tff 0 
 
 THE RECORD 
 OF A YEAR 
 
 Progress of the Work 
 of the General War- 
 Time Commission of 
 the Churches 
 1917-1918 
 
 by 
 
 REV. WILLIAM ADAMS BROWN 
 
rpHE following report was presented at the 
 "'*■ Second Annual Meeting of the General 
 War-Time Commission of the Churches 
 in Washington, D. C., September 241918 
 
 by 
 
 William Adams Brown 
 
 Secretary of the Commission 
 
The Record of a Year 
 
 By 
 
 Rev. William Adams Brown 
 
 M R. CHAIRMAN and Members of the Gen¬ 
 eral War-Time Commission: 
 
 A year ago, in New York City, the greatest 
 center of population in the country, this General 
 War-Time Commission was born. We meet 
 today in Washington, the seat of the Nation’s 
 Government, and the center from which the 
 threads of leadership reach out to the ends of the 
 earth, to make report of the year’s progress. It 
 is an encouraging story that we have to tell. In 
 many different lines we can register distinct prog¬ 
 ress over a year ago. The progress appears in 
 our more vivid consciousness of unity, in our 
 closer practical co-operation, in the clearer defini¬ 
 tion of the function of the different agencies that 
 are working together in the common task, and, 
 above all, in our enlarged program for the future. 
 It would be an agreeable task if time permitted 
 and I were not as certain as I am of the Puritan 
 conscience of our Chairman, to pay a tribute to 
 the different influences that have co-operated in 
 bringing us to this place. 
 
 I would like to speak, first of all, of the attitude 
 of the various representatives of the Government 
 with whom we have had to do during the past 
 year, and who have met us uniformly with a 
 courteous sympathy which we cannot too highly 
 appreciate. There will be opportunity as time 
 gees on to refer by name to some of those with¬ 
 out whom our work could not have been done. 
 I should like to refer to the work of the different 
 
 3 
 
denominational war commissions whose confi¬ 
 dence and practical support, given in increasing 
 measure, has made possible whatever has been 
 accomplished. I should like to speak of the serv¬ 
 ices of the officials and commissions of the 
 Federal Council, which brought this War-Time 
 Commission into existence, through whose facili¬ 
 ties alone it has been possible for us to do what 
 we have done and with whom we have been co¬ 
 operating more and more closely throughout the 
 year. And what shall I say of those great arms 
 of the Church, the Young Men’s Christian Asso¬ 
 ciation and the Young Womens Christian Asso¬ 
 ciation, whose expansion through the year, in 
 their far-sighted and many-sided programs, we 
 have witnessed with so much interest and so much 
 satisfaction? Not the least of the elements of 
 progress that we have to report is the constantly 
 closer relationship into which we have entered 
 with the leaders of those organizations, as we 
 have taken up with them in conference the many 
 practical questions that have arisen and tried to 
 devise the most effective methods of work in and 
 about the camps. 
 
 I should like to speak of our closer relationship 
 with our fellow-citizens of other religious faiths 
 whom we have touched in the great task of patri¬ 
 otism, of that spirit evidenced, for example, to 
 take but a single instance, by Colonel Cutler, the 
 Chairman of the Jewish Welfare Board, who was 
 the first to protest against the proposed removal of 
 the Christian cross from the insignia of the Chap¬ 
 lain-on the ground that it was the right and the 
 duty of the Christian people to express their re¬ 
 ligious convictions according to the symbol which 
 was dearest to them. 
 
 I should like to speak of the Committee on the 
 Churches and the Moral Aims of the War, which 
 
 4 
 
independently and yet in a most co-operative 
 spirit, has been working at a different phase of 
 the common task, that committee to which we owe 
 the presence of the distinguished visitors whom 
 we shall hear in the course of the day, who have 
 come to us to express the Christian sympathy and 
 fellowship that bind us to our fellow Christians 
 of Great Britain—whose coming is a symbol of 
 the wider fellowship which will some day, we dare 
 to believe, unite all Christians in a world-wide 
 brotherhood of faith and service. 
 
 But my task here is simply to speak of the 
 part that has been played in this many-sided 
 activity by our General War-Time Commission. 
 It will be possible for me in briefest outline to 
 touch upon three or four only of the marked evi¬ 
 dences of progress for which I think our work in 
 the War-Time Commission may justly claim some 
 small share of credit. 
 
 An Agency for the Common Work of the Churches 
 
 First, and most important of all, in the Com¬ 
 mission there has been brought into existence an 
 agency through which the churches can work 
 together without the sacrifice of principle. It 
 was for this very purpose that the Commission 
 was brought into existence. You remember the 
 situation a year ago. Many different Christian 
 agencies were operating in the same or allied 
 spheres without any common clearing house. It 
 was in the hope that we might create such a clear¬ 
 ing house that the Commission was appointed, 
 and I think that your presence here today is the 
 best evidence that that has been accomplished. 
 
 There have been many ways in which the Com¬ 
 mission has acted as a common agency. It has 
 acted as such an agency in the acquisition and 
 dissemination of information. We have made 
 
 5 
 
surveys of the camps and hospitals which have 
 been made accessible to you all. Through our 
 service bulletin sent to the different commissions, 
 through the clip-sheet which has been issued to 
 the religious press; above all, through the many- 
 sided contacts which it has brought about between 
 individuals, our Commission has made possible 
 an understanding between the different religious 
 agencies, which I think we may fairly say would 
 not have been possible in any other way. 
 
 Contribution to the Religious Life of the Army 
 
 Again, the existence of the Commission has 
 made it possible to do a number of different 
 things which could not easily have been done 
 otherwise, because there was nobody else to do 
 them. These things have been of all kinds, from 
 the erection of inter-denominational buildings in 
 such centers as Camp Upton and Camp Dix, 
 where there was no single body to handle the 
 mass of detail which was involved, to devising 
 a form of admission which could be used by the 
 Chaplains in France for those men who wished 
 to make a confession of Christ and to join the 
 Church. Today, through this form, the churches 
 can follow their men to France and in the person 
 of the Chaplain, receive the confession which he 
 in turn transmits to the home church. If, in the 
 providence of God, before the letter carrying the 
 news home arrives, the man who makes the con¬ 
 fession should be called to join the great army on 
 the other side, his name will be entered upon the 
 church roll as one who actually entered the church 
 fellowship while serving under the flag. 
 
 A Voice for the Churches 
 
 In the third place, the Commission has acted 
 as a common agency in those connections in which 
 it was the desire of the churches to speak 
 
 6 
 
unitedly for the Church to the churches and to 
 the Nation. To use but a single illustration: In 
 connection with the Memorial Day celebration, a 
 celebration which, at the suggestion of our Presi¬ 
 dent, was given a religious tone, our Commission 
 was the means of gathering expressions of loyalty 
 and patriotism from the churches, which were 
 sent in a memorial album to our President, and 
 I have here a letter which he wrote in response 
 to that message, a message that deeply touched his 
 heart. May I read that letter? It was addressed 
 to Dr. Speer: 
 
 “I thank you sincerely for sending me the 
 very interesting and inspiring messages from the 
 several churches which you have been kind enough 
 to have made accessible to me in a binding. If I 
 followed my own impulse, I would certainly reply 
 to some of these messages, but I see only too 
 clearly that if I began I should begin to discrimi¬ 
 nate as between one message and another or else 
 be obliged to answer them all, which would be out 
 of the question. I must content myself with ask¬ 
 ing you to avail yourself of any opportunity you 
 may have to say with what interest and inspira¬ 
 tion I have received them. 
 
 Cordially and sincerely yours, 
 
 Woodrow Wilson.” 
 
 This common action has taken place without 
 any sacrifice of principle. We recognize the deep 
 convictions and the historic traditions which in¬ 
 spire and which support the different bodies who 
 have been working together in this War-Time 
 Commission. We have not attempted any action 
 that would involve any sacrifice of conviction on 
 the part of any who have co-operated with 
 us, but we have believed, and we have been glad 
 to find our belief confirmed by experience, that 
 there was a great body of common Christian 
 conviction on the basis of which we could work. 
 
 7 
 
The Work for Chaplains 
 
 In the second place, we have done something 
 to promote the religious welfare of our Army and 
 our Navy through our work for our Chaplains, 
 regular and voluntary. This matter will be 
 brought before you so fully by those following 
 me that I will spend but a single moment upon 
 it. But I do want to say with the utmost force 
 of conviction that there is no one of all the 
 interests committed to us which has engaged more 
 of our time, our thought, our effort and our deep 
 conviction. Here in Washington you know what 
 has been done through the General Committee on 
 Army and Navy Chaplains, which is the agency 
 with which the Government deals in the selection 
 and appointment of Protestant Chaplains. We 
 have endeavored to reinforce and strengthen the 
 work of that office and in addition, we, in New 
 York, have had not a little to do through the 
 Chaplains’ Equipment Bureau, which, acting on 
 behalf of the different cooperating bodies, 
 furnishes needed equipment to the Chaplains as 
 they pass through the city en route for their port 
 of debarkation and the front. 
 
 More important than any specific thing we 
 have been able to do for the Chaplains is the ef¬ 
 fort we have made to put them in their proper 
 place in the consciousness of the Army and of 
 the Nation. We have not succeeded in doing 
 everything that we wanted to; we have not suc¬ 
 ceeded in doing all that ought to be done; we 
 have not succeeded in doing all that will be done. 
 There are some of our friends who appear to 
 believe the General War-Time Commission is a 
 more powerful agency than perhaps it is and 
 they have wondered that we have not accom¬ 
 plished more; but when one looks back and com¬ 
 pares the situation a year ago with what we see 
 
 8 
 
now, and looks at things in the large perspective, 
 
 I think we have every reason to thank God and 
 take courage. Then the Chaplain was a regi¬ 
 mental officer pure and simple, without any con¬ 
 tact with the Church, without any recognized 
 place in the large program of Christian service 
 which was being outlined by the great volun¬ 
 tary agencies that fill the public consciousness. 
 The Chaplains were few in number. They had 
 no equipment, no proper training, no organiza¬ 
 tion and no clearly defined status. At every one 
 of these points we note progress. The number 
 of the Chaplains has been largely increased 
 through the passage of the bill providing for one 
 Chaplain for every twelve hundred men. The 
 responsibility of the Government for the equip¬ 
 ment of the Chaplain has been conceded in prin¬ 
 ciple. Provision has been made for the training 
 of Chaplains through the training school at 
 Camp Zachary Taylor. The status of the Chap¬ 
 lain as a spiritual officer has been more clearly 
 defined and safeguarded. In France notable 
 progress has been made through the organization 
 of the Chaplains under Bishop Brent and his 
 associates into a compact and efficient working 
 body. Above all, the principle has been recog¬ 
 nized by the Government and by the churches 
 that the Chaplain is the responsible leader of the 
 religious forces of the Army and of the Navy. 
 
 Two points that will be touched upon by those 
 who come after me are the organization of the 
 Chaplains in this country and provision for a 
 proper rank commensurate with the dignity of 
 their office and the importance of their service. On 
 the last point I want to say only this single word. 
 While we appreciate the reasons that have led 
 some to believe that it would be wiser to remove 
 the Chaplain’s rank and let him serve as a purely 
 
 9 
 
spiritual officer, we believe that so long as he 
 remains an officer of the Army, he ought to be 
 put in a position where he stands on a par with 
 the men who serve in the other arms of the 
 service. 
 
 Voluntary Chaplains or Camp Pastors 
 
 Of the work done by the voluntary Chaplains 
 or camp pastors, I cannot speak here. It has 
 occupied a large part of our time and no small 
 share of our effort. In many different ways we 
 have tried to serve these voluntary Chaplains. 
 We have held conferences which have brought 
 together groups in different cities; we have 
 written letters sharing with them the experience 
 which has come to us of the possible ways of 
 most effective service; we have prepared a brief 
 for the Government setting forth in the fullest 
 way the services which they have rendered; and 
 only yesterday a conference was held with the 
 War Department in order to discuss the ways and 
 means in which their services might be preserved 
 in a new and more effective way during the 
 coming year. 
 
 In connection with this matter of the voluntary 
 Chaplain, a large question has emerged upon 
 which I cannot enter here, a question of the effec¬ 
 tive mobilization of the voluntary religious forces 
 of the Nation. We see today the country’s man¬ 
 hood drafted and assigned for war service on a 
 nation-wide scale, and we cannot believe the 
 Christian Church will fulfill its function in this 
 great war adequately until we devise some 
 method by which we may survey the religious task 
 of the churches on a scale as comprehensive. Why 
 should not the ministry like the rest of the Na¬ 
 tion’s manhood, morally at least, be drafted into 
 the service and assigned, each man in the light 
 
 10 
 
ot his peculiar gifts and fitness, to some task to 
 be administered on behalf of the Church as a 
 whole ? 
 
 The Moral Tone of the Nation 
 
 The third of the points in which we can register 
 progress is the work of the Commission in pro¬ 
 viding an agency to reinforce the efforts of the 
 Government in its attempt to promote the moral 
 welfare of the Army, and so of the whole Nation. 
 I would like here to pay, as no doubt those who 
 follow me will pay in fullest measure the 
 tribute we owe to the Government for its stand 
 in this great matter. Never before, I believe, in 
 the history of the world has a War Department 
 entered upon a great war with such a moral ideal 
 as has inspired those who have directed our 
 American Army. It was my privilege to speak 
 recently with a distinguished French clergyman 
 who had visited this country, and his testimony as 
 to what it meant to his country to have in its 
 midst an army that stood for the kind of ideals 
 for which our Army has tried to stand, I wish 
 I could rehearse in his own words. He said, 
 “These young men are ambassadors to interpret 
 to us the genius of your Christianity, and the 
 more you send, the better.” 
 
 You will have brought before you in due time 
 what the Commission has tried to do to reinforce 
 the Government in this great task. I will only 
 say that as we have been coming more closely 
 to face the problems which this attempt raises, 
 our thought has necessarily been led beyond the 
 Army to the Nation from which the Army comes. 
 As General Pershing said in a letter which will 
 doubtless be brought before you at the proper 
 time, “After all, it is a common fight—yours 
 there and ours here. What is necessary for the 
 manhood of the soldier is necessary for the man- 
 
 11 
 
hood of the civilian.” And it is for us to devise 
 a way in which the ideal which we have set for 
 our Army and our Navy may be carried over and 
 made effective in the life of the Nation as a whole. 
 
 A Program for the Future 
 
 This matter of the moral tone of the Nation 
 is but one of a group of larger questions which 
 the year’s experience has brought to light. I 
 shall have time to hint at them only as I touch 
 for a moment on the last of the four points, 
 namely, the service of the Commission in out¬ 
 lining the program through which the Church can 
 approach, unitedly and constructively, the solu¬ 
 tion of the new problems which the war has 
 revealed. These new problems center in the 
 great industrial communities which the war has 
 brought into being—in our munition factories, 
 our shipbuilding plants, the great centers of in¬ 
 dustry which in so many different fields are co¬ 
 operating with the Government in the gigantic 
 task of supplying the sinews of war. Here is a 
 field all but untouched, but a field which the 
 Christian forces must enter. I am glad here to 
 bear my testimony to the wise and far-sighted 
 plans which are being made by the Young Men’s 
 Christian Association and the Young Womens 
 Christian Association to do for the men and 
 women in our industrial centers the same 
 kind of thing which they have so well done for 
 the men in camp. But we feel that however 
 much they may do, there is a sphere that belongs 
 to the organized Church that no one else can fill. 
 
 There are two possibilities before us. We may 
 approach our problem in an opportunistic way, 
 taking it piecemeal and letting each body try to 
 handle its share independently, as we did in the 
 case of the cantonments; or we may attack it 
 
 12 
 
together as parts of one great organized body 
 representing the Church of Jesus Christ. 
 
 We propose to do the latter and for this pur¬ 
 pose have created the Joint Committee on War 
 Production Communities. This is a committee of 
 sixteen persons composed in part of representa¬ 
 tives of the Home Missions Council, a body 
 which brings together the great Home Boards; in 
 part of representatives of the Council of Women 
 for Home Missions, which represents the different 
 agencies of women engaged in Home Missions 
 work; and in part of the General War-Time 
 Commission, acting through the Commission on 
 the Church and Social Service. This Commis¬ 
 sion has mapped out a program for a united 
 approach to the industrial center and has secured 
 the support of the chief co-operating agencies, 
 including the Young Men’s and the Young 
 Womens Christian Associations. 
 
 A Task for All the Churches 
 
 This program will be laid before you in detail 
 today. It requires for its full and successful 
 operation the co-operation of the churches on 
 a scale far greater and far more concerted than 
 ever before. We shall bring before you a pro¬ 
 posal for a joint campaign on the part of the 
 organized Protestant churches, properly defined 
 and related to the other campaigns that are being 
 planned by other bodies, which will explain the 
 special work which the Christian churches are 
 asked to do, and which, if successful, will gene¬ 
 rate the power which will make possible a long 
 step forward towards larger and better things in 
 the future. 
 
 Mr. Chairman, may I say this only in closing? 
 While I have confined what I have said to matters 
 which have come directly within the purview of 
 
 13 
 
our War-Time Commission in reference to its 
 more immediate tasks, and while I have left many 
 other things of supreme importance untouched, 
 as for example, the work done by our committee 
 on negro troops, which has made an intensive 
 study of conditions affecting this important sec¬ 
 tion of our people, a study which has already 
 begun to bear fruit, or the work of the Committee 
 on Recruiting and Training for the Work of the 
 Churches at Home and Abroad, while, I repeat, 
 we have been concerned primarily with these 
 detailed tasks, our thoughts have ever been turn¬ 
 ing forward to those larger problems of recon¬ 
 struction in the Nation, in the Church and in the 
 world at large for which alone this war is being 
 fought, and through the successful solution of 
 which alone we can achieve our fullest measure 
 of victory. How these problems are to be at¬ 
 tacked, and through what agencies, we shall con¬ 
 sider at a later time; but it has been our convic¬ 
 tion that the most practical preparation which we 
 can make for taking part unitedly in these larger 
 tasks is to work together intelligently, unselfishly 
 and with unstinted devotion at those immediate 
 duties which the providence of God seems to be 
 laying at our door. 
 
 I want in closing to pay my word of tribute to 
 the many whose helpful co-operation given in 
 unstinted measure has made the work of the 
 leaders of the Commission easy, and not least to 
 the members of the staff of whose devotion and 
 unselfishness I cannot speak too highly. Above 
 all, I want to voice our thanksgiving to Almighty 
 God for the best gift of the year, that ever deep¬ 
 ening and more vivid consciousness of a unity 
 of the Spirit that has become to some of us 
 just as certain a fact as the things our eyes can 
 see. I recall one meeting some months ago, when 
 
 14 
 
a group of our camp pastors met for conference 
 about the practical tasks of the Christian Church. 
 We sat from morning until long into the after¬ 
 noon, when suddenly a suggestion was made that 
 we stop our discussion of details for a moment 
 and lift our thoughts to our main objective, the 
 common purpose and the common faith for the 
 sake of which we had come together. We were 
 men of many communions, of many antecedents, 
 of many creeds, but as we spent that short half- 
 hour in contemplation of the eternal realities of 
 the Spirit for the sake of which all these other 
 things were being done, we were conscious that 
 we were in truth one. We spoke of the love of 
 God as made manifest in the person of our Lord 
 and Saviour, Jesus Christ, of His sacrifice on 
 Calvary, of the dignity of the individual soul 
 called to fellowship with Christ, of the righteous¬ 
 ness of God and the need of repentance, of the 
 transforming power of the Holy Spirit, of the 
 authority and responsibility of the Christian 
 Church. And, as our minds and hearts were 
 drawn together in the contemplation of these 
 great things, our differences were forgotten, not 
 because we had sacrificed anything that was 
 precious, but because we had reached down to 
 those deeper depths in which our spirits touched 
 the spirits of our fellow Christians in adoration 
 of that which was most sacred and precious to 
 us both. We believe that such a meeting as this, 
 that the many meetings like this that are being 
 held all over this great country throughout the 
 past year, will lead us out into the larger unity 
 which alone will make it possible for the Church 
 to fulfill its highest mission. With that thought 
 and in that faith we go forward hopefully into 
 the work of the new year. 
 
 15 
 
GENERAL WAR-TIME 
 COMMISSION OF THE CHURCHES 
 
 105 East 22nd Street 
 New York City 
 
 Washington office at 
 
 937 Woodward Building, Washington, D. C. 
 
 Officers of the 
 Commission 
 
 Robert E. Speer, 
 
 Chairman 
 
 Rt. Rev William Lawrence, 
 Vice-Chairman 
 
 Rev. William Adams Brown, 
 Secretary 
 
 Rev. Gaylord S. White, 
 Associate Secretary 
 
 Rev. W. Stuart Cramer, 
 
 Rev. Jasper T. Moses, 
 Harold H. Tryon, 
 
 Assistant Secretaries 
 
 Margaret Renton, 
 
 Office Secretary 
 
 Officers of the 
 Federal Council of the 
 Churches of Christ 
 in America 
 
 Rev. Frank Mason North, 
 President 
 
 Alfred R. Kimball, Treasurer 
 
 Rev. Charles S. Macfarland, 
 General Secretary 
 
 Rev. Worth M. Tippy, 
 
 Rev. Henry A. Atkinson, 
 
 Rev. Edmund deS. Brunner 
 Rev. Charles L. Goodell, 
 
 Rev. Roy B. Guild, 
 
 Rev. Sidney L. Gulick, 
 Secretaries 
 
 Rev. Eddison Mosiman, 
 Assistant to the General 
 Secretary 
 
 Executive Committee of the Commission 
 
 Rev. Alfred Williams Anthony 
 
 Rev. Henry A. Atkinson 
 
 President Clarence A. Barbour 
 
 Rev. Samuel Z. Batten 
 
 Rev. Edgar Blake 
 
 E. M. Bowman 
 
 Rev. J. F. Carson 
 
 Rev. W. I. Chamberlain 
 
 Rev. F. G. Coffin 
 
 Rev. W. Stuart Cramer 
 
 Miss Mabel Cratty 
 
 Rev. Lyman E. Davis 
 
 Rev. D. D. Forsyth 
 
 John M. Glenn 
 
 Rev. B. D. Gray 
 
 Rev. Howard B. Grose 
 
 William A. Harbison 
 
 Rev. William I. Haven 
 
 Professor J. R. Hawkins 
 
 Bishop Theodore S. Henderson 
 
 George Innes 
 
 Lt. Col. Walter F. Jenkins 
 
 Alfred R. Kimball 
 
 Pres. Henry Churchill King 
 
 Rev. F. H. Knubel 
 
 Bishop Walter R. Lambuth 
 
 Rev. Albert G. Lawson 
 
 Pres. Wm. Douglas Mackenzie 
 
 Bishop William F. McDowell 
 
 John R. Mott 
 
 Rev. R. Niebuhr 
 
 Rt. Rev. Theodore I. Reese 
 
 Rev. H. Franklin Schlegel 
 
 Fred B. Smith 
 
 James M. Speers 
 
 President J. Ross Stevenson 
 
 Rev. Paul Moore Strayer 
 
 Bishop Wilbur P. Thirkield 
 
 Wilbur K. Thomas 
 
 Rev. James I. Vance 
 
 2500 2 . 1.19