Faith Works 2-17-23

Faith Works 2-17-23
Jeff Gill

Public votes and private pressures in church life
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On Feb. 20, 1923, my home church, First Christian Church of Valparaiso, Indiana, had a special called board meeting.

It was a Tuesday night, and any minister knows a special called board meeting is never a good thing. Or at least, rarely so.

Rev. C.E. Burns had asked for the meeting, in fact, with what I infer was the support of a few of the elders of the congregation. In some way, a request had been presented to ask for the use of the sanctuary on Wednesday, Feb. 21, for a public meeting of the Ku Klux Klan in Valparaiso.

There are almost no records of that meeting, how long it went, or what arguments were presented pro or con. In the church history it is simply recorded that permission was denied. As I grew up there, some fifty years later I only heard "our church faced down the Klan." And in fact the public meeting was held elsewhere, and the planning for the coming May multi-state rally would continue without the support of First Christian Church. That's almost all I know from the official record.

What I do know in more detail is from a March, 1923 article in the Klan's weekly newspaper, published in Indianapolis titled, of course, "The Fiery Cross." Their coverage bemoans the bias and unfairness of Rev. Burns and his supporters, noting that the motion failed to host the Klan meeting, but adding that the vote was 13 to 9. Not exactly an overwhelming mandate.

And when my father in 1987 was working on a 150th anniversary history of the church, he got a letter from Myrtle Burns Grant, who was the daughter of Rev. C.E. Burns and was a little girl in 1923. She told a pair of funny stories about a potato peeler in the church kitchen, and how her brothers had fallen asleep behind the organ one Sunday during their father's sermon, so when it came time to play the closing hymn, there was no one to pump the bellows and no music came out. Those both made it into the history book published that year.

What the Sesquicentennial Committee voted to have my dad edit out of her letter was a further story, about looking out the front windows of the parsonage one night to see a group of hooded men burning a cross on the front lawn of their home. And about how it happened again, and again, and so the family moved at the end of the year, two states away. That story didn't make it into the history; I heard about it from my frustrated father.

Growing up in that Indiana town, I heard about how the Klan was denied the chance to purchase Valparaiso University, a story which turned out to be untrue in many particulars, and how my church stood up to the Klan, which was true in part, but not true enough to protect a minister with three children in his home.

And paging through the online copies of "The Fiery Cross" to find the hidden details, to compare and contrast their slant to the narratives I knew from more "official" sources, I kept finding headlines next to each other about Valparaiso, Indiana and Newark, Ohio.

You may ask if events 100 years old are relevant today; I note for myself how stories I heard fifty and forty years ago turn out to be oddly edited and often partial. As both a pastor and a historian, I'm interested in what those edits might tell us about what stories we're telling today, and how we can tell truer stories, both to and about ourselves.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's got a few more chapters of this story to assemble. Share your feedback with him as some already have done at knapsack77@gmail.com (all responses will be kept confidential unless you specifically ask otherwise).