Highlights in Restoration History . . .

TOLBERT FANNING: PEACEMAKER

One fact alone makes Tolbert Fanning important in the history of Churches of Christ: he was the founder of the Gospel Advocate back in 1855. Those who know that fact may not realize that he was a prince of peace, a man who gave diligence to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, as the Scriptures instruct. When the debilitating Civil War, which destroyed Fanning’s college and his home and drove him to actual hunger, forced him to shut down the Advocate for the duration, he wrote to a troubled brotherhood: “Brethren, we are one, and have but one work to perform.”

Adaptability was among his virtues. Even when he did not endorse a practice or point of view, he managed to preserve brotherhood nonetheless. Adamantly opposed to the pastor system and the salaried minister and never practicing it himself, he stood by the church in Nashville when they decided, against his own pleading, to adopt the pastor system and hire the popular Jesse B. Ferguson as their pastor. Fanning pointed out that the church had grown to 500 members (half white and half black!) in ten years without a hired preacher. So why hire a preacher?, he would ask. Within a few years Ferguson had many in the church following him instead of the Lord, and if ever a preacher wrecked a church Ferguson wrecked the church in Nashville. The membership dropped to 50 members, the church had trouble retrieving the property that Ferguson, by then a dispenser of black magic, had taken over, and the building was at last burned to the ground!

All his life Fanning looked back on the calamity and would say, Remember Nashville and Lot’s wife!

He was a giant of a man, standing six feet six and weighing well over 200 pounds, all brawn. He had such strength that at barn raisings he would man one corner by himself. Born in 1810, he was a pioneer farmer as well as pioneer preacher. When he first began to preach his friends told him to his face that his chances of success were hopeless, but he was soon holding audiences spellbound by his plain and simple manner of presenting the Scriptures. He baptized large numbers in Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi and founded many churches. Nashville was his base of operation, and it was there that he started the Gospel Advocate after having edited the Christian Review for a decade. As with most of the pioneers, he had printer’s ink in his veins.

While he was not educated at Campbell’s college, he did travel with the reformer and was influenced by his views on education, which found expression in his own college, Franklin College, which stood where Nashville’s airport is now located. Always uneasy with the idea of a clergy system, he made his school strictly liberal arts, leaving it to the Franklin church to train preachers, which was an important part of his ministry. Fanning’s church and school produced many of the leaders of the southern church, including David Lipscomb. He taught his preachers to be able to support themselves, and so he made blacksmiths, shoemakers, and saddlers of them as well as evangelists. He always opposed a fixed salary for preachers, supposing it promoted indolence.

Since he died in 1874 he was not around for “the eye of the storm” in the controversy over instrumental music, but he said enough to put it in the same class with choirs, fancy church buildings, and hired preachers. Since he was in search for “the perfect pattern,” which no party in his view had attained, he was always questioning the innovations as they emerged. This passion for a fixed pattern made the Movement vulnerable to dissension and division, for no two people could agree on the details of the pattern.

Like J. W. McGarvey, who was also adamantly opposed to the organ, Fanning found a missionary society in the pattern in that the churches of the New Testament cooperated. While it is not generally realized among our people, the Churches of Christ in Tennessee before the Civil War were more organized than in any other southern state. As early as 1842 they had 29 churches in a cooperative for evangelizing the state, with the church in Nashville serving as the agent “to receive, manage, and disburse all funds that may be collected.”

In supporting such cooperative efforts Fanning adopted a principle of interpretation that has never been accepted by our more conservative brethren, even though he falls within that tradition. The rule he followed was: Since the Scriptures teach that churches should cooperate, human judgment or worldly wisdom must dictate the methods employed. This led him to accept the vice-presidency of the American Christian Missionary Society, as well as an office in a Bible society.

But he soon became disenchanted with such societies and became one of their severest critics, not that he ever objected to them per se, but that they became ecclesiastical and functioned arbitrarily as bodies apart from the church. It did not help any when the ACMS in “war resolutions” branded southerners as “armed traitors” and called upon all churches to support the Union.

It was here that Fanning showed himself a Christian gentleman and a peacemaker. He sensed that a division was coming in Disciple ranks and sought to avoid it. In spite of his objections, he continued to enjoy fellowship with the “Society brethren,” as they were now being dubbed. He attended the annual meeting of the ACMS in 1859 and was again with such stalwarts as Raccoon John Smith, Moses E. Lard, Benjamin Franklin, Walter Scott, D. S. Burnett, and Samuel and John Rogers. He wanted to warn them of the direction he thought the society was going, but Isaac Errett, who was presiding, was just as eager that he remain quiet.

Fanning’s chance came when he was called upon to report on the work in Tennessee. While he conceded that the missionary society did much good, the church as “the pillar and ground of the truth” is all the society that is needed. They were now doing well in Tennessee without such an organization, he told them. But he also spoke of love and peace and unity among brethren. It must have been impressive when the big guy from Tennessee, disagreeing with them as he did, concluded his remarks with these words of reconciliation, “But I am happy to say, that from what I have heard from the floor, we are one people.”

We have here more than an episode in the life of a leading pioneer minister, for it reveals how tenuous the fabric was that held a unity movement together. It only needed a more belligerent and bombastic spirit than the gentle and loving Tolbert Fanning to make pieces of it instead of peace. Such leaders were sure to come. Fanning seemed to have understood the nature of unity, for he saw that men can differ, even substantially, and still be brothers and work and worship together. If unity means agreement on such issues as societies and music, then the movement never was united.

The Civil War was brutal to our southern brother, not only because of injustices brought upon him for his pacifism, but also because it reduced him to poverty, destroying both his home and his college. This was compounded by misunderstandings with Campbell and Richardson at Bethany, causing him to regret that he ever started a college or edited a paper. It is one more instance of how our “editor bishops” have had a hard time getting along with each other.

When he saw South Carolina secede from the Union, then Mississippi, then Alabama, he knew that life would never be the same in the South. It was 1861 and due to the crisis he shut down his Gospel Advocate for the duration. His parting words were, “Brethren, we are one, and we have but one work to perform.” It was an appeal that has been heard but dimly all these years.—the Editor