CHURCH PLANTING BY THE AMERICAN HOME MISSIONARY SOCIETY

Alwyn York, Conference Historian

Church planting is now one of the main priorities of the CCCC. This focus began in the late 1990s, so it is a fairly recent feature of this Conference, but it is not something that is new to Congregationalism as a whole. The nineteenth century in particular was a period when Congregational churches joined together in several great initiatives of starting new churches. Nineteenth century church planting by Congregationalists consisted of three distinct phases. The first, and largest, effort was starting new churches in the new towns on the expanding western frontier. The second was the establishment of churches among the former slaves in the southern states by the American Missionary Association. The third was an outreach to immigrants from non-English speaking countries. This article will focus on the work of the American Home Missionary Society on the western frontier.

Before a national home missionary society was founded, efforts to plant churches in the new settlements on the frontier were conducted by regional fellowships. As the western frontier was expanding dramatically it became clear that the separate and uncoordinated efforts of regional fellowships would not be sufficient for the task at hand. A national organization was needed. The American Home Missionary Society was established in 1826 as a national missionary association devoted to the spiritual needs of the new settlements to the west. Initially the AHMS was an interdenominational body, supported by Congregational, Presbyterian and Dutch Reformed churches, but as time went on it became predominantly Congregational.

The policy of the AHMS was to assist in the development of churches in the West by subsidizing them to the extent necessary to enable them to hire a full-time or even a part-time pastor. Churches were asked to send in a membership application stating its location, membership, financial condition, with the name and credentials of the man it wanted to hire. Each congregation was expected to raise as much of the minister’s salary as it could, and the Society supplemented this enough to give him a living wage.

The AHMS experienced phenomenal growth from the beginning. In its first year of operation the Society employed 169 missionaries in fifteen states with receipts of $18,000. Within five years the numbers had grown to 506 missionaries and receipts of $50,000.

The impact of the AHMS on the development of communities in the states west of the original thirteen colonies would be hard to overestimate. The records of the AHMS are now housed at the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University. A paper published for this center summarizes the impact of the Society as in this way: “From a purely statistical point of view, the operations of the American Home Missionary Society were a success. Total receipts for its first sixty-seven years amounted to $16,006,504. More than 50,000 man-years of missionary labor were financed and directed by the society. Conversions or new memberships to the churches that received society support totaled 422,041. Between 1826 and 1893 the society had missionaries in every actual or future state of the Union except Alaska and Hawaii.” The human side of all these statistics would be a story too massive to be recorded. It would be an epic of missionary heroism, souls won to Christ, and communities grounded in faith. This truly is a legacy of which Congregationalists can be proud.