Church Unions and Reunions

CHURCH UNIONS AND REUNIONS

A Decade of Mergers

The 1930s saw a series of unions among Protestant groups, usually bringing together people of different ethnic backgrounds who shared a religious tradition. In 1931 members of the Lutheran Synod of Buffalo joined the Evangelical Lutheran Synod of Iowa and the Evangelical Lutheran Joint Synod of Ohio to form the American Lutheran Church; in 1934 two groups from the Calvinist tradition joined to create the Evangelical and Reform Church out of the Reformed Church in the United States and the Evangelical Synod of North America; and in 1931 two theologically liberal and congregationally organized denominations, the National Council of Congregational Churches and the General Convention of Christian Churches, joined to form the General Council of Congregational and Christian Churches.

The Methodists Merge

The most impressive and important merger of the decade took place in 1939, when three branches of American Methodism finally reunited after more than a century of separation. In 1830 the Methodist Episcopal Church split over questions of organization, and a small splinter group, the Methodist Protestant Church, emerged. In 1844 a more serious split occurred, this time over slavery, which resulted in the creation of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The sectional division proved the most bitter and intensified during and after the Civil War, when the two separate churches fought over the same territories and properties. The sectional division became permanent and took on new intensity as Southern Methodists saw their northern brothers and sisters fall prey to the forces of modernism. As recently as 1922 the Southern Methodists had refused to join their northern counterparts, largely because of regional chauvinism but also from a fear of liberalism in the northern church.

A RELIGIOUS RESPONSE TO THE DEPRESSION

At a 1932 meeting the New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church unanimously adopted a report that held that toleration of poverty is sinful and that "all the evils of our present form of capitalism can be traced back to the motive of acquisitiveness." The report further contended that the "principal means of production and distribution which are now privately owned, controlled and operated, mainly for the benefit of a relatively small portion of our population, must be brought under some form of social ownership and management. Private ownership, with its emphasis upon private profits, has failed to keep industry functioning, and we have the sad spectacle of thousands of our magnificent factories and millions of our workers standing idle."

Source:

"Eastern Methodists Go Socialist," Christian Century, 49 (13 April 1932): 467.

Merger at a Price

But the ecumenical force that proved so powerful in the middle of the century was too strong to be denied. The various issues that separated Methodists came to be seen as less important than the issues that united them. The Depression challenged the fund-raising and church-building of both groups; unification promised to lessen the economic strain. When the final issue, the place of the three hundred thousand black Methodists in the reunited church, was resolved, union was finally possible. The compromise, as often happened in American life, came at the expense of Airican Americans. The reunited church was divided into five jurisdictional conferences based on geography. A sixth, the General Conference, included black congregations wherever they might be. In spite of some protests by black Methodists, the compromise satisfied the custom of segregation and resolved racist concerns in all parts of the nation. In July 1939, at a Uniting Conference in Kansas City, the Methodist Church was formed—the largest Protestant denomination at the time and the one that covered the nation most thoroughly in geography, class, culture, and race. The new denomination had around seven million members.

Sources:

Jerald C. Brauer, Protestantism in America: A Narrative History (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953);

Roger Finke and Rodney Strunk, The Churching of America, 1 779-1990: Winners and Losers in Our Religious Economy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992);

Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: Five Hundred Years of Religion in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984).