TEXAS.
“The African Congregational Church” of Paris.
The origin of this church, back in the dark days of terror, in 1868, was so unique, so spontaneous, so much after the spirit and form of the New Testament Churches, that we think it worth while to make some record of the same. At that time the colored people were indeed “scattered abroad as sheep having no shepherd.” Separated from the old church edifices of the white people, they had not yet gathered themselves into their own churches. A Mr. Smith, from Illinois, who had gone through the war as a soldier, and who had settled in mercantile business in Jefferson, Texas, and whose life was soon after sacrificed in the turbulence of those times, came up through Paris lecturing to the colored people. He proposed a church that would accommodate all the Christians, and the result was the organization above named, with a regular constitution and covenant. Its preamble reads thus:
“We, the ministers and members of different Christian churches, feeling greatly embarrassed in our former church relations, and regarding those matters of difference which divided the churches to which we have belonged as being unimportant, mischievous in their tendency, and in discordance with the spirit of Christianity, do now, on this 15th day of March, 1868, unite in a new organization, the African Congregational Church. Thankful to God, our gracious and mighty Redeemer, for this right and privilege of choosing and adopting our own church forms, ceremonies, and government, and of worshiping God as our conscience dictates, we hereby solemnly pledge ourselves to God and to one another that we will maintain a Scriptural Christian character, and support such laws and regulations founded on the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as shall be adopted from time to time by two-thirds of the members of this church.”
The Constitution provides in the five articles for the election of “discreet and faithful members” as trustees, deacons, a clerk and treasurer, who shall pay out money only by vote of the church upon an order from the clerk; for the use of either one of the three modes of baptism; and for the choosing of ministers, “who shall preside over all the deliberations of the church;” a Scriptural plurality of preaching elders, a “presbytery” in, and not over the church.
Not being acquainted with the technical term of “covenant,” they bind themselves by five articles of “Church Fellowship.” The first requires evidence of a Christian experience; not stopping with the fact, of which they were not aware, that Congregationalism was, at first, a protest against receiving unregenerate members into the church, they go back to Acts xx., 20, 21. The third reads: “That, trusting in the promised grace of God, we will not indulge in our hearts, nor practice, any of these manifest works of the flesh” (see Gal. v., 20, 21); example: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, etc. The fourth binds them to cultivate the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. v., 22, 23). In the fifth they bind themselves to obey the Scriptures (1 Thess. v., 11, 12), “by studying to be quiet in doing our own business, working with our own hands, walking honestly toward them that are without;” and also to discharge faithfully their Christian duties as subjects of civil law and authority in obedience to God (Rom. xii., 1, 2).
Here is the way by which, for lack of a council (of which they knew nothing), and for lack of authority this side of the Lord Jesus Christ, whom they had taken as the Head of their Church, they ordained their first presiding pastor:
“Resolved, That we, the members of this church, in conference assembled, do call, set apart, and ordain our well-beloved brother, John McAdams, as the pastor of the church, to minister to us in spiritual things as the minister of the Gospel; that we hereby authorize our said well-beloved brother to administer the ordinances of baptism and the holy sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and to solemnize the rite of matrimony in accordance with the laws of this State; and that our well-beloved brother be furnished with a certified copy of this resolution.”
Four years later the church called to its aid Rev. Warren Norton, a Congregational minister then at Brenham, Texas, in ordaining brothers Albert Gray and Wm. Hamilton as their ministers in the Lord. And this last fall I was permitted to participate in a regular council for the ordination of Mr. J. W. Roberts as pastor in that same church, and of Mr. J. W. Strong as a pastor for the church in Corpus Christi. We had a sermon and all the other parts, including the solemn laying on of hands in prayer; but still we were only helping the church in a function which, in the first place, it exercised alone with a beautiful simplicity and all legitimate authority.
How has the church gotten along? Why, it ran up to a large membership. It paid $115 in gold for a lot, and built a church. It branched out into the Shiloh, the New Hope, and the Pattonville African Congregational churches, in neighborhoods about, and these four became associated in a quarterly conference. But, as the propagandists came along, they found in the walls of the mother church stones with old inscriptions. Baptists, African M. E., Campbellite, Northern M. E., and each pulled out his own and set up churches of those several sorts, so that now the original church building is the shabbiest of the lot, and the membership is only an average. But still, with a high standing for character, with an educated minister, and an educated teacher, Prof. S. W. White, with a new and more respectable site, purchased, with the old acre and a half to be sold, and with some members of property (two of them large farmers) and of influence in the community, they give promise of great usefulness, promise of realizing the expectations of the martyr founder.