0.11 3.1 sending the light: the organizing of texas baptist women  (Page 4/11)

The number of churches participating in annual meetings prior to 1860 varied from fourteen to forty, and they struggled with confusion over the authority of the Board of Directors of the Baptist State Convention to collect and disburse funds. Predictably, by 1853, churches in the eastern and northeastern portions of the state, claiming they had been neglected in the assignment of missionaries and desiring to establish a school in Tyler, organized a rival state body, the Texas Baptist General Association. (This group adopted the name Baptist Convention of Eastern Texas in 1853, then reverted to the original designation in 1868.) The work of the original Baptist State Convention was further thwarted throughout the 1850s by a quarrel between Rufus Burleson, president of Baylor University and head of the male department, and Horace Clark, principal of the female section. A lack of clarity over their areas of jurisdiction and a "disgraceful" clash of personalities led ultimately to Burleson's resignation and removal to Waco University in 1861. L. R. Elliott, ed., Centennial Story of Texas Baptists (Chicago: Hammond Press, 1936), p. 146.

The vision, the organizational structure, and even a sufficient number of church members to support cooperative effort were present among Texas Baptists prior to 1860, but they lacked experience with confederation and they were not yet motivated to achieve large, unified goals. Constantly gnawing at any organizational effort was their traditional opposition to an ecclesiastical body invested with power of its own. Each generation produced a different focus for its resistance, but strong antagonism to a religious bureaucracy persisted throughout the nineteenth century. The kind of affiliation that came to be widely accepted before the Civil War was that of a few churches joined in a single association to assure the success of a specific, local project. A typical example was the proliferation of small schools, often for girls and seldom larger than one teacher in one room, established by Baptists in nearly every populated area of the state. Meanwhile, the individual evangelistic enterprise Baptists historically favored won increasing numbers of converts, the most famous of whom was Sam Houston, baptized at Independence in 1854.

All religious work was either halted or severely disrupted between 1860 and 1874 by the Civil War and Reconstruction. J. M. Carroll, a Baptist historian who experienced the upheaval, recalled that those events

created absolutely new conditions in Texas, and virtually made a new civilization. . . . The magnitude of the State and the absence of transportation facilities rendered it difficult for the people to meet. They could not possibly know and feel and act sympathetically and harmoniously. Almost every separate community, religious and otherwise, had to think and act for itself. Carroll, p. 422.

Among the rare advances made by Baptists in this period were the founding of several German-speaking churches, the beginning of an indigenous newspaper, the Texas Baptist Herald , by J. B. Link, and the origin in 1868 of one of the most significant churches in the state, First Baptist of Dallas, with eleven members. Negro Baptists, who had generally worshipped with whites prior to the War, began several churches on their own and inspired some missionary interest on the part of white brethren, but they were encouraged to form their own cooperative societies instead of joining those already established by whites.