Trampling Out the Vintage:
A Historical Lesson on Leadership
In his book, Broken Churches Broken Nation: Denominational Schisms and the Coming of the American Civil War (Mercer Press, 1985), Clarence C. Goen chronicled the various denominational divisions in the 1840s as a precursor to the violent rupture of the nation in the 1860s. Although Goen did not suggest that the churches caused the Civil War, he did charge them with a massive failure of leadership. A noted historian of American Christianity, Goen contended that the churches’ split over the issue of slavery provided an ecclesial and theological justification for the violent rupture of the nation.
To Goen, the schisms within the Methodist, Baptist and Presbyterian denominations represented a fatal moral and theological compromise that rendered impotent the churches’ persuasive authority. With the churches unable or unwilling to make a fundamental theological affirmation about human worth and dignity, the government was left to resolve the issue through its legislative and military power. Persuasion gave way to coercion.
Among the factors contributing to this failure of leadership in the American church, Goen said, were the absence of any social ethic and critique, an excessive emphasis on individualism and a preoccupation with numerical institutional growth, what he called “expansion by evasion.”
In those critical decades leading up to the Civil War, the ethical and theological discourse coming from pulpits across the nation focused primarily on private morality and personal sins. The notion of social sin and “systems of domination” seldom emerged in ecclesial pronouncements.
Salvation, therefore, was limited primarily to the justification of individuals before God and had an “other worldly” emphasis. Even the Abolitionists believed that changing the hearts of individuals would resolve the problem of slavery, according to Goen. Justification was interpreted almost exclusively as forgiveness or pardon. Paul’s notion of a new people, incorporated into a new and reconciled community, was absent from the church’s preaching and teaching.
Preoccupied with statistical growth and institutional prominence, the churches were seduced into silence on controversial issues. To appease regional blocs, denominations compromised on slavery and accommodated their theology. Numerical expansion took precedence over moral, ethical, and theological integrity and discipline.
Clearly, Goen’s analysis of the churches’ failure of leadership in the 19th century is relevant in the 21st. Forms of human slavery continue throughout the world. Racism persists as both personal and systemic sin in American society and in the churches. Economic disparity locks millions of people in preventable poverty. Wars continue to ravage the earth, and implements of death take precedence over instruments of life. The earth itself is threatened with cataclysmic devastation.
Pastoral excellence requires engagement with the critical issues of our time. In SPE programs nationwide, we see signs that pastors are learning that important lesson. Meeting in peer groups that cross denominational, ethnic and gender boundaries and that emphasize the communal aspects of ministry, SPE pastors are learning anew that ministry means being engaged in the world around us.
But as Goen’s work suggests, history also has much to teach us. Learning the lessons from the church’s past failures is one component of excellence. Our monumental failure to confront slavery in the 19th century may serve to motivate and inform pastoral leaders facing challenges of the 21st century.
Kenneth L. Carder is the Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry at Duke Divinity School. He was bishop of the Mississippi Area of the United Methodist Church from 2000 to 2004 and the Nashville Area of the UMC from 1992 to 2000.
