Campaign for Christ (1)

Upon leaving Texas we made plans for a city wide evangelistic campaign.   Door-to-door calling was a commonly accepted method of evangelizing in those days.  The people in Texas who contributed to our support wanted to come to New York, see the work we were doing, and participate in it, so we began making plans for the arrival of the workers from Texas.  Jim and Charles called on their Yoeman skills to get us ready for the campaign.  We were pretty well organized.

We worked hard to recruit workers.  Most of them came from Texas.  We had 11 people staying out our house.  That was quite an undertaking for Ann.  We fed them (although the church helped us with the groceries), and we found places for them all to sleep. Just think about the challenge of having 11 different house guests at the same time for two weeks.  We knew some of them previously.  Others we did not, and some of them didn't know each other.  The biggest challenge was the bathroom.  We only had one bathroom, so we had to set up a schedule.  I made sure that I took my shower in the middle of the day while the campaigners were out working.

We held public services in the evening.  We were still in the converted pool hall, so we needed a larger place for services.  We learned that the Masonic Lodge owned a building that had a 300 seat auditorium, and we rented it for a week.   We invited my friend Truman Spring to preach for us.  The campaign workers loved Truman.  He had a rather bombastic style.  Abraham Lincoln once said that he preferred preacher who preached as if they were fighting yellow jackets.  He would have liked Truman.  In his early life Truman aspired to become a United States Senator.  He would have put on quite a show on the senate floor if  he had followed that inclination.  We had reasonably good crowds, but I’m not sure about how much the whole campaign affected the future progress of the church.  It was a great shot in the arm for the members, but in retrospect I think the community probably viewed us as a group of southern immigrants trying to import our religion and save the wretched Yankees.