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Pilgrim Holiness History – 1962-1966

“Pre-marriage Challenges”

 

 

In the half-decade before the consummation of their marriage with the Wesleyan Methodists, Pilgrims would face three predicaments: one having to do with the hot political issues of the day, a second due to a dubious investment of church money and the third a confrontation with one of their own conservative districts.

 

Civil Rights

The hot political issue of he 1960’s was the Civil Rights movement. In 1954 the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education rejecting the segregation of schools. A year later in Montgomery, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus where African Americans were supposed to sit. The Montgomery Bus Boycott was born and a local Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. was vaulted into national prominence. In 1957 President Eisenhower had to send troops to Little Rock to force public schools to accept African-American children. By the 1960’s sit-ins were happening in Greensboro and Nashville.  In 1961 the “Freedom Rides” began, with Civil Rights activists riding interstate buses into the segregated south to test the Supreme Court’s insistence on desegregating busses in inter-state travel. African-American riders were arrested in the south for "breaching the peace" for using "white only" facilities. Voter registration drives were launched in the south and where whites tried to block African-Americans from registering. In 1963 Alabama’s Governor, George Wallace actually stood in the doorway to block the desegregation of the University of Alabama. A massive march on Washington occurred in 1963 where Dr. Martin Luther King gave the “I have a dream” speech. The country was divided. Civil Rights activists worked for change and desegregation. Some whites defended “states rights” insisting that every state could make their own rules on how they preferred to treat African-Americans and the federal government should keep their nose out of the state’s business. It was the hot issue of the day and the Pilgrims were being called to take sides.

 

Some Pilgrims wanted to mind their own business and say nothing. Others argued that Civil Rights was a moral issue and racism was sin so it required a holiness denomination to make a strong anti-segregation statement. The national Association of Evangelicals did respond with an anti-segregation statement. The Pilgrims now had to decide if they would reject the NAE statement, ignore it, or adopt it. The Pilgrims adopted the statement. In 1964 the GBA adopted the anti-segregation Civil Rights statement beginning with the preamble stating the real cure to racism should be the conversion of men and women but we live in a not-yet-converted world and thus called all Pilgrims to support full equal rights for all citizens and they should work for the passage of desegregation laws. Beyond the anti-segregation and pro-Civil Rights actions the statement called for Pilgrims to open the doors of all churches and institutions to “every person, regardless of race or national origin.” The Pilgrims had chosen to side with the Supreme Court, and Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The GBA statement was published in the denominational magazine. However, it would be unfair to say Pilgrims were activists in the fight for equal rights. While the statement was strong the action was weak. Most Pilgrims stood on the sidelines during the Civil Rights movement. They had long been a religious minority themselves so they were sympathizers, but few became activists. They did not join the freedom rides or line up for marches.  Pilgrims had always been a quiet people who mostly kept to themselves. Like the Amish, many did not even vote.[1] They had not yet entered the public arena. For many even the making of political statements seemed to be too worldly. Many Pilgrims acted like they were, well, Pilgrims— sojourners in a strange land they were just passing through on their way home to heaven where their actual citizenship was.  

 

 

A dubious investment

R. C. Hawkins was an organizer and dreamer. He had been a DS in Michigan when he was elected Secretary of Church Extension in 1954. The Church Extension department also supervised two nursing homes in Louisiana as a social service ministry to mostly poor African-Americans. In the mid 1960’s Hawkins came across an exciting investment opportunity which promised such handsome payoffs that (were it successful) might produce so much revenue “the general church would never again have to ask for money—we could operate forever off the profits of this investment.” Using the two nursing homes as collateral, and without full approval[2], Hawkins borrowed a large sum of money and made the investment. The promised profit did not materialize and the church found itself having to pay off the nursing homes mortgages a second time. Hawkins was moved out of office by 1966 and the Pilgrim leaders were embarrassed. Merger discussions with the Wesleyan Methodists were now at an advanced stage and this fiasco made the Pilgrim leaders look like a bunch of wild cowboys without accountability. Perhaps this was the last chapter in the Pilgrim’s long history of permitting (encouraging?) risky entrepreneurial actions with mild administrative oversight. If the investment had panned out and brought the promised millions, Hawkins might have been a hero. Since the deal turned sour, and so much money was lost, the Hawkins story became a folk tale frequently repeated for a few decades to warn developing leaders against trying risky endeavors. The nursing home mortgages were eventually paid off (again) and Hawkins disappeared into the tapestry of church folk lore.

 

Wedding rings and the secession of the New York District.

The wearing of wedding rings had been a nagging issue for the Pilgrims. Conservatives argued that the Bible clearly forbade the wearing of all gold (1 Peter 3:3). Progressives believed that a person might wear a wedding ring but they should not rely on gold or silver for their adornment but rather on their inner spirit. Conservatives thought the passage “meant what it said—don’t wear gold.” So, repeatedly the conservatives brought memorials to the general Assembly/General Conference calling for the banning of wedding rings for all Pilgrims. As far back as 1938 a memorial had been brought to add the wedding rings prohibition to the church “Covenant.” The issue was so debated then that the conference limited debate to three minutes per person. However the 1938 proposal did not pass. It was eventually tabled. The issue would not die. Conservatives were not satisfied that they themselves were free to not wear a wedding ring, they wanted all Pilgrims everywhere to take off their rings as a “test of membership.” When the issue came up periodically it at times had had more support and at other times less, but it never could pass at general conference.

 

Then in 1950 the GBA surprisingly offered its own memorial. The GBA recommended a statute that would add a statement to the “Special Rules” of the Manual that the church was “opposed to the wearing of all rings.” The resolution swept through with a standing vote of 285 to 17.  Both conservatives and progressives voted for the memorial!  Conservatives thought they had won. They rejoiced that they had finally forced all Pilgrims to take off their wedding rings. However, when the chair of the conference was asked if this was a “test of membership” he ruled that it was not and the conservatives saw why the progressives had voted with them. Among Pilgrim lore it was widely believed that only those items in the “Church Covenant” were tests of membership—the “special rules” were only advisory… advice people should hear seriously but on which they were free to decide for themselves. To reinforce this position, following the conference the General Superintendents issued numerous letters taking the position that the wearing of rings was not a test of membership.[3] 

 

Having lost their attempt to require all Pilgrims to line up with their own convictions against wedding rings, some conservatives took a fall-back position: they set up their own rules applying to their own district or local church. This is what the New York Pilgrims did and it brought them into conflict with the rest of the church. At stake was the issue of “states rights”—could a district have stricter rules than the denomination?[4]  The denomination said no; the New York Pilgrims said yes.

 

But the wedding ring was not the only difference the New York district had with the Pilgrims. They also were opposed to the remarriage after divorce of even the “innocent party” and they opposed watching television. The Wesleyan Methodists had a similar conflict with some of their own districts over television that had prodded General Superintendent Roy Nicholson to face down conservatives insisting on their own stricter rules. This issue for the Pilgrims came to a head in 1962 when the New York Pilgrim district conference affirmed its right to make its own membership rules. General Superintendent P W Thomas, who was chair of the conference, ruled the action out of order. The body appealed his ruling and overruled the chair, setting up a conflict with the general church.  In February 1963 the General Board called New York District Superintendent Andrew Whitney before them and asked if he could serve under the denomination’s manual. He replied he could not. The board promptly removed him from the D.S. office. He returned to New York where they reconvened a “district conference” and formed a new denomination, The Pilgrim Holiness Church of New York  taking about 30 churches with them.[5]

 

However, in spite of the “split” the Pilgrims continued to grow. The denomination was not at a standstill. In 1961 at the University of Michigan John F. Kennedy had announced the launching of the Peace Corps. It was to be a new kind of army—one dedicated to peace and understanding throughout the world, a kind of secular missionary corps. The Pilgrim’s youth leader, Dr. O. D. Emery, responded with his own idea. He proposed launching a similar corps of youth who would be dedicated to worldwide evangelism and service. He called it YES Corps—Youth Enlisted/Serving. The general board by this time was absorbed with the upcoming merger and was unwilling to fund the program. However they did permit Emery to launch it if he could find the money. In a rousing speech at the 1966 General Conference Emery ripped out magazine beer and cigarette advertising pages from popular magazines, tossing them to the floor while reciting the cost of each page aimed on capturing the minds of youth.[6] He called on the Pilgrims to ante up even just the equivalent of a single advertising page to send their youth around the world in service and evangelism. Pilgrims did respond and the first year saw five teams travel more than a quarter million miles in this new exciting program.

 

In 1962 the Pilgrims had 53,294 members. In 1966, just four years later, they had grown to 56,763 members—a 6% growth for the quadrennium, in spite of the loss of 30 churches. Merger talks were underway. (Indeed some of the unrest in New York may have related to the impending merger with the Wesleyan Methodists.)[7] The Pilgrims had been steadily growing for almost 70 years but still had not solved the challenges of their educational institutions. They had faced some division between conservatives and progressives but the conservatives always seemed to either lose or leave. The time seemed right for a merger with the like-minded Wesleyan Methodists.

 

To think about….

1. Pilgrims had a long history of working with the poor in city missions from their founding. Yet by the 1960’s the Pilgrims slowly become mostly middle class, or at least near middle class. What do you think of the Pilgrim statement on Civil Rights? How would you have answered opponents that said the church should stay out of politics?
2. What similarities do you see between the Pilgrim’s Civil Rights statement and The Wesleyan Church’s recent statement on immigration, especially as it relates to sequence (The Wesleyans made their statement before the NAE this time).
3. How does the dubious Hawkins’ investment relate to the Pilgrim’s longstanding tradition of independent entrepreneurial risks by strong leaders? What do you think of getting approval of committee members informally in conversations then assuming you have official approval? What might have happened if the investment had actually quickly yielded millions of dollars that would have funded the general church work forever with no USF or other offerings? What do you think of the notion of funding church work by fiscal investments?
4. What are the current conservative-progressive issues your denomination is debating? What do you learn form this earlier debate?
5. What do you think of the idea that there ought to be one set of rules for church members worldwide?  Would you allow a church (or a district) to have rules that are stricter than the denomination has? Would you allow them to have rules that were more liberal? Why or why not?

 

 

   

So what do you think?

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Keith Drury   November 10, 2009

 www.TuesdayColumn.com