Here we must rely on Eva Heiliger, a great niece and frequent correspondent of Meta Chestnutt's and her uncritical biographer. According to Heiliger's unpublished book manuscript, in the early months of 1894, S. E. Kennedy, preacher for the Christian Church in nearby Chickasha, I.T., was telling the people of Minco that he had friends and knew churches in the east who were willing to sponsor a Christian school in Indian Territory that was under his direction. Their donations would lighten the financial burden associated with the college. Locals liked what they heard. Soon, townspeople who supported the school were suggesting to Miss Chestnutt that for the good of the future college she should let go of her leadership and make way for a new direction. What could she do but comply with that consensus? Broken-hearted, she immediately began packing for a trip to her old home in North Carolina.[1]
What no one at the time realized was that Kennedy had been sending photos of the impressive facility to friends and congregational leaders in distant places, telling them that it was a church building. As he described things to potential contributors, Kennedy was himself the minister of the church, a vital outpost of the kingdom of Christ in Indian Territory.[2] Why the deception?
Kennedy understood that many members of Christian Churches and Churches of Christ were reluctant to contribute to Christian colleges. Ambivalence about colleges affiliated with the Restoration Movement reach back all the way to the very first one: Bacon College, founded in 1837 at Georgetown, Kentucky. As the school began, John Allen Gano, a well-known Kentucky evangelist wrote:
I am unwilling . . . that the birth of [Bacon College] . . . be viewed as a part or even an appendage of the reformation for which we plead. The cause of Christ is one thing--the college another--as essentially distinct as the Church of Christ and this republican government. Let every Christian parent bring his or her children to the Lord's house on the Lord's day, and teach them the Lord's word. This is the school of Christ--this is training up children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. The College, if they want, should have a paper of their own. The Christian should plead for Christ.[3]
Fifty years later, people of Gano's persuasion looked to leaders like Daniel Sommer, publisher of the Octographic Review. To his thousands of readers, Sommer emphasized that the churches of the New Testament spent money on two things: evangelism and benevolence. Christians of the apostolic age did not establish schools. Besides, Christian higher education tended to promote a clergy class and the idea that one could not be a worthy preacher without a college education.[4] Such prejudice against church support for Christian colleges generated the temptation for Kennedy to suggest that the building under construction was a church house, not a school. Meta Chestnutt's original school house in Minco served as both a school during the week and a church on Sunday. Perhaps Silas Kennedy rationalized that the college under construction would eventually double as a church house.
What he did not count on was the possibility that one of the men he had solicited for church funds would actually make a trip to Minco, Indian Territory, in order to see this "church building" for himself. When the unnamed visitor realized that he had just taken a tour of a school building and not a church house, he immediately notified others who were planning to send money to Silas Kennedy. It seems that the visitor also notified locals about the scheme. Soon, community leaders in Minco sent word to Meta Chestnutt, who had recently traveled from Indian Territory to her old home in North Carolina. She was welcome, they wrote, to return to Minco and assume control of the new college, the flower of the school she had established five years before.
Notes
[1] Eva Heiliger, "Born to Meet Adversity (and Rise Above It)," 93-95. This manuscript is part of the Meta Chestnutt Sager Collection housed in the Oklahoma History Center in Oklahoma City.
[2] Ibid., 94.
[3] John Allen Gano, Millennial Harbinger, August 1837, 384 (misprinted as 284).
[4] See, for example, in Octographic Review 31, Daniel Sommer, "Preachers and Preaching" (Feb. 16, 1888), 1; "Concerning Colleges" (Nov. 15, 1888), 1, 8; "Colleges Again" (Nov. 22, 1888), 1. For a brief description and analysis of Sommer's position on colleges, see Robert E. Hooper, A Distinct People: A History of the Churches of Christ in the 20th Century (West Monroe, LA: Howard Publishing Company, 1993), 20-21.
No comments:
Post a Comment