Chautauqua, Camping and the Poor

Early in my Methodist ministry (I was in my 20s at the time) I received a call from my District Superintendent (DS) who said he wanted to see me. He drove to my home (45 miles away) that very day, and asked me to serve as camp director for the district’s Junior High Camp Adventure. The camp consisted of 180 campers with 30 counselors, which I would recruit. The conference camping program was expanding and we were purchasing new campsites.

I was honored. I could think of no other church position beyond the local church that I would be more interested in. I grew up in the conference’s camping program. Our Decision Nights were like old-fashioned revival meetings. I made lasting friendships at those camps. I had already served several years as a counselor. I would serve as a Junior High Camp Director for 14 years.

I am more impressed now, years later. What is now the Indiana Conference of the United Methodist Church is a merger of five former conferences: two former Evangelical United Brethren and three former Methodist. My own former conference, North Indiana Methodist, during the 1950s and 60s, ran district-based programming. There was only one conference staff person in the area of education and camping. All camping staff were volunteers. Camp directors themselves, not conference staff or even committees, pretty much planned the program.

Directors set and often wrote the curriculum. Our conference even published its own camping song book. Meanwhile, our Senior High “institute” camp was enrolling 3,000 youth per summer. District Superintendents expected every pastor to be present for the senior high “camp.” We would have ministers’ meetings then and plan the district program. The Junior High program was enrolling nearly 2,000 campers per summer. Our camps often filled up within weeks after being open for enrollment.

The Methodist heritage of camping goes back to John Wesley. On April 2, 1739 Wesley determined that the concern for “decency and order” and preaching confined to the church building, was hindering the gospel. He therefore submitted himself to “be more vile and proclaim in the highways the glad tidings of salvation.” His colleagues thought he was “beside himself” but Wesley started preaching outdoors in the fields and on the street corners. His crowds grew to 500, 1,000, and 3,000. Those attending were miners, poor people, and others who did not feel comfortable in a church building. This new approach basically launched the Methodist revival in England.

What Wesley started in England spread to America. America after the Revolutionary War was spiritually in dire straits. The rebellion against England was also a rebellion against England’s establishment Anglican Church and the Anglican God. Deism saturated the religion of the fathers of the revolution.

When Methodism was founded in America in 1784 only 10 percent of Americans were church members and religion was in decline. Armed with the instructions that they had nothing to do but save souls and reform the nation, the Methodists launched what would later be called The Western Revival, or the Second Great Awakening.

Methodists were not part of the established elite. They were people on the edges themselves, wanting to reach others on the edges. To use Wesley’s phrase they were reaching out to the “more vile.” Actually, in many ways, they were themselves the “more vile” part of society. With few established church buildings the Methodists preached outdoors. The granddaddy of the camp meetings, Cane Ridge in Kentucky, are estimated to have drawn between 15,000 and 20,000 persons in 1801.

From there camp meetings spread throughout all the land, even to the East Coast. And, thanks to a maverick, Lorenzo Dow, they even spread back to England where they were so controversial a new denomination, the Primitive Methodist Church, was formed.

An outdoor setting broke down social and racial barriers. Rich and poor, black and white, young and old were converted. The colonial Calvinism of the Puritans was displaced by Methodist views of unlimited atonement (Christ died for all—or free will). The camp meeting introduced the mourner’s bench, sinners slain in the Spirit, the altar call, and indigenous music (the gospel hymn). It redefined the word “evangelical” in its American setting. The Methodist circuit system thrived on camp meetings. The Methodist fourth quarterly conferences, usually in the fall, were times when all the churches and classes and preaching points on the circuit traveled to one place, often for two or three days. These were the ideal times to schedule camp meetings. According to Francis Asbury’s journal, Indiana by 1808 had already recorded 17 camp meetings.

The result is church membership in America grew from 10 percent of the population in 1790 to 33 percent by 1850. Methodism grew from 2 percent of the religious population in 1784 to 33 percent by 1850. In Indiana when Methodism claimed 434 churches in the 1950 census the dominant colonial church, the Congregationalists, with its trained clergy, could claim only two.

Some historians claim the camp meeting phenomenon peaked in the 1830s and passed from the scene after that. They may have peaked on the East Coast but in the “West” (Midwest today) they kept adjusting and refocusing and reinventing themselves. “Campgrounds” were established. Instead of moving from place to place, camp meetings had their own locations. Many of these were organized independently, that is, without denominational sponsorship. However, districts also established their own grounds.

But during this time Methodism was undergoing great change. Methodists were becoming more prosperous, more respectable and less “vile.” They began building brick churches with steeples. Some even began “pew rental,” a practice practiced mostly by sophisticated churches like the Episcopalians. They began establishing colleges, and even seminaries. And they began to push back against the unbridled “enthusiasm” of the revivalists. They also pushed back against some of the revivalists’ radical social reformist ideas. When the Wesleyan Methodists split from the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1842 they were criticized as radicals because they opposed not only slavery and alcohol, they also were anti-war, pro-women preachers, and post-millennial.

Methodists also became much more institutional. Perhaps the best example is Sunday school. Methodists were great supporters of Sunday schools from their American beginning. But the Sunday schools, almost all lay-led, were emphasizing catechisms and Scripture memory and were related to interdenominational Sunday school unions. This changed when the Congregationalist Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) published his epic Christian Nurture in 1847. Bushnell was rebelling against revivalism. He argued that children did not have to be taught they were sinners before they could become Christians. Indeed, it was possible for a child to grow up and never imagine anything but that he or she had always been a Christian. This new theology cut the heart out of evangelical theology. Teachings about sin, the cross, the blood of Jesus, and conversation were not only unnecessary but also a hindrance to the spread of Christianity. They ran counter to modern theories of child development and would need to be corrected.

Methodism’s growing class of elites bought into Bushnell’s new theology in increasing numbers. Churches needed to emphasize Christian nurture and not revivalism. The one person who probably did more than anyone to advance this new thinking was John Vincent (1832-1920). Vincent became editor of Sunday-school publications in 1868 and promoted graded instruction for all age levels. He advanced the uniform lesson plan. He initiated teacher training classes and also was largely responsible for launching the Chautauqua movement.

In October 1873, the Sunday School Union approved the project of a Sunday-school Teacher’s Assembly to be held in August of 1974 on the Chautauqua Lake (NY) Camp Meeting Grounds. A 10-to-15-day institute would train leaders in the new direction of Sunday schools. Scientific and cultural subjects would be added to the Sunday school curriculum. The perspective of the training would be based not on the sinfulness of human nature, but on the inherited goodness of humanity created in the image of God.

From that first meeting the Chautauqua movement spread rapidly. Within 12 years twenty-one different Chautauqua organizations had been formed, reaching thousands of persons. Most of these were based on repurposed camp meeting grounds. Groups like the Chautauqua Teachers’ Reading Union, the Book-a-Month Reading Circle, the Society of Fine Arts, and the Literary and Scientific Circle, sprang into existence. Some thirty-nine Summer Assemblies were held during this time. A Sunday school periodical, Good Tidings, by 1890, was circulating nearly 40,000 copies weekly. Methodist Sunday schools increased during the 50 years from 1850 to 1900, from 5,000 to 30,000.

This is not to say that camp meetings faded out of existence. In many ways they grew more radical. But they were reaching a different kind of people. They became centers for Wesleyan teaching on Holiness. Indeed, many camp meetings became independent Holiness Association camp grounds. But Methodist districts and conferences were also still maintaining campgrounds. But the point needs to be made—and this is one of the focuses of this article—during this period Methodism lost much of its “vile” constituency. The appeal of Chautauqua and the repurposed Sunday school was primarily to the educated and more sophisticated. The appeal of the camp meeting was to less educated, less culturally sophisticated persons and groups.

This is well illustrated by the account of Phineas Bresee and the founding of the Church of the Nazarene. Bresee was a successful pastor in the Southern California conference and the presiding elder of the Los Angeles district. But he was a revivalist and in the Holiness wing of the church. The presiding bishop of the conference in 1892 was none other than John Vincent, of Chautauqua and Sunday school fame, and now a bishop. Vincent and others opposed revivalism (and Bresee) and in 1892 removed him as a presiding elder and appointed him to a local church.

In his new appointment Breese was approached by persons wanting to start an independent church and a ministry among the poor. When Breese became involved he was forced to withdraw from the conference. He then, with others, formed the Church of the Nazarene. This was not an isolated incident. All over the country camp meeting and holiness leaders were forced out of Methodism and formed new denominations, many of which eventually became Pentecostal. Thus Methodism, at the very time that it claimed to be an advocate for the poor, was guilty of casting the same group from its ranks.

Meanwhile, on the conference level, the idea of camping and outdoor assemblies, attracted new interest. Youth camps sprang up all over. Some of these carried over old camp meeting practices—preaching, Bible classes and decision nights. Others were influenced by the rise of such groups as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and designed camping programs that were religious versions of these groups.

(The next article on this subject will deal with camp meetings, youth camps, institutes and outdoor assemblies in the 20^th century, in America and also on the mission field. Special interest will be given to the rise of Pentecostalism, the groups that can claim to be part of Methodism’s family.)