Elizajane C. Shackleford

Also, on April 30, Died, ELIZAJANE C. SHACKLEFORD, daughter of B. W. Stone, and wife of Alexander Shackleford, in Maysville, Ky. aged 23 years and 11 months.  She had been baptized on the profession of her faith in Christ a few years ago–lived the life of a Christian and died in the fearless and triumphant hope of immortality.  Her warm affection–her cheerful temper–her modest, unassuming conversation–her patience in suffering–her devotedness to her God, her parents, her husband, her sisters, brothers, and friends, were surpassed but by few.  These endeared her in life–these will endear her memory to surviving friends.  She and her infant daughter which died the evening before, sleep in the same coffin, interred in the same grave.

The Christian Messenger June 1831, vol 5 no 6, page 143.

Willard Collins Preaches at Lischey Avenue Church of Christ, April 26-May 10, 1942

A friend gave me this card about a year ago while I was teaching a class on Stone-Campbell history. While his mother attended Lindsley Avenue Church of Christ as a child, she occasionally visited family across the river in North Edgefield at Lischey Avenue Church. Going through an old scrap book he found this card and graciously gave it to me, knowing it would be a treasured part of my collection (which it is!).

Collins’ meeting-card opens a window into the life of one congregation seventy years ago. It helps us understand how this congregation (Lischey Avenue) and this evangelist (Willard Collins) prosecuted a ”gospel meeting.”  All but forgotten now in most urban and suburban churches, ‘gospel meetings’ or ‘revivals’ were common across Protestant denominational lines generations ago.   They are part revival (for those already members of the congregation), part evangelistic or outreach event (for those who are not members of the congregation) and part teaching event (for all concerned).

This meeting begins Sunday April 26th and goes through two full weeks to Sunday May 10th.  Collins preaches twice on Sundays and nightly at 7:40pm.  I am not sure exactly how he handled the two Sunday services since only one title is given on the card.  Nevertheless, judging from the titles alone, Collins’ sermons are at once evangelistic, moralistic, doctrinal and hortatory. He initiates the meeting by first laying out the gospel before proceeding through several conversion stories in Acts. The middle sermons are moralistic: he draws a bead on hypocrisy and congregational life and then addresses the ‘household code.’  I am unsure of what he means by ‘addition problem.’  Collins addresses what appears to be the basic life situation for most of the his auditors at Lischey: church-going working and middle-class families with children.  How ought these folk live?  What is good and right, what is noble?  It appears that these are his overarching moral concerns for the middle of the meeting.

The final three sermons conclude the meeting on a decisive note.  Why should visitors to this meeting seriously consider the Lischey Avenue Church of Christ rather than, say, North Edgefield Baptist Church a short distance away? By 9 May 1942 the United States had been at war with Japan right at six months.  Given the circumstance of spring 1942, how should we live as citizens of a nation at war?  Finally, in what must have been a powerful conclusion: the title is telling: “The Burial of Those Who Die Out of the Lord.”  His last sermon moves his hearers to decision.  Collins’, if anything, was persuasive and moving.

By April 1942 Collins, age  26, preached for Old Hickory Church of Christ about three years.  Old Hickory is a few miles east of Nashville (it is now in the city limits of Metro Nashville), right on the banks of the Cumberland River.  Old Hickory was a thriving little hamlet and Collins’ church was an active, thriving, aggressive congregation.

Lischey Avenue Church of Christ began in 1907 through the door-to-door efforts of two women who canvassed the neighborhood around Joy’s Flower Gardens in North Edgefield.  Joe McPherson preached a tent meeting on James Avenue in August 1909.  By May 1910, thanks to the generosity of T. S. Joy’s donation of a lot, the little church had a frame meetinghouse on Jones Avenue.  They outgrew the building and moved to 1310-1312 Lischey Avenue in May 1923, completing a new building in January 1925.  They then outgrew that building, and in early spring 1942, seventy years ago this week, completed a $20,000 facility.  They arranged for Willard Collins, a dynamic young evangelist, to hold the first two-weeks’ meeting in the new building.  In March 1942 Lischey Avenue was a congregation of about four hundred members.  Collins, writing in his report of the meeting to the Gospel Advocate, says, “The Lischey Avenue meeting, in Nashville, closed May 10, with six hundred fifteen present.  The previous largest crowd in the history of the church was five hundred nineteen.  Fourteen were baptized and one was restored.  This is an active congregation and a pleasant one with which to work.”

While Colllins held forth in East Nashville, Old Hickory was equally busy in a meeting of their own.  In the midst of the Lischey Avenue meeting Collins wrote this report for the Advocate: “One hundred eight have been baptized here and thirty-eight restored in the past eight months.  Nine hundred fifty-two attended Bible classes Sunday for an all-time record.  Hulen L. Jackson just closed a meeting here….”  Collins left Old Hickory in 1944; two years later he began preaching at Charlotte Avenue Church of Christ in West Nashville when Athens Clay Pullias accepted the Presidency of David Lipscomb College.  Collins would soon direct the Lipscomb Expansion Program in the late 40′s, helping DLC move from a two-year Junior College to Four Year Accredited Senior College status.  After years of decline, Lischey Avenue moved out of the neighborhood and, with Parkwood Church, formed Northside Church of Christ in 1976-1978.  Lipscomb College expansion and East Nashville decline, though, are topics for further research reflection.

A single ephemeral handout card, as I have demonstrated here, can be quite helpful.  From this item we have open before us a window into one two-week period in the life of Lischey Avenue Church of Christ.  From it we have some idea of their theological commitments and the program of preaching and teaching they pursued in their community at that time.  In tandem with a few other sources, we are able to see a bit more clearly.  In the fascinating world of research, at times some questions are answered, while new ones are posed, and still altogether different questions surface.

There may be other such cards out there somewhere that may give us additional understanding.  Maybe not…maybe a good deal of the history of this congregaion is lost to time.  There is a lot of history to be written, if only the primary source materials are available.  Do you have any old paper from Lischey Avenue, or any other Church of Christ or Christian Church in Nashville?  If so, I’d like to talk with you about how those important materials can be preserved.  For my plea along those lines, see my 3 July 2009 post, Save the Paper.

Bibliography:

Willard Collins’ meeting reports:

       Gospel Advocate, May 7, 1942, page 450
       Gospel Advocate, May 21, 1942, page 498

More about Lischey Avenue history and work:

“Lischey Home-Coming in New Building,” Gospel Advocate, March 5, 1942, page 237.
Batsell Barrett Baxter and M. Norvel Young, Eds. New Testament Churches of Today, Volume 1. Nashville:                       Gospel Advocate Company, 1960, page 237.

For a helpful study of the intersection of local history and congregational history, with a focus on the Old Hickory Church of Christ, see:

C. Philip Slate, Du Pont’s Old Hickory Employee Movement and the Spread of Churches of Christ” Restoration Quarterly 39:3 (1997) pages 155-174.

——-

Lischey Avenue Church of Christ’s 1942 (with a ca. 1959 classroom building) building yet stands at 1312 Lischey Avenue.  This is as it appeared about two years ago:

The Reynoldsburg Genizah

The 19th century discoveries in the genizah (storage place, preservation) of a Cairo synagogue expanded research vistas in medieval Jewish studies, including the text and tradition of the Hebrew Bible.  Protocol for the disposal of worn-out scrolls and like documents was burial; until then they were stored in the genizah at the synagogue. A close parallel for Christian congregants is the cubby hole under the pulpit or the rooms adjacent to the baptistery or the closet in the church office or any like place that attracts wonderful clutter.  The genizah at Cairo held nearly 300,000 fragments spanning the thousand years from 800-1800. Quite a find.

Upon the death of McGarvey C. Ice in January 1999 my Ice clan cleaned out the farm at 5775 Refugee Road, Columbus, O.  When the Ice’s moved in, in the 1930′s, they were nine miles out from Columbus city limits.  The forty-acre farm was in the village of Brice, which was close to the town of Reynoldsburg, which was close to the city of Columbus.  For the next sixty-five years the city accumulated around them as three generations of stuff accumulated throughout the home and outbuildings.

Great-grandad, K. C. Ice, was a poor doctor.  Well check that, all indications are that he was a good physician, but he never was wealthy.   Born in a log cabin in West Virginia, he put himself through high school and three colleges, medical school included.  He served poor rural farmers in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and across Ohio.  He also preached some, wrote an occasional letter to the editor, and took the church papers. I know he subscribed to the major periodicals across the Stone-Campbell spectrum: Christian-Evangelist on the left, Octographic Review and Firm Foundation on the right, with Christian Standard, Christian Leader, Word and Work, Restoration Herald and Gospel Advocate in the broad middle…at least I know of these…knowing him there were likely others.   He graduated from Hiram and Bethany Colleges, and sent his children to Christian Normal Institute in Grayson, Ky, to Harding College in Morrilton, Arkansas, and to Freed-Hardeman College in Henderson, Tennessee.  He read Blue and White from Johnson Bible College and occasionally items from Harding College and David Lipscomb College.

Grandad was a college professor.  He taught high school, coached some, worked for the WPA during the war, and even spent a Great Depression summer as a circus clown when teachers were not paid in the summer months. For thirty-three years of his career he taught at Franklin University in downtown Columbus.  By retirement as Head of the Dept of Engineering Drawing, he taught courses in everything from chemistry and physics to engineering drawing and drafting to radio, televsion and even refrigeration.  As scientific and analytical as he was, he was an artist (drawing), sculptor (clay) and musician (coronet and violin).  He also preached some for a small congregation in Reynoldsburg.  And he, too, read the church papers…a few here and there, but always, every time, cover to cover, did he read Christian Standard and Word and Work. He published an occasional article in the Ohio Valley regional paper the Bible Herald.  Frugal, he and Grandma grew vegetables and canned them, repaired what broke, then repaired it again, and, of course, didn’t throw anything away.  At least not anything worth anything and most certainly nary a thing that down the road might have some use sometime, somewhere, for some reason.

All that to say, cleaning out the home was obviously bittersweet.  But what a treasure trove of paper.  Laura and I filled a steamer trunk full of paper from the barn and home.  Sermon manuscripts and outlines, all handwritten by my great-grandfather and grandfather.  Back issues of Christian Standard, Gospel Advocate, Apostolic Times (the one in Nashville) and Firm Foundation.  Shoe boxes of tracts and leaflets.  Pounds of clippings from all of the above.  The mice got to quite a bit of K. C. Ice’s clippings from the church papers.  Of course, they were put out in the loft in the barn.  Not thrown away or buried, not burned, just put aside in the genizah.  I sifted pounds of paper fragments no larger than a nickel or quarter.  Most all of it highly acidic, much of it nearly pulverized upon my touch.  I went through it all and saved all I could possibly reconstruct.  The rest may still sit in that loft for all I know.

My discovery of a cache of Restoration paper in the Reynoldsburg genizah opened new vistas for understanding of my family history.  When Grandad died, and Grandma moved in with an aunt and uncle, I was in my first year of graduate school at Lipscomb.  Just 23 years old.   Over the last dozen years I have sorted, read, re-read, re-read and tried to absorb them.  I knew then that they were special; but their worth grows on me.  In the course of five years’ archival work I corresponded weekly with people who knew nothing, or next to nothing, about their ancestors or their congregation.  I spent my days trying to fill in the gaps for them.  Professionally and personally,  I found it tremendously rewarding.  It broadened and deepened my appreciation of what I have available to me; in a pointed way, helped me realize how fortunate I am to simply have something that belonged to an ancestor.  However, like any collection, it raises some questions as it answers others.  I have a small, dark foggy window into KC Ice’s mind.  I am so thankful for what I have; I am even thankful for the questions, the mysteries, the unknowns.

So, I’d like to scan some of these papers, post them to this blog, and think out loud about them.  It is really an exercise for me to work through my family history. An online platform such as this will make my work accessible to genealogists and other researchers.  It will also make my collection available to my Ice relatives; perhaps it might help them as well.  If you will indulge my forays into the genizah, I will occasionally post items from it to this blog.

Christian Leader editorial staff, February 1928

4.16.98

Anyone who has called Nashville home in the past several years remembers two major natural disasters: the May 2010 flood and the April 1998 tornado.  The flood is still fresh in our minds each time we have heavy rain; in some places, if you know where to look, you can still see debris.  On April 16, 1998 tornadoes spun all over middle TN, all day.  I rose early that Thursday morning to the sound of weather alerts on the radio (650 AM of course).  The alerts were a constant all day.

I lived upstairs at Central Church downtown.  I wove quite a path through alleys and at least three wrong-ways on one-way streets to get home that night.  It was surreal: no power, no lights save for police and fire vehicles and, most of all, it was so scary-quiet.  Glass shards, leaves, fiberglass insulation, paper, wood, mud, water…it was all mixed thoroughly and plastered liberally across the whole of downtown.  East Nashville was heavily hit, which brings me to this clip:

This clip is an excerpt from a very well-done Nashville Public Television production on local religious architecture. It, and an accompanying book, are worth the investment for Nashvillians who pass these buildings each day. For anyone interested in church architecture Designed for Worship proves itself a fine model of how substantive architectural discussion can be presented in an accessible form all the while maintaining high standards of aesthetic and editorial excellence.

The clip below explores how historic church architecture lives with its community. Focusing mainly on St. Ann’s Episcopal Church in East Nashville, they weave a compelling narrative of how hope emerged from displacement and of how new life replaced acute loss.

Look for the Russell Street Church of Christ to make a brief appearance at 3:01 and 3:15.  This tornado more or less ended Russell Street’s congregational life.  Never able to financially recover, they closed a short while later, thereby ending almost 110 years of ministry on Russell Street.

Preaching on the Titanic Disaster

By late April 1912 the reality of Titanic’s sinking set in and Kromer C. Ice had time to reflect.  He prepared his thoughts and held forth in the Sunday evening service, April 29, at the Christian Church in McMechen, West Virginia.  McMechen is a river town, tucked between a hilly ridge to the east and the Ohio River on the west, just south of Wheeling.  In April 1912 K. C. Ice was about half-way through his second stint as McMechen’s minister.  He preached there from July 1907 to May 1908; returning in December 1911, he left in July 1912.  I have a few of his manuscript sermons from the second McMechen ministry; I do not have the Titanic sermon. I wonder what went through his mind for two full weeks, 14 to 29 of April, 1912. I wonder what he said.  Preaching to people he knew, trying to speak a word about unspeakable tragedy…I wonder how he wrestled and, after ascending the pulpit stairs, what he said.

McMechen church as it appeared during K. C. Ice’s ministry; an envelope:

Dr. K. C. and Rosa B. Ice, 1908. They were married in November 1908 not long after the conclusion of his first stint preaching at McMechen. By the time of their return in 1911 they had a two year old son, McGarvey.

McGarvey Charles Ice, born 5 October 1909 at Bethany, WV. Age in this photo about 2 years?

Walter Scott on ‘Meeting’, Preaching and Exhorting

MEETING.

Agreeably to appointment, a four day’s meeting was held at Mayslick, on the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st ult.  It was supposed that on Lord’s day, fifteen hundred persons were present: five brethren engaged actively in the business of the meeting, and ten or eleven individuals were immersed.

We would just notice that the economy to be observed at such a meeting ought to be maturely considered, for very frequently our best wishes and most zealous efforts are rendered abortive for want of a proper plan, and a few moments deliberation.

The fact of commencing operations at the spur of the moment without any preconcerted plan, frequently proves injurious to our cause.

I very well recollect of three of us, a while before the actual restoration of the Ancient Gospel, standing up and in succession, with only a few minutes intermission between the last two, delivering three set speeches of from two to three hours in length each, and then sitting down without ever affording the audience a single opportunity obey the Son of God.  Things, however, are very much changed since that time, and now we meet to preach the gospel that it may be obeyed by those who hear us.

How then ought the ministering brethren, who are present on such occasions, to proceed, in order to produce the greatest possible effect?

Experience suggests the following to me as the best plan to be pursued.  The laboring brethren who are to be engaged should have the sole direction of this matter, and should then pitch upon one brother who is capable of handling a distinct topic.  When he has enlightened the audience, and has stated, defined, and illustrated his subject, let him give an invitation to the people and be succeeded by his fellows in the character of exhorters.

Exhorters, it ought to be observed, should never introduce new topics, but only new and striking ideas on the same topic.

Exhortations should consist of such things as have a tendency to move the affections of those who have believed but not obeyed; they should be elevated, violent, or tender according to the state of the case; bold & lively, striking and animating, containing great and beautiful images, calculated to move the soul and win the world to God.

The person engaged in delivering the leading discourse should not, I think, be called on to immerse; it is on some occasions too much.  The-man-at-the-fountain should be one of the other brethren.

[Walter Scott] “Meeting” The Evangelist, 1:6, June 4, 1832, p. 139.