USA > North Carolina > Historical papers of the North Carolina Conference Historical Society and the Western North Carolina Conference Historical Society > Part 19
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Think of Chas. Ledbetter in 1795 at Beal's church, ten miles from the present town of Mocksville, in answer to the question, What has been paid for the support of the ministry? reporting "one pair socks is the total paid to date."
On Mocksville circuit at the quarterly conference held in June, 1865, just after the Civil War when all of Davie county was embraced in one pastoral charge, the question was called. What has been collected to defray the expenses of the circuit and how distributed? and the answer was: 111% bushels of corn, 11 bushels wheat, 71% bushels rye, 109 pounds bacon, 65 pounds flour, one gallon molasses, paid to the preacher in charge.
But that was at a time when the South was prostrated just after the conclusion of the war. The people were poor and dis- couraged, without money and with only limited food which they shared with the preacher. "Such as they had gave they unto him."
At Olive Branch near Farmington, at the quarterly conference held March 16, 1816, the total amount reported from 20 preaching appointments on Salisbury circuit was $37.94 and it was applied as follows: ยท $6.13 to Edward Cannon, presiding elder, for salary and travel expenses, and $20 to Bowen Reynolds, the preacher in charge, while the balance of $11.81 was turned into the surplus fund. They were certainly skilled in the art of finance. The laymen knew how to run the church economically and the preachers had of necessity to practice the most rigid self-denial to avoid being in debt to the point of embarrassment to themselves or to others.
At the first quarterly conference in Salisbury in 1846, William Rowzer, John J. Bell and William Overman, the committee appointed to confer with the preacher in charge as to his family needs, reported $16.00 a month as the amount necessary.
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Bishop Asbury, great man that he was, never stressed the grace of liberality, but rather encouraged the idea of poor pay on the grounds, as he thoroughly believed, that it would attract to the ministry those only who were genuinely called to preach and poor pay to the preachers would aid in developing the beautiful grace of humanity. Then, too, the people would have no ground for saying they were preaching for money. But he was willing and did endure as great hardships as he asked his preachers to endure. No man ever endured more of hardship for the good of his fellows than did Francis Asbury. But in preaching the doctrine of poor pay for the preachers he strangled the benevolent spirit among the people, and the church has ever since been forced to magnify the call for money for missions, for schools, for churches and a better paid ministry. This task would have been easier if Asbury (conscientious saint that he was) had not used his influence for too rigid economy. But the people have grown wonderfully in ability to pay since his time and have grown likewise in the grace of liberality.
Great changes have come since those early days. Those old preaching places, Beal's, Whitaker's and Olive Branch, have long since been abandoned and Farmington, Wesley Chapel, Smith Grove, Center, Liberty, Concord, Bethlehem and Advance with various other churches more recently built afford opportunity for present day worship.
The vast circuit once supplied by Andrew Yeargan is now covered by six presiding elder districts and the small part of it which is now confined to Davie county includes six pastoral charges-Advance, Cooleemee, Farmington, Davie, West Davie and Mocksville, with a combined membership of 3,000, with twenty-one church buildings valued at $120,000, and while we have not grown in liberality as much as we should, these charges last year paid for all purposes about $22,000, which is a vast growth over the amount Andrew Yeargan reported.
What would he think if he could come back and see the wonder- ous growth of a great church of nearly 120,000 members, church prop- erty worth six and a half millions, with annual contributions amount- ing to one and three-quarter million dollars, all in territory which was once his circuit?
Thirty Years in the Presiding Eldership
REV. J. T. GIBBS*
HIS SUBJECT, which I hesitated to accept, and did so only when urged, must have been suggested to the Committee by one of the younger brethren. Thirty years of the future seem much longer than thirty years that are past. To the eye of youth, such a period of responsibility is something worthy of wonder and study. It may well be, however, that a man of mature years has chosen it. The thirty years referred to have seen great changes in many ways. Wealth and population have grown enormously. Physical comforts and conveniences have entirely changed the superficial aspects of civilization-for during those years the mass of our people were intro- duced to telephones, electric lights and bathtubs, while automobiles and wireless telegraphy were being invented. That thirty years goes all the way back to log school and meeting house, tallow candles and feather beds.
My first year in the Presiding Eldership was spent on the Salis- bury District, the old North Carolina Conference memorializing at the close of that year the General Conference to divide it, which was done next May. Very little of that territory was then accessible by rail. And what roads in winter! They must have owel their loca- tion to Indian paths or game trails. The deep and sticky mud and tortuous grades reduced the rate of travel to a walk. I once drove the forty miles of frozen ruts from Albemarle to Salisbury when the thermometer was below zero. A good old sister had knitted me a hcod and a pair of pulse warmers, but I was too stiff to get out of my buggy when I reached home. So I was carried into the house and treated by the physician then attending my wife, whose illness had hurried my return. And then I remember how I once pleaded with a ferryman to take me across the Yadkin River in time of flood. Large trees were drifting down the rapid current, and the trip was made only after I had explicitly assumed all risk. How different now is travel in the good counties of Stanley, Rowan, Davie and Mont- gomery!
When the old Conference was divided-or when it was agreed to at the Annual Conference at Greensboro-I cast my lot with the eastern division. Since then I have traveled the Fayetteville, Rock- ingham, Warrenton, Raleigh, Durham and Washington Districts-and the Fayetteville, three full quadrenniums. Right in the beginning of this period, my friend. Mike Bradshaw, who has distinguished him- self as a preacher, was giving an eloquent description of the model Sunday School in a Conference at Aberdeen, when a train was heard in the distance. With the first faint sounds, Mike began to fidget and falter in his speech. As the noise grew into a roar Mike's alarm become more painfully evident until face and gesture told of utter
* Annual address of the North Carolina Conference Historical So- cicty, 1922.
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terror. Glancing wildly around at the brethren, he implored them to tell him what was happening. When some one said it was a train, he asked what a train might be, declaring loudly that no such dis- turbance ever occurred on his charge, the Lillington Circuit. This dramatic incident greatly impressed me as his Elder that he was suited to different environments. That was long ago. In a few months Mike was sent to Morehead where he could hear the whistle of the Mullet railroad whenever he tired of the sounding breakers on the shores. Some years later Mr. Mills laid his rails from Raleigh and Ramkatt through Lillington to Fayetteville. And though the frivolous spoke of his engines as coffee pots, he developed a real, standard guage railroad and some of the best farming country in the state.
Those thirty years saw great changes in the ministry-changes incident to the development of the state in educational facilities and in those indefinite ways that I can only call the trend of modern thought and life. As I look back upon the character and keen minds of the early leaders, I am impelled to quote the scripture which says, "There were giants in those days." Some displayed the graces of classical learning, while others treasured diplomas from the Uni- versity of Hard-knocks. But the features of those early leaders stand out in memory as clearly as cameos. Their equals may now live among us, but it is not given an old man to know. As a boy on my father's farm, and at our little country church, I was amazed at their powers of mind and soul. As a young man in the Confer- ence, I observed their walk among us, heard their sermons and listened to their long and heated debates on Church schools, and on the Conference organ and other Church papers, and at Conference and elsewhere on hard points of doctrine. They were diligent in the business of their Master, fervent in spirit, servants of the Lord! Spiritually they were given to single combat rather than to the massed attacks of modern organized religion. The man in the pulpit was the champion of the Lord and of that system of doctrine peculiar to his own denomination. How they drilled into their heroes the utter absudity of predestination! And how they defended the Methodist privilege of backsliding against all manner of attack!
A neighbor and dear friend of mine has filled the Baptist pulpit at Warrenton the past thirty-eight years. Some times we talk of the old days when Christians strove mightily over the mode of baptism and other doctrinal divergences. And my Baptist brother says that the preachers in his Church were not allowed to think they were doing their duty unless they turned their heaviest artillery on "baby sprinkling" several times a year. And I told him how our preachers then were expected to attack close communion and im- mersion as the exclusive mode of baptism, for our people thought that was included in the preacher's vow to drive away all false and erroneous doctrine. But times have changed, and so many sons and daughters of God have gone home to heaven along all the main roads of the different denominations that the old debates are being neglected. The different columns of the mighty army of the Lord are establishing better contact as they go along. There is close
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co-operation and less misunderstanding, and God lets me trust that the zeal of His people is not diminished.
Shall I tear aside the veil of secrecy that surrounds the thirty consecutive years I was numbered among the official advisors of our Bishops? Well, why not? It's a very thin veil, anyway. The mystery is either trivial or imaginary-the secrecy hardly more than a decent reticence about intensely personal discussion. There are a certain number of district stations and circuits paying different salaries and making different demands. And there are about the same number of preachers of different needs and different abilities. It is not a simple matter of graduation, of sending the best preacher to the biggest salary. My warm personal friend, Capers Norman, was never the best, or even the second best, preacher in the Conference. But he could grasp the hand of a home-sick boy in a strange city in a way that would brighten that boy's eyes and warm his heart. He was a master at organizing the various activities of a large con- gregation, and he was a man of blameless life and deep personal piety. God had made him for our big jobs, and the Bishops and Presiding Elders couldn't have kept that man and those jobs apart, if they had tried. On our poorest work was Uncle A. D. Betts-who ever knew him but to love him? None among us ever walked closer to his God, nor would I, who knew and loved them both, say that Uncle Betts was less a man in brain or heart than Brother Norman. The Master gave them different jobs and the Bishops' cabinets had very little to do with their appointments.
But often several men seemed equally fitted to serve a particular charge, and, of course, there have always been many congregations of similar type and needs. So it has often seemed right to base appointments, somewhat, on personal needs-and, even to ask personal favors. One of our preachers asked a particular appointment be- cause it was near a college where he wished to educate his daughter. The appointment was suitable, the request reasonable, but the bishop had practically decided to send another man to that place. My man who had asked the appointment, was apparently no better suited to the place than the other, but he had a special need; his case was peculiar. So I told of the man's gallantry in the Civil War, and of the sacrifices he had made, until tears ran down the good Bishop's cheeks, and he said, "We'll have to help the brother educate his daughter"-and he gave him the appointment.
There are good men who never receive what they consider just recognition. Some of them have unusual abilities in different lines, but are not suited to the needs of our leading churches. I have known more than one eloquent preacher who did not get hold of his people personally-and there are times of bereavement when a simple 'God bless you' is worth a dozen sermons. I fear some have really weakened their power for good by becoming impatient of promotion, and I have known others who thought their own need more important than those of the congregation they sought to serve. One brother on a poor charge asked me for a much better appointment on the ground that he had married a cultured woman and his wife must have a servant. He was so persistent for a given appointment
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that he forced me to tell him that his mental equipment was entirely inadequate for the work he sought, and then he bluntly said that he thought the good appointments were for those who needed good salaries.
And so it goes. The most intimate details of a preacher's mental and moral make-up, of his acceptability in different communities, even of his family life-may enter into the discussion of his fitness for a certain appointment. And common decency requires some measure of secrecy. But as a simple matter of mathematics, there is scant time in a bishop's cabinet for rehearsing personal histories. There are too many appointments to be made in the small number of hours available.
I shall never forget the giants of the olden days, but after them come my colleagues. I have been privileged to live and work with men. And I have fought them too! I fought them for the glory of God, and gave them the best that was in me to defeat their erroneous notions as to the men needed to convert the sinners of a given place -say, Raleigh, Fayetteville, Wilson. I have exposed them before Bishop after Bishop, and have felt the force of their vengeance. So I ought to know something about them-those boys who now sleep beneath the sod and those whose grey heads are honored by a younger generation. And I am not ashamed of the company I have kept. If earthly friendships are remembered by the saints above, there are those before the Throne who await my coming. And there are those I long to see.
I have seen the new Presiding Elders scheme and trade, striving manfully to measure up to their new responsibilities. And I've seen them steady under the surprising discovery that the older heads were not trying to rob them of their best preachers. And, of course, I have seen them develop into calm, conscientious counsellors of the appointing power. But young or old, trying to champion a single district, or working for the good of the whole Conference, the Presiding Eldership of my thirty years has been characterized by sincere devotion to God's service. And it has been the almost uni- versal rule for narrow views-official selfishness, if I main coin a phrase-to expound and dissipate under the effects of experience. We've all made mistakes, of course. We have even cherished false ideas of the nature of a bishop's cabinet. But surely we were all human and had to learn-and I have seen the brethren grow in grace as they grew in wisdom.
The presiding eldership is inevitably regarded by the young as an honorable distinction and a fit goal of ambition. It was so with me, but I can honestly say, I didn't seek it. On the contrary I shrunk from it, when Bishop Key first intimated that he had me in mind for such an appointment. He then told me plainly that I might decide it, and I declined it. It is due myself to say that Bishop Key sought the interview, and it is due the memory of the good Bishop to say that the reason he gave for doing so has always seemed to me justifiable. Two years at Fayetteville and one at Raleigh comprise all my experience on leading stations. But surely three years was long enough for me to learn that our city churches demanded the
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best we can give. The work is even more strenuous and certainly calls for just as large abilities as does the district work. Why should a young man set his heart on one line of endeavor rather than the other? The honor lies in doing well the work at hand.
I have long heard speculation as to the eldership spoiling men for other duties. But how can a man be spoiled while the blood courses in his veins and the spirit of endeavor remains in his heart? My people in Warrenton may have spoiled me, but they won't let me believe the eldership has. After all, the ministry is much the same, whether it means preaching to few or many. How many times have I read the lines, "As thy days may demand shall thy strength ever be."
To my youthful fancy the "Elder" was a man of power and dis- tinction. He came around occasionally to see what the common everyday pastor had been doing. Our little country church was some times, not often, served by untrained preachers-not yet in full con- nection with the Conference. The sacrament of the Lord's Supper was associated in my youthful mind with the quarterly meeting. And baptism and marriages frequently waited for the same occasion. So the person of the "Elder" acquired merit in my eyes from the sacred- ness of the rites he performed. The undergraduate pastor was a member of our own community but there was something apostolic about the holy man who served the Lord's table, blessed the union of loving hearts and welcomed infancy to the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
But the Conference is not, by any means, composed of Presiding Elders. Nor are even country churches so dependent on them as they were; for changes in our laws have empowered unordained men, undergraduates, to baptize and to marry people. So capable a man as J. D. Bundy had to tell a prominent couple on his first charge that he was unordained, and by his advice they arranged to have me, his "Elder," marry them. So my thirty years in the "Eldership" has brought me many friends outside the cabinet. Four times a year I have visited the charges, and so visited each of fifteen or twenty or more preachers, and never all of the same preachers in any two years. These visits have been social as well as official. Generally, I have sat at the pastor's table and slept beneath his roof. 1 have been honored by all kinds of confidence and asked for all kinds of advice. Many of these preachers rarely saw another of their calling and denomination, except at Annual and District Conferences.
So my years in the presiding eldership gave me an unusual acquaintance with Methodist preachers. I have found them human- for who is not? Some years ago I asked one of the younger pre- siding elders about one of the brethren-one of those who never sets the world afire. The young "Elder" answered that he was a good fellow, but always begging to be sent to High Steeple Church. Suddenly he broke off from what promised to be a real indictment of the poor fellow's egotism and said, "But you know him; you had him four years." I'd had him, and I knew him; one of our most eloquent men, he would occasionally say or do something so unconventional as to unsettle all but the strongest in his church. Good, strong, sincere,
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he lacked St. Paul's consideration for those weak in the faith. He never understood why men of less brilliant pasts should outrank him in the Conferences.
I have found them faithful. Occasionally one would buy more goods at the story than his little salary would pay for. I have known some to undertake little side lines, to the unintentional neglect of their ministry. A Very few have given up their sacred calling for the marts of trade. But I have known many able men to rear families in humble parsonages on small salaries. Once a year the newspapers print the preacher's name in connection with his appoint- ment. Perhaps he has already been mentioned as a member of some committee. If his church is reasonably large and one of our biggest newspapers is published in the same city, he may find a paragraph or two about each Sunday morning sermon. But that is about all he contributes to the day's news. He doesn't figure in the murders, divorces, embezzlements and other real sensations. But his sons rise to prominence and power, and his daughters grow into noble woman- hood.
I have found them unselfish. A number of young men have entered the ministry, in my time, who were already earning more than the Church was paying its leaders. They not only began again at half-and in one instance less than one-fifth-the pay they had been getting, but gave up bright financial futures for a calling that never promises more than a living. I mention them not as less sel- fish or more devoted than their brethren, but simply because a part of their sacrifice is capable of measurement-a thing that all men might see. The church has had its share, perhaps, of big- brained, forward looking men, who never thought of any selfish career.
And with the preacher nearly always stands a godly woman. We men can wear old clothes and dispense with luxuries much more easily than our wives-and that not mentioning any "weaker sex." Judging by what they bear, the ladies of our parsonages must belong to the strongest sex there is. It is they who worry over the practical matter of spreading a small salary over three meals a day and clothing for a family, which is more apt to be large than small. They are the chief sufferers from the upheaval of moving just before Christmas. They are with the children more constantly and feel more keenly the inability to give them all the neighbors have. They have less diversion, less going about among the people, less of occupation with things outside the home. But they stand shoulder to shoulder with their men, and make the humble Methodist parsonage about the nearest thing to a model home that this world knows.
The Saviour said, "Not as the world giveth, give I unto you." And that must be particularly applicable to the splendid manhood and womanhood of our parsonages. They have little of the good things that men of the world strive to get. They approach remark- ably near their high ideal of losing their own lives in unremitting toil for the advancement of the kingdom. And if ever the Pharisee and the Hypocrite have their reward, surely these soldiers of the
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Cross shall be paid their share, full measure, pressed down and running over. They still tread in weak human flesh the path their Master trod. Shall they not come to that place where all tears are dried, all the stains of travel washed away, and every stumbling fall forgotten? Surely they shall be where their Lord has gone. The threadbare coat shall give place to the white robe of righteousness, and instead of the little cottage they shall inhabit fair mansions on the streets of gold. Surely their song shall forever praise Him who has brought them through many tribulations.
Recollection of Men and Things in the Old North Carolina Conference
REV. J. EDGAR THOMPSON*
HEN I was asked to speak before the Historical Society at this hour of the men and the movements in the old North Carolina Conference. it was stipulated, with great emphasis, that I was to confine myself "to the things that you know, and nobody else knows, and have not gone into print." That confines me within very narrow limits, or what I "know" might fill the first two or three pages of a child's primer, but what I don't know would fill the libraries of the world.
One may occupy a place that would call attention to him, or even give him a cheap notoriety without his having any special merit. On one Friday afternoon at old Trinity College, I took a volume of Hume's History of England from the Library and read about two pages in it that afternoon. The next day I heard a gentleman from Massachusetts in conversation with another gentleman discussing the Writ of Habeas Corpus. The gentleman from Massachusetts asked, where did the Writ of Habeas Corpus originate? The gentleman of the second part didn't know. Assuming that neither of them knew, I ventured to enlighten them by remarking that Mr. Hume says it was first given in the Magna Charter by King John of England to the Barons at Runnymede. "That is correct," replied the gentleman from Massachusetts. "When did that occur?" he shot back at me. "About the beginning of the thirteenth century," which happened to be correct also. Then came the "solar plexus." "What do you think of Mr. Hume as a historian?" My knowledge of Mr. Hume had been exhausted, and extricating myself the best I could I withdrew from their presence, but as I turned away I overheard him say, "That young man is well posted in history." Cheap notoriety, I call that.
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