6
Consolidation
and Centralization
Pilgrims
started out as a collection of like-minded people in a “union” called the International Holiness
Just
eleven months after the great stock market crash of 1929 the Pilgrims gathered
in
The
situation in 1930
Pilgrims
naturally resisted centralized oversight and authority. Believing the Holy
Spirit called each person to their work, they seldom asked permission to do
anything. Missionaries raised their own funds and started their own mission
fields wherever God had called them.
Some became Pilgrim fields; others joined other denominations or stayed
independent. Evangelists roved the nation holding tent meetings leaving behind
newly planted churches which they sometimes bequeathed to Pilgrims and
sometimes gave to other denominations or just walked away leaving the fledgling
congregation to themselves. When pastors or regional leaders saw the need for
orphanages, city missions or Bible schools they simply organized them in
obedience to the Spirit without asking permission of anybody. Denominational
leaders were being elected but few people felt restrained by them in any way
since they “answered to God alone.”
Sectionalism and individualism prevailed. Before 1930 one could argue
that the Pilgrims were not much more than a collection of several denominations
and independent works, a movement, more than a unified denomination.[1]
Before
the 1930 Assembly there were three General Superintendents—two for the homeland
work (the aging Seth Cook Rees and W. R. Cox) and a third General
Superintendent (R. G. Finch) for foreign missions. They worked largely independent
from each other and didn’t even live in the same towns. There were nine—nine!—General
Boards which operated independently from each other, including a separate board
for Foreign Missions, Home missions, Publications, Education, along with four
other boards plus a “General Council” which exercised little actual authority
over all the other boards. There were two official headquarters (
Given
the Pilgrim’s high value on missionary work[2], the board of
Foreign missions raised the most money—many times as much as all the
stateside work combined, and a large amount of the stateside money went to
“home missions.” It was virtually impossible to raise money for the $2500
salary of the homeland GSs. They were left to preach
at camp meetings and hold revivals to support themselves. Knapp’s “Faith
principle” along with the “Voluntary principle” dominated Pilgrim thinking so
they resisted any attempt to “tax” churches or members. A meager attempt had
been made in 1922 to urge churches to voluntarily contribute 25 cents per
member to support the stateside GSs, but even that
flopped. Pilgrims preferred to give their quarter to missions.
The
new unified plan
In
1930 a new unified plan for supporting the general work of the Pilgrims was
hatched. It proposed unifying the general church work into a single budget that
would support all the work (including missions) and it would end all
competitive appeals for funds. Paul Thomas, author of the official Pilgrim history,
likened the situation to the original thirteen colonies—each operating
independently from the other insisting on a weak federal government that would
not infringe on “states rights.” Pilgrims were great givers—but they liked to
give where they saw the need, not on the basis of some centralized taxation
system. The new plan would turn out to be somewhat of an organizational success
but it would be a colossal financial failure.
Pilgrims
already believed there was one Lord, one faith and one baptism. They now
implemented a plan to also have one General Superintendent, one general board,
one headquarters and one general budget. The one General Superintendent would
be over all the work—both foreign and stateside, the one general board would
supervise all the work, the one headquarters would be in Indianapolis[3] and the and
one general budget would support all foreign and stateside work and be divided
by the board using a percentage allocation. The 76 year-old Rees was elected as
the single GS.
The
plan was adopted but not without opposition. Advocates of missions saw the
scheme as an attempt by denominational administrators to get their hands into
the missions cookie jar. Others saw it as crass centralization of power[4]. But the
measure passed eventually and all competitive special appeals ended. So did giving. The unified budget was based
on the cherished voluntary principle so each church was supposed to voluntarily
pledge an amount and the district was to combine those pledges as the district’s
pledge to the general work. Pilgrims were accustomed to emergency appeals, so
many simply quit giving to the general work. It was, after all, depression
times. The new headquarters in Indianapolis was first located in a residential
house that was rented for $35 a month. Even when it soon moved to a larger
house, several general leaders’ families[5] lived in the
house to help pay the rent. General board members paid their own expenses to the
first meeting, and slept on cots in a large attic room of the
headquarters-house, relying on local Pilgrim churches to provide something for
them to eat during the meetings.
A
worldwide depression, combined with the confusion generated by the new unified
plan made the money dry up. On top of all this, the aging Seth Rees, now the
singular General Superintendent, spent little time around the new headquarters and
the newly elected Treasurer (Harry Hays) could not keep books.[6] The financial
part of the plan collapsed and the general leaders eventually revoked it
returning the church to separate and competitive money appeals. The lasting
effect, however, was organizational—the Pilgrims now had a single headquarters,
a single General Superintendent, and a single general board managing the
general work.
Death
of Rees
Just
three years after the eventful conference in 1930 Seth Rees died (May 22, 1933).
The white-haired warrior-saint was venerated among Pilgrims now far more than
his forgotten partner in founding the church, (Martin Wells Knapp).[7] He was
remembered at his death as a man of missionary fervor and preacher more than
denominational leader or administrator. Rees’ successor as solo-General
Superintendent (filling out his unexpired term) would be Walter L. Surbrook[8] a young
To think about….
So what do you think?
During the first few
weeks, click here to comment or read comments
Keith Drury
[1] I do not make this argument however but it could be made. Even the official Thomas and Thomas history closes with a membership graph and sure enough, it begins in 1930 –the advent of a unified General Board. Did the Pilgrims look around them at other holiness denominations (The Free Methodists, the Church of the Nazarene, the Wesleyan Methodist Church) and copy their more unified centralized approach? What other factors may have contributed to this seismic change? As it turned out the consolidation of power would be a “liberalizing” influence on the denomination—for in virtually all conflicts afterward to the 1960’s the centralized power would be on the progressive/liberal side of the issue with the conservative or radical or ”legalistic” side constantly pushing against centralized authority.
[2] Concerning the Pilgrims high value on missions: Rees considered it the primary aim of the church. In a letter to the New York district read into the record in 1933 he said, “One of the chief mistakes of the Pilgrim Holiness Church is that we have made missions and missionary work a department when we should have made it our objective—first, last and always.” However, in the quadrennium ending in 1930 the denomination of 17,400 members had raised a total of just short of $255,000. Of that amount a full 81% of the funds went to foreign missions. Certainly nobody could have complained that missions was not getting a “fair share” of general church giving could they? Indeed, some considered that the homeland ministry was being starved in favor of foreign missions. This may have been at the root of the scheme to unify the budget and the percentages established by the General Board backeds this up—Missions got less and church administration got more. But of course they didn’t—neither got enough since the money dried up as most Pilgrims just waited for the “emergency appeals” they were accustomed to.
[3] Three locations competed
for the new central headquarters,
[4] Though Franklin D. Roosevelt would not be elected
President for two more years (1932) a similar centralization of power and
economic activism would prevail in the nation in the 1930’s. Pilgrims were
generally opposed to FDR’s approach politically so it is all the more
interesting that they accepted a similar nationalization and centralization in
the denomination’s economy.
[5] The families of the General Treasurer and General Secretary lived in the church headquarters building and there was also one guest room reserved for aging General Superintendent Rees when he was on location, (which was seldom).
[6] Faced with a bookkeeper who couldn’t keep books, the headquarters recruited Edna Neff, who volunteered her time to hold things together until (within a year) E. V. Halt, a bookkeeper-cum-evangelist was persuaded to join the headquarters as the General Treasurer and Publisher. Halt would serve for the next 36 years and establish what would become a family lineage of denominational service including a later publisher, Raymond Halt (his brother) and still later (after the 1968 merger with the Wesleyan Methodists), Richard Halt (Raymond’s son) who served as Publisher.
[7] Perhaps this elevation of
founder Rees is due partly to Knapp’s early death in 1901. But it may also
indicate a growing drifting away from God’s
[8] Walter Surbrook
had graduated from Owosso Bible Holiness Seminary and from the Kingswood Holiness college with
the A.B. and B.D. degrees. He later received a Master’s degree from the
University of California. He was a
professor at the