Locking out the Spirit
an article provided 18MAR09 by Disciples News Service
By that evening, the two North American missionaries had had all they could take. After years of patient teaching, why could these people not see that 'order' was the Disciples' way? So the missionaries walked into the service, ordered the congregation out, and prepared to install a lock on the church door.
Not until decades after that night in 1935 would it become clear that the missionaries could lock a door, but could not lock out the Spirit.
The missionaries were Vere C. Carpenter and C. Manley Morton, and the church, Calle Comerío Christian in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Carpenter had arrived on the island in 1906 and Morton in 1923. Both missionary families followed the first North American Disciples sent to the island in 1899, shortly after the U.S. defeat of Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War.
Early Disciple missionaries on the island established orphanages to address the social ills they encountered, but leaders then shifted their emphasis to evangelism.
By the time Puerto Rico found itself facing the Great Depression, Disciple membership
was at more than 1,500 believers.
And then the trouble started - trouble, that is, from the North American perspective.
The missionaries dubbed it a "pentecostal movement."
For the Puerto Rican Disciples, it was "Avivamiento" - a revival.
Puerto Rican pastor Joaquín Vargas, in his classic history, Los Discípulos de Cristo en Puerto Rico, described the beginnings of what would become a sweeping renewal movement.
In December 1932, a lay leader of the Calle Comerío church decided to hold a noontime prayer session. The meeting touched a spiritual nerve. Though Puerto Rican Disciples interpreted the stirrings as God's presence, their North American counterparts viewed it as a rejection of Disciple tradition. Missionary Morton urged the United Christian Missionary Society in a 1934 letter to tighten control because of the "departure from the traditional and scriptural position which the Disciples have always occupied."
Tensions mounting, Morton and Carpenter interrupted the evening service at Calle Comerío. Seeing their orders ignored, they headed off to find the police. But a judge who taught Sunday school at another Disciples congregation refused to let authorities break up the service. Eventually, dialogue triumphed over drawn lines and ultimatums.
Reflecting near the end of his life decades after the Avivamiento, Morton saw the tumultuous events of the 1930s in a different light. "That the Disciples of Christ in Puerto Rico could undergo that experience as a united people is a modern-day miracle," Morton said in his unpublished autobiography, reproduced in Spanish by Vargas. "It is also proof that Christians, however different their experiences and beliefs, if they hold true love in their hearts, and the willingness to look for and trust God's direction, can get along with each other."
Amazing what a little Avivamiento can lead to.
Written by: Ted Parks
Associate Professor of Spanish
Lipscomb University, Nashville, TN
Celebrate the Bicentennial of Thomas Campbell's
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A Message from a Christmas Past
The December 20, 1917 issue of the Christian-Evangelist, a prominent Disciples national weekly, had its annual Christmas focus. Through numerous articles, editorials, short stories, artwork and poetry centered on Christmas, the journal sent its well-wishes to readers for the season. Included are numerous quotes and reminders about the true meaning of Christmas. Virginia's famous letter even makes an appearance.
Among the many interesting items in the issue are two articles which merit special attention. Coming from the pens of two widely regarded ministers, J. H. Garrison and Edgar DeWitt Jones, they speak a word to us this Christmas season. Just as a single page separates them in the journal, the issues to which they speak are equally close in our lives today.
Jones's Christmas meditation is from 2 Corinthians 9:15:
"Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift." There Paul roots the grace of giving in the prior grace of God. We give because God has first given to us a gift of grace upon grace. Indeed, God's gift is so marvelous, so wonderful, so gracious, that words fail to capture or fully describe it. God's gift to us in Jesus, Jones says, is "the unutterably great boon of the heavenly Father to his children."
He concludes, "Hang the wreaths, twine the mistletoe, light the candles, give the gifts; but above all and best of all, remember Bethlehem and God's Gift in that manger-cradle."
Turn the page and you will see "The Editor's Easy Chair", a weekly column contributed by the journal's Editor-Emeritus, J. H. Garrison.
Among the short notices in his column (of 20 DEC 1917) is this about the 'Great War' in Europe: "Still the war goes on. Armies advance and retreat. Charge is met by countercharge, and the death list grows rapidly." Garrison then ties the idea of the challenges of war with work still to be done in the Church: "[Concentrating on] the putting away of all hindrances to union so that the church may present a united front to its enemies, and the incarnation in our daily lives of the principles which Jesus Christ teaches as essential to the well-being of mankind is so difficult that nothing but a united church working in close cooperation with God can ever accomplish it."
Jones and Garrison found themselves in the thin space between God's indescribable gift and still the war goes on. In that thin space they called upon the Church to embody the life of Christ in her life.
In the face of war they called upon the Church to make known to the world the Prince of Peace. In the face of alienation and hostility they still call upon us to make real the truth of Christmas: that God has come near...that God is with us.
This Christmas season we find ourselves in similar thin spaces. Pressed between the gospel and the situation of our climate, our cities, our international situation, what are we to do? Given the good news of God in Christ on the one hand, and the world in which find ourselves on the other, where do we go from here?
Two saints from our past have left us a word we should hear. We know what we are to do and we know the values and truths we are to embody to our world.
Written by: McGarvey Ice
Director of Public Services,
Disciples of Christ Historical Society
Nashville, Tenn.
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