Let’s Reassemble in 1989 and Start Over. . .

DID WE GOOF AT SAND CREEK?

Both in my history of our people, The Stone-Campbell Movement, and in these columns, I have cited August 18, 1889 as the birthday for the non-instrument Churches of Christ. Since the origin of any new denomination involves many factors, including lots of time, any exact date is disputable. But if we point to a single historical incident as our origin, it would have to be to ,the reading of the Address and Declaration at Sand Creek, Illinois, near Windsor, in 1889.

This occasion is more defensible than the one more often cited: when David Lipscomb, editor of the Gospel Advocate, suggested to the U. S. Census Bureau in 1906 that the Churches of Christ should be listed as a separate church and distinct from Christian Churches or Disciples of Christ. We were already a romping youngster by that time.

And we have to insist that 33 A.D. in Jerusalem is an inappropriate date of origin for any denomination, despite the claim of the naive that their church can be traced all the way back to Zion through two thousand years of history, like the Old Landmark Baptists. Or the notion that the church ceased to exist during most of those years and that it was recently duly “restored” and so 33 A.D. is the date of origin, as claimed by the Mormons and some of my brethren in Churches of Christ.

While our Movement, questionably called “the Restoration Movement,” goes back to 1809 (the Campbells), or 1804 (Barton W. Stone), or better still to 1794 (James O’Kelly), the non-instrument Church of Christ as a separate and distinct church within that heritage is clearly of more recent origin. The Church of Christ as we know it, such as the Sixth and Izard Church of Christ in Little Rock or the Highland Church of Christ in Abilene, cannot be traced as far back as 1850, except as a part of the Movement as a whole. Just as the Christian Churches/Churches of Christ (Independent), still another denomination within this heritage, cannot be traced back to 1900, except as part of the Disciples of Christ.

Churches or denominations do have their origin, and I am saying that the church with which my family and I have been identified for several generations, the Church of Christ, had its origin in the Stone-Campbell Movement and gradually became a distinct group from the 1870’s to the 1890’s and may arbitrarily be dated from the dramatic event that Daniel Sommer called “A Grand Occasion,” at the Sand Creek Christian Church, August 18, 1889, when a document was read that served, more or less, as a “formal” withdrawal of fellowship, the “Church of Christ” from the “Christian Church.”

Those names might be put in quotation marks since the Disciples of Christ (They all called themselves “Disciples” at this time, even on that occasion) used both names, making no distinction between them. But soon the Sand Creek community had two Disciple churches, divided and even in a lawsuit. When the Illinois Supreme Court in 1906 ruled that it was a church fuss and beyond its province, the case was legally named “The Christian Church at Sand Creek, Shelby County, Illinois, versus The Church of Christ at Sand Creek.”

The Sand Creek Christian Church, where the Address and Declaration, the withdrawal document, was read, eventually became Sand Creek Church of Christ, noninstrumental (and remained so until recently, the building still standing), while the group that eventually left (the “progressives” or instrumentalists) became the Sand Creek Christian Church. The Christian Church sued for the property and lost by default of the court. It is interesting that the court made its decision in 1906, the same year Lipscomb was asked by the Census Bureau if the Church of Christ should not be listed separately.

Those years between 1889 and 1906 saw the Church of Christ become more and more separated from the rest of the Movement. To Daniel Sommer the “innovators” were now “the So-called Christian Church” and by 1892 he announced in his paper that “In the course of a few years the Church of Christ will stand entirely separated from the Christian Church” and that “there will be no more fellowship between them than there is between the Church of Christ and any other branch of sectarianism.” He cried “Hallelujah” that “the Sand Creek Declaration,” as he called it, was being adopted.

By 1895 the Christian Church was clearly “a sectarian church” to Sommer, and it remained for those who are “apostolic disciples to lead sinners to obey the gospel and thus join the Church of Christ” he wrote in his Octographic Review. In 1892 he wrote in his paper: “In that city (Bloomington, Ind.) the Church of Christ was established twelve or fourteen years ago in contradistinction from the ‘Christian Church.’ The struggle for existence has been long and serious, but light is dawning.”

But the Movement had a church in Bloomington as early as 1831, but to Sommer the Church of Christ did not start until about 1880. We reached the place in our history where the Christian Church and Church of Christ were divided and at war in cities where we had had churches upwards of half a century.

It became the same in the South, due largely to the influence of David Lipscomb, who agreed with Sommer even though he did not like him. When the “Society men” published a list of churches in Tennessee, Lipscomb complained that they were Christian Churches and not Churches of Christ. That was 1901. By 1904 he had started his own list of faithful Churches of Christ. While earlier in his ministry he could not conceive of ever dividing the church, and said as much, he at last announced that “Division must come.” This became the essence of what might be called Church of Christism, which presumes that division is a means of preserving doctrinal purity and restoring the true church. This explains why the Church of Christ has continued to divide into what Reuel Lemmons has described as “subdividing into narrow sectarian camps.”

But getting back to what happened at Sand Creek, I have asked, as a member of the Churches of Christ, if we goofed on that occasion. We surely did in one particular, even if we assume that it was a grand occasion, as Sommer believed, or that it signaled the division that had to come for the sake of truth, as Lipscomb believed.

The goof was that while our pioneers read a declaration of withdrawal from the Christian Church and specifically named the offensive innovations, they did not mention instrumental music!

This must qualify as the goof of our history. Here we are with our raison d’etre being that we are noninstrumental, the oddity that separates us from all others, and yet when we trace this vagary back to our beginnings we find that it was not even mentioned in the list of innovations that were cited as the cause for our separation. Did the Declaration of Independence not name the crimes of the king of England against the colonists?

Daniel Sommer preached long and hard that Sunday afternoon at Sand Creek, and instrumental music did not escape his stinging judgment. While the Bible leaves no doubt that we are to sing, he said, making an argument that our folk have often repeated, “but no one ever did or ever can believe that it is the Lord’s will to play an instrument in the worship.” He was so adamant as to insist that “No one on earth can possibly believe that playing of any kind is a part of the worship of God through Christ.” Any instrument used to accompany the singing is an offense to Christ, he avowed.

In fact Sommer’s address was vintage Church of Christ, for it included those themes that have made us “a great and prosperous people,” to use Sommer’s words: the sufficiency of the Scriptures, the nature of the church, the plan of salvation (with emphasis on baptism for the remission of sins), the name of the church vs. sectarian names, and the Campbellian doctrine that faith is belief based on testimony. He deduced that “Church of Christ” should be the church’s name (The fetish for small c “church of Christ” came later) from Rom. 16:16, “the churches of Christ salute you,” and argued that this implies the singular. He might have selected “Church of God,” which appears much more often in Scripture in both singular and plural form. But that was not one of “our” names.

And Sommer scored all the “humanisms” of “the schoolmen,” whether societies, one-man preacher-pastor, or modern methods of raising money such as “box supper business,” as well as instrumental music.

Sommer’s address reveals how we had come to view the Scriptures. Since he condemned organs and societies on the basis of Biblical silence, he saw he had to defend other “silent” things that he chose to use. He found authority for a meetinghouse in the “one place” of 1 Cor. 11:20, and even the use of lights have a proof text (Acts 20:8). This kind of hermeneutics and “respect for the authority of the Bible,” the essence of restorationism, has sired many factions among us and has produced different kinds of Churches of Christ.

Even though Sommer inspired the creation of the withdrawal document, he did not actually compose it. While Peter J. Warren, who had preached in those parts for over forty years, is named as the author, it must have represented the contributions of several ministers who had gathered that weekend for the seventeenth annual Sand Creek affair.

It was Warren that followed Sommer that afternoon and read the bull of excommunication as part of a larger address, and while it was a deplorable incident in some respects Warren deserves high marks for his efforts to be gracious. Having himself an exemplary reputation and coming from a highly respected family who were settlers in that area, it was not out of character for him to say to his “erring brethren,” as Sommer called them: “Let it be distinctly understood that this ‘Address and Declaration’ is not made in any spirit of envy and hate, or malice or any such thing. But we are only actuated from a sense of duty to ourselves and to all concerned.”

It is unfair to say that these men were motivated by hate or that it was a lack of love that caused this division. Sommer and Warren still loved their brethren. It was a doctrinal dispute over what we might call opinions but which they saw as matters of faith. The “innovations” were departures from the truth, as they saw it. While Warren insisted that he was acting from kindness and in Christian courtesy, he declared that “we cannot tolerate the things of which we complain.” Division must come, as Lipscomb was later to put it, as a means of standing for truth, and so at Sand Creek (for the first time I believe) we put it in writing and made it as “official” as we could: If you do not believe and practice the way we do we will not accept you as our brothers in Christ.

The lethal line actually read: “that after being duly admonished and having had sufficient time for reflection, if they do not turn away from such abominations, that we can not and will not regard them as brethren.”

The document named the “abominations” as unlawful means of raising money (festivals), the use of choirs to the neglect of congregational singing, a man-made society for missionary work, the imported preacher/pastor who takes the oversight of the church. Then there was the more inclusive charge, which would surely include instrumental music: “These with many other objectionable and unauthorized things are now taught and practiced in many of the congregations.”

The strange omission of instrumental music did not go unnoticed. When N.S. Haynes wrote his History of the Disciples of Christ in Illinois (1915) he conceded that Daniel Sommer was the leader of the “conservatives” in the North, and in the “Address and Declaration,” which Haynes found “crass and papistic,” he sees Sommer drawing upon a tendency in thinking that had been present in the Movement from the outset. This was the failure to distinguish between the incidentals of the faith, which allows for differences, and the fundamentals of the faith, which are the basis of unity. He notes that while “the organ question” was the crux of the controversy at the time, the document said nothing about it.

The Christian Leader, published in Cincinnati, reproduced the document almost immediately, but in its account the phrase “the use of instrumental music in worship” is added to the list of abominations, which indicates how explosive the issue was. Someone was persuaded that the withdrawal document could not omit from the list of “vicious things,” to quote from the document, the most vicious offense of all, so he added it. The redactor embellished the document in a few other less dramatic ways for publication in the Leader. It is a good illustration of what happened to Biblical texts in the hands of various scribes. It is understandable that some Church of Christ historians would select the Cincinnati version of the “Address and Declaration,” which names instrumental music, rather than Sommer’s original document, which does not.

But it was hardly a major goof, and we must conclude that it was no big deal either way. Nor do we have to be embarrassed by Sand Creek since it reflects an important value in our heritage: a sincere desire to follow the Scriptures as the only rule of faith and practice. Too, it was the kind of zeal and determination manifest at Sand Creek, even if misguided, that gave Churches of Christ their growth impetus.

Perhaps we should reassemble at Sand Creek (in 1989?) and have a “Selective Appreciation of our Heritage” program. We would gather neither to extol nor to criticize but to evaluate constructively, and thus learn to be selective in what we value in our history.

We would need to ask if our pioneers at Sand Creek were true to the genius of the Movement launched by Stone and Campbell, who insisted, even in their own personal relationship, that Christians are free to differ but not to divide. We must ask whether they had a responsible and workable hermeneutics. Can we prevail as a responsible people and have a viable witness for unity when we, like Sommer and Warren, presume that we must “prooftext” the Scriptures for everything from hymnals and meetinghouses to organs and societies? Is the Bible really that kind of book?

And did our beloved forebears at Sand Creek really understand the nature of unity, fellowship, and brotherhood? Cannot an instrumental church and a non-instrumental church be united in Christ and work together to build God’s kingdom? To enjoy together the fellowship of the Spirit must we see everything eye to eye? And does brotherhood mean that I am to accept you as a sister and a brother only insofar as you do not trespass upon my own list of “abominations.”

Let’s return to Sand Creek and compose a new document, a charter of Christian freedom for Churches of Christ that will encourage our people to cherish all that is good and noble in their heritage and to be faithful to all God’s truth without compromise, and at the same time to move on out into the larger Christian world and become an effective witness to the Body of Christ uniting. —the Editor