R. W. Officer Reports on Stone-Campbell Churches in I.T., 1890

During the second half of 1890, only a year after Meta Chestnutt first arrived in Silver City, R. W. Officer reported on the state of Stone-Campbell churches in Indian Territory. There were, he said, about 2,200 disciples in 54 congregations (an average of approximately 41 members per church). Fourteen of those congregations met in homes. Thirty of the churches met in community school houses. Only ten worshiped in a building owned by the congregation. There were a total of nineteen preachers in I.T. Virtually all of them, "by the work of their own hands," supported themselves and their families.[1]

Officer seems to have had mixed feelings about an entire region made up of congregations whose preachers were bi-vocational. On the positive side, those preachers followed in the footsteps of Paul, the apostolic missionary who worked to support himself. Officer noted that to the church at ancient Thessalonica the Apostle wrote, "Ye ought to follow, [imitate] us: for we behaved not ourselves disorderly among you; neither did we eat any man's bread for nought; but wrought with labour and travail night and day, that we might not be chargeable to any of you; . . . "[2]

Still, Officer knew from experience that strong financial support for missionaries and their ministries led to success:

The different religious communities (denominations) sent missionaries to this country with the Indians when they came years ago, sustained them by their missionary societies through their boards, sent men to assist them when the interest demanded, sent teachers, and helped to sustain them. They sent money to aid in building institutions of learning, and had the assistance of the Church extension funds to aid in building church houses.[3]

What might the Stone-Campbell churches in I.T. have been if they had received the same kind of support? What was more, Officer said, when he first came to I.T. ten years earlier, he could not build on the work done by others who had come before him. J. J. Trott had worked among the Cherokees some twenty years before. But after his death, the mission outpost Trott had established "went down," so much so that his own children "took membership with the denominations in their communities."[4]

In the mid-1880s, the Disciples' American Christian Missionary Society had sent Isaac Mode to evangelize the Creek Indians living in and around Wetumpka, I.T. Various hardships, especially Mode's difficulties with the Creek language, "were of such a nature that he did but little, and from some cause resigned."[5]

Besides those failures, Officer had always known a variety of "religious neighbors" in I.T. who collaborated in "a kind of a union of action to spoil our efforts." Sabotage by outsiders was compounded by "men claiming to be Christian preachers who seemed not to care for the cause." The progress that Officer and his colleagues witnessed had not come easily. He and other Stone-Campbell missionaries had overcome difficulties that were, said the Civil War veteran, "hard to imagine."[6]

Notes

[1] R. W. Officer, "Indian Territory," Octographic Review 33 (December 18, 1890), 6. The date of Officer's report is uncertain. The article appears after an editorial preface: "The following document had the misfortune of being delayed in Bro. Officer's hands before it was sent to us, and of being delayed in our hands after reading this office. Publisher."

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid. For a brief account of Mode's failed mission, see Stephen J. England, Oklahoma Christians (St. Louis: Bethany Press, 1975), 42.

[6] R. W. Officer, "Indian Territory," 6.

J. J. Trott: Missionary to the Cherokees, 4

On March 6, 1856, J. J. Trott sent a letter from his home in Franklin College, Tennessee, to the Gospel Advocate magazine in Nashville. He explained that he had just returned home from a three thousand mile trip through Arkansas, Missouri, and the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, in what is now northeastern Oklahoma. Wisely, he had avoided the deadly chaos over slavery in what came to be known as Bleeding Kansas.

The trip, which took up the previous November through February had Trott traveling in frigid conditions "by steamboat, railroads, stage, horseback, and sometimes on foot." He was disappointed that although he had been authorized by the American Christian Missionary Society to solicit funding for his proposed Indian mission, he had managed to collect only $166.

The churches had contributed their thousands to Bethany College and Christian University, and their hundreds for Revision, and therefore came to the sage conclusion, that a few dimes or dollars was all that they could and ought to do for the conversion of the children of Shem![1]

(If you happen to serve as a missionary, or you work with a large, multi-staff church, it might be some consolation to know that your never-ending competition for resources is not a new one).

In spite of the cold weather, Trott enjoyed his time in Indian Territory. While in the Cherokee Nation, he "preached at several important points" and visited with many old acquaintances and friends he had first met in Georgia over twenty years before, prior to the removal of the Cherokee people to the West.

A man of his day, Trott noted with satisfaction that the Cherokees had advanced in all of the ways regarded by Euro-Americans as marks of civilization: large-scale agriculture, animal husbandry, frame and brick home construction, and high rates of literacy resulting from a modern school system. "Thus," he wrote, "we see that the Cherokees have all the means of improvement. All they need in a religious point of view is more missionaries to them in applying the means." He observed that the Moravians, Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists already had "missionaries, mission schools, and churches among the Cherokees." Would the Christian churches in the United States continue to do less?[2]

Notes

[1] J. J. Trott, "The Indian Mission," Gospel Advocate (April 1856), 110. Christian University was the original name of the school that came to be known in 1917 as Culver-Stockton College. See George R. Lee, "Culver-Stockton College," Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, 258.

[2] Trott, "The Indian Mission," 111.