but we are equal by grace. As for “Anderson”, they work for us, but we also support them, just as surely as Jay Barber represents my love for Warner Pacific College in all that he does. In turn, he has certain obligations to me as an alumnus, as well as to his Board of Directors, as well as to Church of God Ministries.

I have a bad ankle from a fall during construction of a church building. I referred to it in my blog on walking. It pains me dramatically at times. Now: the broken relationships of non-accountability and self-directing independence in the church pains the Body of the Church as surely as my ankle distresses me.

Don’t talk to me about the theology of Biblical Inspiration and ignore the plain teachings of the Apostle Paul and others in the Scriptures. I don’t find a top-down polity in the Scriptures. I am not afraid of a denominational label for accepting accountability to others. Neither do I find Bible Christians running around being hands without arms and a body!

Wayne

Maintaining Spiritual Democracy

I'm not a health freak, but I like myself well enough to eat right, exercise occasionally, and maintain a reasonably healthy lifestyle. I like our family of faith well enough to want to see it practice reasonably healthy relationships while maintaining a vigorous lifestyle of servant ministries.

I am still muddling and meditating my way through Strege's book I Saw the Church and it occurs to me that at most (if not all) of the serious junctions in our ecclesiastical journey polity and the early come-outism show up on the screen like one of those pop-up ads we like to stay protected from on our computers.

It showed up when Stockwell challenged Warner for early control of the Gospel Trumpet, the issue was control, for the magazine was the major avenue of interpreting our message to the public. At that time, Warner was accepted as the presiding Elder. In becoming Managing Editor et al at Warner's death, E. E. Byrum inherited that position of elder interpreter. Informal consensus was the rule, but the "buck generally stoppped" wherever the Editor and/or other elder brethren "explained."

It showed up later when the Missionary Board recalled G. P. Tasker from India for his cooperative missionary ministry as well as his lack of Colonialistic attitude with the Indian Church. It showed up again when the Russell Byrum trial took place a few years later, the core of the issue being Byrum's departure from the teaching of come-outism. Editor Smith has become the interpretive Elder, but faced a growing number of people in leadership with diffeent views than Smith's insistence on come-outism and related issues. When C.E. Brown was elected Editor, he countered the tight leadership with a view of "spiritual democracy" and he acted on that view by turning over his task as Editor of approving/disapproving of credentials by handing that off to State Organizations. Again, at the core of contention was the anti-organization bias held by those in particular who held to the come-out theory.

It was the same core issue when the Ohio Brethren took Anderson College to task and tried to wrest control of the school away from President Morrison and restore the "come-out" doctrines at the school. A decade or so later, when Earl Slacum created a schism in the church, although some of Slacum's verses read differently, the song was the same: he predated those "in power", some of his views were rejected, and he became a watchman on the wall calling for a return to the earlier scheme of things--centered in the come-out theories of the church and the more tightly controlled views of that era.

Strege documents all of this in his book and I find the reviewing and refreshing. It helps me remember who I am in relation to the church to which I have given my life. It invigorates me to renew my efforts as a retired pastor, someone with a sometimes more comprehensive overview of things, to appreciate where we are in the church. Although I am sometimes troubled by things I see, I know first hand we are a more democratic body in the best sense of the word than we have ever been. That encourages ane empowers me to envision our best days ahead of us as we reach out to help heal a hurting world.

It was probably back in the mid-sixties when I sat down in the narthex of Pinehurst church in Birmingham, AL at Southern Convention with my longtime friend E. E. Wolfram. He was an Anderson Exec by then, I was a smalltime pastor that was openly opposing the building of the Warner Auditorium in Anderson. I had written two other friends, Harold Boyer and Max Gaulke, for their views on the issue, which I synthesized and used as my argument to campaign against the new building for several reasons, one of which was my view of getting the General Assembly out of Anderson for a change.

Wolfram sat me down that day at Pinehurst and shared how my editorials from the pages of the Mississippi Coordinator made the rounds among some of our national leadership. Without taking issue one way or the other, Ewald reminded me, "Wayne, there was a day when you could not have done this!" When the issue later came to a vote, I was one of 2 opposition votes against 916 affirmative votes. Ewald's point was simply that we are getting better at handling diverse views in the Church of God and no longer face a polity that practices agree or go elsewhere.

I have some non-negotiables and I dislike dissension, but I greatly encouraged by our greater openness today, our more inclusive attitudes, and our getting closer to sound biblical body language that keeps us mutually accountable to each other, without having a cooky cutter ecclesiolgy that makes us all think, act, and believe exactly the same.

Moreover, after more than fifty years in Chog Ministry I confidently assert that we are going in the right direction and that we are more nearly what we have always claimed to be than ever before in our history. And, I encourage every young pastor out there, we are not yet all that we want to be, or are going to be, but we are far more, bigger, and better than we were in our romanticized yesterday.

Peace and Grace, Wayne