A Short History of the Division

The division examined in this booklet is often spoken of as if it began in the 1950s. In one sense that is true: the separation became hard, congregational, and irreversible during that decade. In another sense it is not true at all. The question underneath the 1950s was older than the 1950s. It had already divided the fellowship twice before, each time at a new flashpoint, each time over the same fundamental issue: what does the local church, as a collective body, have the authority from Christ to do?

A reader who starts the story in the 1950s will misunderstand it. The men who took the non-institutional position in 1957 were not drawing a new line. They were standing on a line drawn by earlier brethren in 1849 and again in the 1880s. To understand the 1950s, the reader has to begin earlier.

The Missionary Society

In 1849, in Cincinnati, Ohio, a group of brethren organized the American Christian Missionary Society. The stated purpose was good and unobjectionable: to send and support missionaries to preach the gospel at a scale no single congregation could achieve. Alexander Campbell himself served as its first president. The reasoning was straightforward. The church was commanded to preach the gospel to all the world. Individual congregations were too small to do that work alone. A cooperative organization — a society — could pool the resources of many congregations and accomplish what none could accomplish separately.

The reasoning carried many; the objection of others was not a quarrel with missions but a quarrel with the arrangement. Where did the New Testament authorize the local church, as a collective body, to fund a separate human organization to do its work? Where was the pattern of such a society in the practice of the first-century churches? The objectors argued that the New Testament showed churches cooperating in a different way — each congregation doing its own work under its own eldership, with relief funds sometimes sent directly from one congregation to another in time of need, but never pooled under a central organization. Preaching the gospel was the church’s work. The society was not the church. Adding the society was adding what Scripture did not authorize.

The controversy divided the fellowship. By the latter half of the nineteenth century it had produced two distinct bodies that had begun as one movement: what would become the Christian Church / Disciples of Christ on one side, and the churches of Christ on the other. The churches of Christ, as they emerged, were a fellowship that had rejected the missionary society on the hermeneutical ground that Scripture does not authorize it.

Instrumental Music

The second dividing question arose at roughly the same time and hardened somewhat later. Instrumental music was introduced into the worship of some congregations during the latter half of the nineteenth century, and it became a settled feature of others by the 1880s and 1890s. The defense was, again, that of expediency: the New Testament did not expressly forbid instruments, the instrument aided the singing, and aiding an authorized work was within a congregation’s liberty.

The objection, again, was hermeneutical. Where did the New Testament authorize the use of instruments in the worship of the church? Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 specified the kind of music God wanted — singing, vocal music from the heart. Specification is itself a form of restriction. The congregations that would continue as churches of Christ rejected instrumental music on the same reasoning by which they had rejected the society: Scripture had not authorized the practice, and silence was not permission.

By 1906 the division was formally recognized by the United States Census Bureau. The Disciples of Christ were counted separately from the churches of Christ. The missionary society and the instrument had produced two different bodies from what had once been one.

These two earlier divisions matter for the present one because the question is the same. May the local church, as a collective body, undertake an arrangement or a practice that Scripture does not authorize, on the reasoning that Scripture does not forbid it and need invites it? In 1849 the arrangement was a missionary society. In the 1880s it was a keyboard. In the 1950s it would be something new again. The fault line was the same each time.

The Pre-War Background

The first church-supported orphan home among churches of Christ was the Tennessee Orphan Home, chartered in 1909 and opened in September 1910 in Columbia, Tennessee. From the beginning, the arrangement was controversial. Opposition was present in the same publications and among the same preachers who had opposed the missionary society a generation before, and on the same ground. Caring for orphans was a good work; no one disputed that. But was it the local church’s work, to be funded out of the collective treasury and administered through a separate human institution, or was it an individual obligation, to be met by Christians in their own spheres as God had always assigned relief of the needy to the individual?

Through the first half of the twentieth century, the practice of churches contributing from their treasuries to such institutions grew, but so did the opposition. Foy E. Wallace Jr., one of the most widely read preachers of the 1930s and 1940s, warned in the Bible Banner in 1939: “The church is about to become the unwitting and unwilling victim of institutionalism… Institutionalism was the taproot of digression.” The younger Guy N. Woods — later to become the most prominent institutional defender of his generation — wrote in 1946 that “there is no place for charitable organizations in the work of the New Testament church.” Woods’s later reversal on this question is a historical fact of the period and will be addressed in its proper place in Chapter 6. For the purposes of the present chapter, it is enough to note that the opposition to church-supported institutions in the 1940s was not a fringe view. It was the view of leading preachers on both sides of what would, a decade later, become the division.

What changed after the Second World War was scale. The number of institutions multiplied. Radio emerged as a medium for mass evangelism, and then television. The cost of such work was far beyond the reach of any single congregation. The older arrangements — a local orphan home supported by a few local churches — began to give way to larger ones, and the larger arrangements raised the old questions in sharper form.

The Flashpoints

Two arrangements in particular brought the controversy to a head in the 1950s.

The first was the Herald of Truth, a radio program launched in February 1952 by the Highland congregation in Abilene, Texas. The program was conceived from the beginning as a nationwide evangelistic effort. The Highland eldership provided oversight; congregations across the country were invited to send contributions to Highland, which Highland then used to fund the program. The reach was substantial; within a few years the Herald of Truth was broadcasting on hundreds of radio stations, and the television expansion followed. The question the arrangement raised was not whether radio evangelism was legitimate. It was whether the arrangement — one congregation’s eldership overseeing a work funded by many congregations — was itself Scripturally authorized.

The second was church-supported benevolent institutions, which had existed for decades but which now expanded rapidly. Orphan homes, homes for the aged, and Christian colleges received funds from church treasuries across the brotherhood. The defenders argued these institutions were expedients: the church was commanded to care for orphans and to teach, and institutions were simply efficient means by which the church accomplished its work. The objectors argued that the institutions were themselves separate organizations — each with its own board of trustees, its own charter, its own officers — and that the New Testament neither authorized such institutions nor provided any pattern for the church’s funding of them.

The Defining Debate

The most thorough public exchange of the period took place November 18 to 23, 1957, in the municipal auditorium of Birmingham, Alabama. Roy E. Cogdill represented the non-institutional position. Guy N. Woods represented the institutional position. Over five nights the two men debated two propositions: first, the Scripturalness of church support for benevolent institutions such as orphan homes; and second, the Scripturalness of the Herald of Truth and similar sponsoring church arrangements.

The Cogdill–Woods Debate remains, more than sixty years later, the single most important document of the controversy. Both men were able advocates. Both represented their positions at full strength. A reader today who wants to understand what each side actually argued — in their own words, under the discipline of cross-examination by the other — can do no better than to read the debate in full. The most serious study will begin there.

The Journals

If the debate was the most visible exchange, the journals were the more continuous battlefield. The Gospel Advocate, published in Nashville and edited during this period by B. C. Goodpasture, advocated the institutional practices and defended them week by week in the homes of its subscribers. The Gospel Guardian, published in Lufkin, Texas, and edited by Yater Tant, defended the non-institutional position and reached its own readership by the same weekly rhythm. A congregation’s orientation could often be predicted by which paper its preacher and elders read. For most members on both sides, the journals did more to shape conviction than any single debate ever did.

The Hardening

The historian David Edwin Harrell, who has written extensively on this period, distinguished between two styles within the institutional movement. Foy E. Wallace Jr., in an earlier generation, “scorched heretics”; B. C. Goodpasture, in the 1950s and 1960s, “warned them they would lose their position within the brotherhood.” The distinction matters. What Harrell documents is a deliberate move, on Goodpasture’s part, from persuasion to isolation. Preachers who took the non-institutional position were to be dismissed; their meetings at institutional congregations were to be canceled; members who held the position were to be expelled from existing congregations; and congregations that resisted conforming were to be blackballed from fellowship lists.

The ten years between roughly 1955 and 1965 produced sharp pain on both sides. Preachers lost their livelihoods. Long friendships ended in silence or in print. Members who had sat on the same pews for decades found themselves unwelcome in the buildings they had helped to build. Congregations went to court over property. Communities that had supported one congregation now supported two — one institutional, one non-institutional — with the same name on the sign and nothing else in common.

It is only honest to say that harsh words appeared on both sides of the division. The non-institutional brethren were sometimes intemperate in their writing; the institutional brethren sometimes used their institutional advantages as weapons. Men on both sides later regretted specific things they had said and done. A historian writing from any position has to acknowledge that a division this serious rarely produces only one kind of failure. But the documentary record of the period makes the particular strategy of isolation clear, and the effect of that strategy — on congregations, on families, and on the course of the division — cannot be honestly left out of an account of what happened.

The Aftermath

By about 1970 the division was effectively complete. Fellowship lines had hardened; the two bodies rarely shared preachers or meetings; the journals had largely stopped engaging across the line. A generation of younger members began to grow up in one world or the other, most of them knowing only the one they were raised in.

The non-institutional congregations today number approximately 2,055 in the United States, with an estimated 120,000 members. By Mac Lynn’s long-running compilations, that represents roughly fifteen percent of churches of Christ congregations and about nine percent of members. Institutional congregations represent the clear majority. Both groups have, over the past several decades, declined in overall size along with most of American religious life; churches of Christ as a whole peaked in the 1980s and have been in gradual decline since. The division is no longer expanding, but it is far from healed.

Recent years have seen the first sustained conversations across the line since the 1950s. A meeting at the Gospel Advocate offices in Nashville in May 2016 brought non-institutional and institutional brethren into the same room for the first time in decades. The Exploring Current Issues Conference, hosted annually in Cullman, Alabama since 2011 under Jim Deason’s leadership, has continued that conversation. Whether any significant reconciliation will come of these exchanges remains to be seen. What they demonstrate is that at least some on both sides believe the conversation is worth having.

That is the history. The chapters that follow examine the Scripture on which the division actually rests.

A reader who wants to go deeper into the history itself will find recommended sources in Chapter 11. The standard modern histories, the primary debate texts, and the journal archives are all still available. This chapter has given only the outline. The serious student will want the detail.

For Reflection and Discussion

1. The 1849 missionary society, the 1880s introduction of instrumental music, and the 1950s institutional controversies are often described as three separate divisions. This chapter argues that they share a single underlying hermeneutical question. State that question in your own words. Do you agree that it is the same question in each case?

2. Why do you think the defense of each innovation — the society, the instrument, the church-supported institution — turned to arguments from expediency and unmet need? What does that pattern suggest about how authority from Scripture is being established, or not established, in those defenses?

3. Read the quotations from Foy E. Wallace Jr. (1939) and from the younger Guy N. Woods (1946) in this chapter. Both men were warning against “institutionalism” before the 1950s controversy became a division. What does the existence of these earlier warnings tell you about the view that the non-institutional position was a new or reactionary development?

4. This chapter acknowledges that harsh words appeared on both sides of the division. Is it possible to hold a strong conviction on a matter of Scripture and still write and speak about those who disagree with charity? What does Scripture teach about how a Christian is to conduct himself when contending for the faith (consider Jude 3; 2 Timothy 2:24–26; Ephesians 4:15)?

5. Whichever side of the division you were raised in, how much of what you currently believe about the other side comes from reading the other side in its own words, and how much comes from hearing your own side describe it? What would change about your convictions if you read the Cogdill–Woods Debate straight through without deciding in advance who won?