Name Authority for Nashville, Tennessee Stone-Campbell Congregations

Name Authority for Nashville Tennessee Stone-Campbell Congregations, September 2012

Click above to download a document listing 319 variants of time-, place- and character-names for the 227 known congregations of the Stone-Campbell movement in Nashville and Davidson County, Tennessee from 1812 to September 2012.

To my knowledge my work in this area is the only such compilation, and therefore, the most complete.  The initial publication of the list to this blog was in May 2010 as a first step in my research toward a book on the Restoration Movement in Nashville.  I blogged then:

With over 200 congregations in this county, the congregational research alone will take years, perhaps the remainder of my life.  If I live to be 100 I may not finish even a rudimentary survey.  It may be too much:  too many congregations, too many preachers, too much ‘story’ to tell.

But this is where I am at the present.  I publish the list here to generate interest, additions, subtractions, corrections and clarifications.  Look it over and if I need to make changes, please let me know.

While congregational history is only one aspect of this project, this is where it all played out…on the ground in the congregations on a weekly basis.  Few congregations have attempted more than a list of preachers or a narrative of the expansion of the church building.  What I propose, as I wrote above, may be too much…too far to the other extreme.  But that fact changes not one whit the necessity of it being done.

The story of these churches in Nashville needs to be told.  I ask for your help in telling it.  look over my list; I solicit your critique. Contact me at icekm [at] aol [dot] com.

(The first version of the name authority, from May 2010, can be found here.)

Susie W. Haley Allen

Gospel Advocate 25 January 1917, 35:

“Obituaries”

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Allen.

Sister Susie W. Allen, wife of J. G. Allen, departed this life on October 6, 1916.  Her maiden name was “Haley”–the daughter of T. W. Haley, who taught in the city schools for thirty-four years.  Sister Allen, with four other sisters, taught at different times, and she was engaged in this noble calling at the time of her marriage to J. G. Allen, February 6, 1883.  This union was blessed with seven children.  One died in infancy, leaving six with their father to mourn the loss of a mother and wife.  The surviving children are James A., David H., Mary Lee, Ruth, Mrs. O. F. Young, and Mrs Fletcher Daily.  All, except Mrs. Young, who resides at Davidson, Tenn., are residents of Nashville, Tenn.  At the time of our sister’s marriage to Brother Allen she was a member of the Baptist Church and he was a member of the Methodist Church.  They both realized the wrong of thus being divided religiously and determined to give the word of God a careful and thorough investigation on the subject of the plan of salvation and the church Christ established.  The result of this careful, prayerful, and painstaking investigation of the Holy Scriptures was the discovery that both were wrong, and they became members of the church of Christ, determined to be Christians only.  For twenty-nine years Sister Allen was faithful and true to the church and when death claimed her mortal body, she was found with the armor on and at the post of duty.  She peacefully passed from the shores of time to the golden strand on the other side, with all of her children and devoted husband present.  It was the writer’s sad pleasure to conduct the funeral services at 2:30 P.M., Lord’s day, october 8, in the presence of a large audience of sympathizing friends.  I had known Sister Allen for a long time and had been in her hospitable home time and again.  I feel sure that I knew the spirit of this good woman and have no fears of unduly praising her character.  She was gentle, modest, kind, and thoughtful toward all in an eminent degree.  I have never known one in whom I thought the virtues of true womanhood shone more brightly and beautifully than in the life and character of Sister Allen.  She filled all the places assigned her by nature and providence with that Christian fidelity which prompts to a full measure of duty.  Her children were devoted to her to the last degree.  By her sweet disposition and ever-abiding affection for them, manifested in so many ways, they could not help but lover her with an intensity that always placed mother first in everything.  As a wife, Sister Allen filled the duties and requirements of that sacred relation with the devotion and fidelity God placed upon it.  Her husband and children rise up to call her memory blessed.  They have been deprived of the sunshine of her presence in the hom; but the blessed memory of her face, voice, gentle words, and deeds of kindness falls upon them like a sweet benediction from the heavens that bend above.  Look up and look away, dear ones, to where she has gone; climb the ladder of life until you, too, catch a glimpse of the glory land.      F. W. SMITH.

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Susie Haley was a conscientious member of Central Baptist Church in downtown Nashville (also know as First Baptist Church).  Prior to their marriage Jacob may have been a member at Elm Street Methodist Church in South Nashville or McKendree Methodist Church downtown, or perhaps another congregation.  They did not agree in matters religious, but they did agree that the Campbellites were not even respectable people (so Jacob wrote in 1936).  They heard J. C. Martin preach in a rented hall sometime prior to November 1887.  Hearing him preach about unity rooted in Scripture appealed to both of them…apparently in spite of thier hard feelings about ‘Campbellites.’  Jacob may have been immersed at Central Baptist Church; Susie had been immersed evidently some years before.  Susie was not reimmersed when they came to South College Street from Central Baptist Church.  By November 1887 the Allen’s were among the very first members at South Nashville’s South College Street Christian Church, where, with W. H. Timmons, David Lipscomb and J. Claude Martin served as elders.  At some point…I cannot yet dermine when…Jacob was immersed (possibly reimmersed? but I’ve found no evidence it was reimmersion) by James A. Harding at South College Street…perhaps in 1889?  In 1892 Harding and his family transferred from Winchester, Kentucky, to the South College Street Church and by about 1894 he and the Allen’s and quite a few others swarmed from South College to establish Green Street Christian Church.  By then Jacob began preaching and not long afterwards his young son, James, learned to preach at Green Street under the tutelage of his father and Harding.  All the while Susie, as F. W. Smith notes in his obituary, upheld ‘ideal womanhood’ and supported her husband and later her son in their ministries.  Hers is one story from the congregation David Lipscomb pastored from 1888 until his death in 1917.

S. H. Hall remembers David Lipscomb

S. H. Hall remembers David Lipscomb

Samuel Henry Hall was born in Smyrna, TN 23 December 1877.  Baptized by F. W. Smith in a meeting at Rock Spring Church of Christ in 1892, he began preaching a few years later in 1896.  By the time he entered Nashville Bible School in 1902 he had been preaching about six years, had taught school, was married and had a young son.  While a student at NBS he roomed with H. Leo Boles.  When these memoirs were published, first in 1955 under the title Sixty Years in the Pulpit (privately printed by John Allen Hudson of Old Paths Book Club), Hall had lived in Los Angeles for five years.  Hall preached often in revivals and gospel meetings throughout his career, and earlier at Sichel Street Church of Christ, Los Angeles, from 1920-1922.  His brief stay in California came between two long ministries, first at West End Church of Christ in Atlanta from 1906-1920 and at Russell Street Church of Christ in Nashville from 1922-1950.  During his ministries in Atlanta and Nashville, both churches grew to considerable size.  West End Church in Atlanta grew to about 350 members (large for a Church of Christ in Georgia at that time) and Russell Street in Nashville, with over 1000 members, was among the largest congregations of any group in Nashville.  He served on the Board of Directors at David Lipscomb College prior to his move west in 1950.  Additional information is available at here.

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Excerpted from chapter 3 of S. H. Hall, Sixty-Five Years in the Pulpit, Or, Compound Interest in Religion. Nashville: Gospel Advocate Company, 1959. Pages 13-14. 

DAVID LIPSCOMB, whom I first came really to know after entering the Nashville Bible School.  When I entered that school[1] I had deep-seated prejudice against him because of the influence of the “A. McGary and Lipscomb controversy” over what was called “rebaptism” and “shaking them in,” the latter being the expression used by McGary against Lipscomb and the former the word used in speaking of those who stood with McGary.  My father was a regular reader of the Firm Foundation and took a radical stand for McGary’s side of the question, and it was through his influence that prejudice against Lipscomb found a strong place in my heart.  I took a class under Brother Lipscomb, primarily to give him all the trouble I could when such questions came up.

            But, let me state that this is where I got what I sometimes call “my second conversion.”  I found Lipscomb so everlastingly fair in all that he said about other religious bodies and those of our brethren who differed with him that it revealed something within me that was all wrong and led me to see how utterly wrong I was in taking a position and holding to it with bull-dog tenacity instead of studying the question with the sole desire to get the truth, even when it condemned me.  It was the influence of Lipscomb that planted, never to be rooted up, the following scriptures – Micah 6:8, “He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to lover mercy (kindness), and to walk humbly with thy God?”  Jeremiah 5:1, “Run ye to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, and see now, and know, and seek in the broad places thereof, if ye can find a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh the truth; and I will pardon it.”  To be absolutely just in representing others, never falsely accusing them, and to be as fair in stating their positions as you are in stating your own, was the lesson I got from Lipscomb—and it saved me.  For had I continued with the unfair and prejudiced way I had been handling questions with those whom I differed, I would have been lost—no doubt about this.  The awful danger of our “receiving not the love of the truth, that we might be saved” about which we are warned in 2 Thessalonians 2:10-12 had never dawned upon my heart.  Lipscomb planted that warning, and he lived what he tried to get over to his students.  He is the only editor—there may be one or two exceptions—who, occasionally, in his writing would take up some statement that he had formerly made and state, “I am sure I was mistaken in the position I took on this scripture and want to now correct it.”  He looked for his own mistakes as well as the mistakes of others.  Hw often did I hear him in the class, when some young preacher would start off on a tirade /14/ against the Baptist or Methodist on some position, gently say, “You are mistaken there—here is their position,[2] and he would give it exactly as their best scholars taught it.  All liars shall have their part in the lake of fire and brimstone, so the Book declares.  So far as I know, it is just as bad to lie about others by accusing them of believing something they do not believe as it is to lie in a horse swap.  If not, why not?

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[1] 1902; he was twenty-four years old, married with a two-year old son, and had been preaching 6 years.

[2] Hall does not close his quotation.  It may end here or at the end of the paragraph.

Reading up on rebaptism

Shortly I intend to read up on the rebaptism issue among conservative Disciples especially as it relates to David Lipscomb.  While I will be able to access Gospel Advocate on microfilm, I do not aim to thoroughly sift primary sources.  Rather I seek representative primary sources and introductory secondary sources, especially footnoted critical studies or surveys.  If you have any leads, please comment.  I intend to post to this blog a bibliography and summaries of what I find.

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I realize that some months ago I began a summary interaction (which remains incomplete) with Samjung  Kang-Hamilton’s article, about Alexander Campbell and the education of children, in Restoration Quarterly.  My copy of her article is somewhere, I am sure.  But where…what stack…which box…is anybody’s guess.  I have confidence that I can excavate it. 

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For the months of November-December I taught some on Stone-Campbell history on Sunday mornings at Owen Chapel Church of Christ in Brentwood, TN.  Along the way I have compiled for each session what I believe to be helpful bibliographies.  I will type those up and post them here.  Perhaps as I post them I will be inspired to reflect some about what and how I taught.  I invite comments and suggestions as that unfolds.