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.