Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
The Brethren Church frequently held its national denominational conferences in Winona Lake.
In the year 1900, sessions of the Aug. 31 to Sept. 5 conclave were centered in the white wooden auditorium located at the foot of the Ninth Street hill, approximately where the Rodeheaver Auditorium now stands.
Delegates had been dealing with the normal agenda items of budget, election of leadership, selection of hymnals and more. But one pastor, Jacob C. Cassell, had a burning vision and passion that he wanted to express.
Cassel had helped start a congregation in Philadelphia in 1887, and more recently had been attending missions gatherings in New York. There he met mission leaders, including J. Hudson Taylor, Andrew Murray and more. These men were driven by a vision to evangelize the entire world in their generation. And Jacob Cassel caught the vision.
So on Tuesday morning of the Winona Lake conference, Cassel stood up and delivered an impassioned message that focused around the question “Are we ready to enter the foreign missions field?” A few delegates responded affirmatively, but not the larger body of the conference.
An eyewitness to the proceedings, L. S. Bauman, recorded “When the issue was presented of actually effecting a foreign missionary organization within the conference itself, no encouragement was given. The missionary enthusiasts were informed that there was plenty of room ‘out under the trees’ where they could go to effect their organization. And this was exactly what they did. Having been given the cold shoulder by the conference, the group betook themselves to a little knoll to the north of the building where the conference was being held … On this spot the missionary enthusiasts who refused to have their ardor cooled conceived and brought to birth the Foreign Missionary Society of the Brethren Church.”
The records show that 53 “mission enthusiasts” were part of that founding meeting. The spot is now marked with a concrete marker beside the picnic shelter on the knoll between Swiss Terrace and Park Avenue, with the metal plaque inscription reading “On This Knoll, September 4, 1900, the Foreign Missionary Society of the Brethren Church was organized.”
One of the first leaders of the new movement was Charles F. Yoder, an honors graduate of the University of Chicago, who pastored the First Brethren Church of Warsaw, Indiana, having grown it from 30 to 430 members. Working with him was L.S. Bauman, a pastor from Philadelphia, who later moved to a church in Long Beach, California, and served as the general secretary of the Foreign Missionary Society from 1906 to 1945.
Their first field of interest was Persia, and when that didn’t work out, they shifted attention to starting in Montreal. But eventually it was Argentina where the first missionary efforts were centered. Charles Yoder departed for Argentina in September 1909 with his family and a single missionary, Bertha May Bell. They began in Rio Cuarto, a city in central Argentina.
As the missionary efforts grew, focus shifted to Africa, and in 1918 a couple named Florence and James Gribble sailed for Africa, intending to start mission work in the western Oubangui-Chari region in colonial French Equatorial Africa. Because of World War I, among other reasons, they weren’t granted permission to enter the country until 1921, but their entry into the area that today is Central African Republic began one of the great sagas of missions history.
Today, as a result of the seminal work of the Gribbles and others, Central African Republic is one of the most evangelized countries in the world. By some reports, nearly 3,000 Brethren churches have been established and on any given Sunday morning nearly a half-million people are worshipping in Brethren churches in the C.A.R.
The early 1950s became the greatest period of expansion for the Society, as missions were established in Brazil, Mexico, France, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. The leadership was now headquartered in Winona Lake and was led by a former pastor, Dr. Russell Barnard. In the 1980s, efforts shifted to evangelism and church planting in a number of Asian and Central Asian countries.
The Society eventually moved its headquarters to Atlanta and, at this writing, is relocating again to the Columbus, Ohio, area. It has been rebranded as Encompass World Partners, and currently has active missionary work in more than 30 nations.
Thousands — perhaps millions — have now been impacted by the gospel message through Brethren foreign missions. And it all started with 53 people who took their vision out onto the knoll under the trees in Winona Lake and began a movement that now reaches around the globe.
