Journal: Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal
Volume: DBSJ 15:1 (NA 2010)
Article: “Come Apart And Rest A While”: The Origin Of The Bible Conference Movement In America
Author: Mark Sidwell

DBSJ 15 (2010) p. 75

“Come Apart And Rest A While”: The Origin Of The Bible Conference Movement In America

Mark Sidwell1

Dating the beginning of the Protestant fundamentalist movement in the United States is a tricky business. As good a case as any could be made, perhaps, for May 25 to June 1, 1919. On those dates there met in Philadelphia a “World Bible Conference” that became the foundation of the World’s Christian Fundamentals Association (WCFA), what David Beale described as “the birth of organized, interdenominational Fundamentalism.”2 Starting from scratch, the organizers sought to assemble a structure to perpetuate their organization and its goal of defending the fundamentals of Christian doctrine from the assaults of liberalism. One method they hit upon was to organize a “Committee on Correlation of Bible Conferences,” chaired by Minnesota Baptist W. B. Riley. In undertaking his task, the chairman praised the Bible conference movement as “one of the greatest movements of modern times, a movement that is indisputably from God.” He continued:

Thoughtful observers must also be profoundly impressed with the timeliness of the conference conception. Just when modernism was lifting its head in Germany, God moved upon certain of His servants in England and America to originate a method of Bible study that was destined to prove not only an antidote to the poison of modernism, but a medium of sanctification of saints and salvation of sinners.3

Riley saw the conferences as a natural weapon for the WCFA to adopt in its fight for the faith: “By means of the Bible conferences we can enormously aid all those people who are making a fight for evangelical religion in their varied denominations and kindred organizations.”4

As Riley’s comments indicate, Bible conferences served both to form and to further the fundamentalist movement. Twenty-first-century Protestant fundamentalism has many roots—a variety of

DBSJ 15 (2010) p. 76

institutions, theological movements, and social forces. These roots include a growing interest in premillennialism and the conservative scholarship of Princeton Seminary, the challenges to America’s “Christian” civilization made by Darwinian evolution, and the development of Bible institutes and Bible colleges. Bible conferences take a prominent place in this list. Yet, although observers acknowledge the debt of fundamentalism to these conferences, the precise nature of that contribution remains hazy. How exactly did the Bible conference movement cont...