CHAPTER IX
Perplexing Questions
Some of the members of the New Design church lived on the Mississippi bottom land, and because of the distance between the settlements after some time a branch, called an Arm, was constituted on the Bottom. It was to sustain public worship, but without church authority to administer the ordinances. (But revival meetings were held there by brethren Badgley, Chance and Simpson, and out of the revival came another church. It was organized April 28, 1798, and was called the Bottom Baptist church. There were now two churches in Illinois, on the outmost border of christian civilization. There were also four Baptist churches in Ohio and one in Indiana; seven altogether in the entire Northwestern Territory. There were in the United States seventy thousand Baptists, one fourth of them being in Virginia. Population of the country, five millions.)
For the sake of the church fellowship our Illinois churches became "corresponding" members of the Green River Association [of] Kentucky; they were expected to be represented annually by letter rather than by delegate. These little churches in the wilderness began at once learning wisdom by experience, as we all have to learn. One thing they experimented with was majojity government. By self-government it is not meant that every individual must agree with every other, but that when a vote is taken the majority of votes must control. This is no arbitrary rule but is according to nature; for so each individual governs himself when of two courses he chooses the course that appears to him to have the greatest number of sound reasons in its favor. It would be an ideal church that should always be unanimous; as it would be an ideal individual who was so clear of apprehension that he never needed to weigh evidence. But the Creator sees it to be better for us to strive after our ideals than to have them ready-made to our hand.
However, it was a theory of Elder Badgley that church action should always be unanimous, and under his direction the New Design church adopted a "rule of oneness." No business could be done until all were agreed. Under this rule if one member stood out he controlled the church. That was government by the minority. The only resource was that the obstinate member might be disciplined by the majority, and led either to cease his opposition or be excluded from the church.
[p. 32]
But the war the rule was repealed, was as bad as if they had let it stand. At a business meeting in 1801, in the absence of the pastor, the church repealed the rule of oneness in order that thereafter the way might be open for unbaptized believers to be invited to the Lord's table, and the invitation was given. The invitation however did not long remain in force. It was opposed by the pastor, and by the Green River Association whose advice was asked, and thereupon it was permanently dropped.
This matter of "strict communion" has been, at least until recently, pretty well settled among the Baptists of this country; and it became so by long discussion and by the practical test of experience. The New Design experiment is only one of many in our state history. When the old Northern Association, including Chicago and vicinity, was formed, in 1834, an open communion agitation was kept up for several years. Pastor I. T. Hinton was its chief advocate. But he failed to win the churches to his views. The copy of the Association Minutes bearing the expected resolution never appeared. In 1850 one of the churches of the Salem Association voted as New Design did in 1801, but like New Design soon returned to the old path. Let baptism be made optional and the ordinance will perish. John Bunyan was an open communion Baptist, and his church had no Baptist pastor for a hundred years after his death. Pastor Hinton might have gathered wisdom from the experience of his father. James Hinton was pastor of the Oxford, Eng., Baptist church, and resigned his pastorate because if he preached on baptism many in his church did not like it, not having been themselves baptized, and if he was silent the ordinance itself was in danger of being forgotten. Very rarely does an unbaptized member of such a church express a desire to be baptized. It is like admitting the unconverted, hoping that their church membership will lead to their conversion.
Associational communion has sometimes been attempted by Baptists, as by the vote of one of our local Associations in 1862, and once or twice in Chicago. But it never rose to the dignity of more than an incident. The truth that it is a church ordinance is too well grounded among us. In some of our colored churches the bread and wine has been carried to the bedside of the sick, and to the houses of absent members, but such practices have generally ceased of themselves. It is a church ordinance, and that essential character is as persistent in it as the perfume in a flower.
[p. 33]
(In the revival which resulted in the organization of the New Design church, in 1796, Benjamin Ogle, Mrs. Lemen's brother, was one of the converts, but with his father he joined a reorganized Methodist class. In the year 1800 however he was baptized and joined the New Design church. He was a Baptist preacher for forty years, adding another to the list of able preachers who went out from that little church.) (The same year, 1800, the Pulliam family from Virginia came to New Design from Missouri, where they had lived four years and where the mother died. One of the sons, James Pulliam, also became a Baptist preacher. His claim, near the Badgley settlement in St. Clair county, covered the present site of Belleville. He acquired more wealth than most of the early preachers, and where he died he left $2000 to Shurtleff College as the beginning of a fund for the education of needy ministerial students.)
(In 1800 also Ohio was dropped out of the Northwestern Territory, and the remainder was organized as Indiana Territory; William Henry Harrison was governor, and Vincennes the territorial capital. And so the nineteenth century opened on Illinois as two counties, St. Clair and Randolph, of Indiana Territory. Our two churches were in the lower part ot Randolph, which in 1816 became Monroe county.) ================= [Edward P. Brand, Illinois Baptists -- A History, 1930, pp. 31-33. -- jrd]
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