Churches of Christ are one of three major denominations that emerged out of what historians in recent decades have called the Stone-Campbell movement. Barton Stone's “Christian” movement arose in the wake of the great Cane Ridge Revival (1801) as a revolt against creedal Calvinism, while Thomas and Alexander Campbell's Disciples movement, beginning in 1809, sought a restoration of the “ancient gospel” and “ancient order of things.” The two movements united in 1832 and were variously called Disciples of Christ and Churches of Christ. They eschewed creeds and confessions of faith, seeking unity in face of the proliferating denominationalism driven by the democratization of American Christianity.
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, tension was mounting between conservatives (mostly Churches of Christ) and progressives (mostly Disciples of Christ). Churches of Christ began to form a separate identity marked by their rejection of parachurch organizations for conducting mission work and their opposition to the use of instrumental music in worship.
Only in the last three decades or so has a critical history of Churches of Christ begun to emerge. The first full critical history of Churches of Christ, Reviving the Ancient Faith, was published by Richard Hughes in 1996. The critical perspective has continued to grow in a small but steady stream of articles, dissertations, and monographs. With rich texture and local color, Baird sets the Oklahoma story of Churches of Christ within the larger critical understanding that has emerged. He does this deftly and even-handedly, and the fact that he is a lifelong member of Churches of Christ in no way detracts from his judgments—indeed, it gives him an insider's feel for the tradition. The book is an exemplary state denominational history by a skilled and seasoned historian who has spent a career working in Oklahoma history, including a history of the state as well as books on the Osage, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Quapaw peoples. Over many years he has done extensive work in local archives and has a remarkable grasp of the far-flung documentary resources. For this volume he added to that research work in the records of scores of congregations, a challenging undertaking given the lack of formal organization beyond the congregational level in Churches of Christ.
Baird's story begins in Indian Territory in the early 1880s when several missionaries envisioned an “Indian mission” among the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Comanche tribes. They sought to introduce the basic vision of the Stone-Campbell movement—rejecting creeds, restoring the basic message and practices of earliest apostolic faith, and proclaiming that as the path to unity—and to conduct the mission according to the “Lord's plan,” that is without a mission agency. The vision included not only “preaching the gospel” but also establishing schools and caring for the large number of fatherless children in Indian territory.
When the famous land run of 1889 opened up all the Indian reservations of central and western Oklahoma to settlement, Churches of Christ followed the settlement patterns in what became Oklahoma Territory. In 1907, Congress added Indian Territory to Oklahoma Territory and admitted the Twin Territories to the union as a single state. By the end of the territorial era, Stone-Campbell churches, both conservative and progressive, had made impressive gains, making up at least ten percent of all churchgoers.
At this very time, Churches of Christ were recognized for the first time by the federal government as an independent denomination separate from the Christian Church/Disciples of Christ. One of the strong contributions of Baird's history is to reveal what this division looked like at the ground level—the rivalry, the internecine squabbles, the financial disparities, and the theological framing. As the separation became more distinct and settled, Churches of Christ began to define themselves with greater clarity. They focused on evangelism and steadily established new churches throughout the state. They sustained their a cappella worship practice as a key identity marker. They wrestled with various doctrinal issues, including pacifism, and they established Cordell Christian College (1907–1918), which closed during the war because of legal pressure and persecution for its staunch pacifism.
The period from 1920 to 1945 was a turning point for Churches of Christ. Up to this period, they had been largely rural, served by mostly untrained ministers, meeting in modest and often rented buildings, and fiercely independent. Yet in the interwar years, they took new steps in organization and outreach. They continued their aggressive evangelism, moving into the rapidly growing cities. They established new Christian colleges and “Bible chairs” at state universities. In the same period, they faced challenges of theological modernism (especially evolution and higher criticism), the receding of the pacifist tradition, the persistence of racism, and the tensions over the place of social justice.
The period from 1945 to 1970 continued the vigorous growth: indeed, it was widely reported that Churches of Christ was one of the fastest growing religious bodies in the United States. There was a church building boom along with the founding of Oklahoma Christian College. Services to orphans and the elderly proliferated. But challenging and troubling issues remained, prominent among them the issue of racism. Prominent African American evangelists Marshall Keeble and R. N. Hogan baptized thousands—both African Americans and whites—but were patronized and discriminated against. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s was largely ignored.
After 1970, according to Baird, Churches of Christ in Oklahoma began a long, slow period of decline lasting down to the present day. A contentious tribe throughout their history, Baird concludes, the Churches of Christ “quest for religious unity had not turned out that way, in Oklahoma or elsewhere.”
Baird's recounting of the Oklahoma story is full of colorful, gritty, dedicated, hardheaded, and often surprising characters: R. W. Officer who spent twenty years in Indian Territory but at the end of his life had little to show for it; Meta Chesnutt Sager, a young woman from North Carolina who spent her life as a missionary in Indian Territory; Samuel R. Cassius, an African American preacher who established over forty congregations in Oklahoma but left the state following the Tulsa race riot of 1921; and O. E. Enfield, a Churches of Christ evangelist and debater who became a socialist and was arrested and jailed in 1917 for his views.
Baird has dug out a rich, thick, and poignant story and told it against the backdrop of Oklahoma statehood. It's the kind of cultural history that both inspires and chastens—inspiring appreciation for a very human saga, and chastening the too-easy judgments and stereotypes to which people are prone.
