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The Period of Controversy

The issues upon which division actually occurred had already arisen before the Civil War and they were so hotly debated in the years immediately after it that 1866-75 is sometimes called “the period of controversy.” The principal topics which were discussed with greater or less heat during this period were these: open or close communion; the title, “Reverend”; the “one-man system” of the pastorate; the alleged introduction of a creed; the use of the organ; and the missionary societies. Only the last two of these had any lasting importance as divisive issues. The first four merely illustrate the heightening tension between the strict constructionists and those who favored what they considered reasonable expedients to meet changed conditions.

When the Reformers were being excluded from Baptist churches and associations, they were accused of many things but not of departing from the Baptist practice of close communion. One must conclude that they had not yet departed from it. In 1828 Mr. Campbell objected to admitting the unimmersed to the Lord’s Supper even occasionally, because he thought this would logically require admitting them to church membership. But the restriction upon the communion was gradually relaxed, without much talk about it, until Isaac Errett could write in 1862, when the question was debated at length in the Millennial Harbinger, that probably two-thirds of the churches welcomed to the Lord’s Supper all who considered themselves qualified to commune. The solving text was that each should “examine himself and so let him eat,” and the standard formula came to be, “We neither invite nor debar.” There was, in fact, very little general 120 controversy on this subject. In time the close communion practice disappeared so completely that most Disciples in the United States do not know that it ever existed and are somewhat shocked to learn that it still prevails in the British churches.

The presentation to Mr. Errett of a silver door plate with “Reverend” before his name precipitated a brief but lively argument. Aversion to this title had been common among the earlier restorers of primitive Christianity. The Christian Baptist had said many a caustic word about clerical pretensions of dignity and usurpations of power, of which “Reverend” was considered a symbol. But as Disciples came to have more and larger churches and a ministry more clearly distinguished from the laity, they became less sensitive about a title which, in practice, meant only that its bearer was a minister. The title long remained unpopular, but the issue faded out.

Protest against the “one-man system” had a similar motive but more substantial ground. The enlarging function of the pastor and the somewhat diminished prominence of the lay elders, as town and city churches with settled full-time ministers multiplied, evoked a futile resistance to the passing of those frontier conditions under which lay leadership for the churches had been successful. “Mutual edification” had been considered by many to be an essential part of the ancient order. No division came from this difference in practice and terminology, and the difference itself tended to disappear. One of the ultraconservatives gave the reason when he wrote: “Brethren, no system of edification can be scriptural if it doesn’t edify.”

When Mr. Errett, as minister of a new church in Detroit, issued for public information a brief “Synopsis” of the Disciples’ position, there was an outcry 121 against it as a “creed.” Strangely enough, the chief critic, Moses E. Lard, had himself put forth “sixteen specifications of fundamental principles.” This episode is worth noting only because it shows how keen the legalists were to find proofs that the Disciples had become degenerate and had gone off after “innovations.”