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Pilgrim Holiness Church: 1905-1919

Acting more like a Denomination

1905 was a turning point year for the organization that would become The Pilgrim Holiness Church—the loosely organized eight year old movement started thinking a lot more like a denomination than an interdenominational movement even though strong strains of connectionalism remained.

 

Martin Wells Knapp was dead (1901) and Seth Rees had resigned as General Superintendent (1905) moving back to Chicago where he launched a ministry to prostitutes then later moved west continuing his revival preaching especially among a new vibrant denomination (the Church of the Nazarene). He eventually joined the Nazarenes (1912) when became the first pastor of the newly formed University Church of the Nazarene, at Pasadena (more on that messy situation later). Both founders of the Union were now gone, and all the other founders would soon disappear.

 

Sixty year old George B. Kulp became the new General Superintendent, replacing the 51 year-old Rees. Kulp would serve for the next 16 years. Kulp made no speeches about being an interdenominational movement. Rather, he aimed to turn the rag tag band of independent entrepreneurs into a proper denomination. He would have some success. Kulp had military experience[1] and was known as an “old paths” conservative. Now renamed the International Holiness Apostolic Union the new Manual included the objective “to form local unions and Churches”(my italics) in order to “conserve the Holiness work.”  A series of “covenant” questions were approved for new members which included the typical lifestyle issues of the day: attending church, giving to the church and to the poor, personal and family devotions, just dealings with others, discharging debts faithfully, avoiding tattling, backbiting, and frivolous conversation, and the usual prohibitions of the day: tobacco, alcohol, gambling, dances, shows, theaters, horse-races, and base-ball games.[2]  The new seven-member General Board (called then the General council) included none of the original founders. The General Conference (then called the General Assembly) included all the General leaders, every DS, and one pastor and lay person from each church. All other ministers got a voice though not a vote.

 

The come-out question

The most pressing question of the day for holiness people was the “Come-out question.” What should holiness people do—stay in their home denominations and be “Holiness leaven” or “come out from among them and be ye separate[3]” organizing their own holiness denominations. By the middle teens those who determined to stay in their home denominations drifted away from the union. Those convinced “coming out” was the right answer swelled the ranks of the “denomination.” The independent spirit continued within the new denomination for many years even as it coalesced into the structure of a denomiantion. There still was no headquarters and scant centralized publications and even the General Superintendent received no salary until about 1915.

 

Bible Schools

You might think that a fledgling denomination would need no other Bible school than God’s Bible School in Cincinnati, and you would be right numerically. However, the entrepreneurial spirit was so strong that soon a host of Bible college were founded including one in North Carolina, Greensboro Bible and Literary School (1903), Owosso, Michigan--Bible Holiness Seminary (1909) Milton, Pennsylvania, Bethel Institute (1914) Binghamton, N.Y.—Pentecostal Mission Bible School (1908), New London, Indiana—Holiness Bible School and Faith Missionary Training Home,[4] and  later Allentown P.A.—Beulah Park Bible School (1922) and several other Bible schools we’ll mention later in the story. The Pilgrims were both a Camp Meeting denomination and a Bible school denomination along with being a missions church. Many of the Bible schools were actually located on campgrounds. Pilgrims saw a pressing need for training ministers and missionaries but they left the training of nurses, teachers, lawyers, or geologists to other “liberal arts” schools. To us today it seems laughable for a tiny denomination to support a half dozen Bible schools but the denomination didn’t actually support them. They were independent self-supporting institutions that recruited their own students and raised their own funds and had Trustees from a variety of denominations. The independent entrepreneurial spirit prevailed and the fledgling denomination would wind up with as many as ten or more institutions serving their young people at various times. Most would collapse later, but in this time of great expansion, they served a vital role in producing workers for new churches.

 

Publications

The primary magazine (unofficially) of the new denomination continued to be the Revivalist published in association with God’s Bible School, but the entrepreneurial spirit affected publishing too. Besides the Revivalist there was The Apostolic Visitor published in Owosso, Michigan, The Apostolic Messenger from Greensboro, N.C.; the Bethel Herald in Milton Pennsylvania, A Voice from Canaan from Carlinville, Illinois, News from Home from New York, God’s Messenger from Mooers, N.Y., and The Apostolic Messenger from Cambridge Maryland along with the more official denominational magazine, the International Holiness Advocate. By 1920 the General Assembly tried to launch a centralized denominational publishing and printing plant for periodicals and Sunday school literature. They voted to locate the publishing house in Frankfort, Indiana and invested in a building there. It never happened. The publishing wound up located in North Carolina and then later moved to Kingswood, Kentucky and the property in Frankfort was given to the Indiana district. The denomination did have its own official organ (the International Holiness Advocate) and one by one the other periodicals disappeared and only two survived—the independent Revivalist and the official Advocate.

 

Missions

Meanwhile the denomination launched all kinds of advances in missions. A missions board was founded and new missions were sent out. Mrs. Knapp continued her husband’s missionary zeal and raised significant suns through the Revivalist. New converts from the Caribbean and South Africa often came to God’s Bible School to study then return to their fields to establish Bible colleges. All the work in Africa started before 1905 had fizzled so it was re-started with a whole new crop of missionaries. New works began in Swaziland and Natal. All across the Caribbean new fields emerged on island after island, strongly tied to God’s Bible School and the Revivalist and the Union.  Indeed, it would be fair to say that GBS, though technically unconnected with the denomination, continued to be the primary “missionary training school” of the Pilgrims for years to come. One of these missionaries, R. G. Finch, was appointed superintendent of the Trinidad work in 1912. He would play a key role in a messy incident in the denomination’s history which we shall describe when the time comes.

 

Size

Pilgrims never were good at counting. Many churches kept no attendance records at all, preferring rather to ask, “How have your services been going.” They were more interested in the presence of God in their services than the presences of heads. Thus, nobody knows for sure how many members the movement had in 1905. However, by 1906 they listed 74 churches, 145 ordained ministers and 2744 members. By 1906 they had a greatly expanded Manual. Twelve months later they had added another hundred ministers.[5] The movement was looking more and more like a denomination

 

Not-yet-Pilgrims

By 1919, for all practical purposes the International Holiness Apostolic Union looked a lot like a denomination. It walked like a duck and quacked like a duck so it must indeed be a denomination. But actually, even with all the structuring and organization, the movement still had lots of “movement consciousness.” There were denominational leaders and denominational publications but these ran in concurrently with similar independent publications, Bible schools and independent regional leaders. It would take fifty more years to finish Kulp’s work of fashioning a collection of independent cowboys into a “proper denomination.” But Kulp’s early organizational work would set the stage for the next era—a time of “mergers and acquisitions.”  Through these coming mergers the Pilgrims would merge with no less than eight other denominations, getting a fresh influx of leaders and a new name. They would get Seth Rees back from the Nazarenes.

 

So what do you think?

During the first few weeks, click here to comment or read comments

 

Keith Drury   September 22, 2009

 www.TuesdayColumn.com

 

To think about….

1. The role of founders in a second-stage organization.

2. Why did Rees leave leadership at age 51?

3. The wisdom of organizing an interdenominational work into a denomination.

4. The come-out movement and its role in later come-out movements from the come-outers.

5. How to tap the vitality and growth of independent entrepreneurialism. 

6. The role of Bible Colleges and Liberal Arts colleges, past and present

7. Counting heads vs. asking about God’s presence in services.