Walter Scott
Walter Scott was the youngest of the Founding Fathers of the
Disciples of Christ. He formulated and put into practice the
effective evangelistic method which had been lacking. It was
he who gave the impetus which changed a movement for reform within
the Baptist churches into a separate religious body.
 Walter Scott was born in Moffatt,
Scotland, in 1796. Financial limitations-his father was a music
teacher who supported ten children-did not prevent him from getting
a thorough classical education. He studied at the University
of Edinburgh and is believed to have taken a degree there.
He came to America in 1818 at the suggestion of an uncle who
worked in New York City. He taught in a Long Island Latin school,
later taught in a school in Pittsburgh conducted by afellow countryman,
George Forrester. Mr. Forrester was the leader of a small church
of "humble, pious people, mostly Scotch and Irish."
Upon the sudden drowning death of Mr. Forrester, Walter was left
to run the school and to shepherd the little church.
Delving deeper into theology and Bible study, Scott made personal
discoveries which changed the course of his life. He turned completely
towards preaching and working out a plan of evangelism. Serious
studies of religious questions still did not prevent him from
continuing a small tutoring enterprise for young men.
Depressed with the existing sectarianism within the churches,
he reached the clear conviction that the central and sufficient
fact for Christian faith could be stated in these four words.
. ."Jesus is the Christ". [McAllister & Tucker
1975]
America was a country-young, prolific, free, hopeful, and
expanding. Representatives of every sect in Europe had come to
these shores, and the complete freedom of religion made it easy
for new ones to arise, as they promptly did. Every one of them,
old and new, was a minority group. This disunion of the religious
forces was therefore more extreme than elsewhere, and the need
for its correction was more urgent. But the problem of union
had entered upon an absolutely new phase. It was no longer, as
it had been in the European countries, a political problem. It
had become a purely religious problem, to be solved, if it could
be solved at all, by religious means, by persuasion, and by voluntary
action.
Now that Christians had won the right to separate without
fear of pressure from the state or compulsion from some favored
church, they were for the first time in a position to seek a
kind of union which would not deny their freedom. It was under
these conditions that the pioneers of the Disciples of Christ
began their movement for the restoration of a simple and noncreedal
Christianity and the union of all Christians on the basis of
the essential and primitive conditions of discipleship. [Garrison
& DeGroot 1958] |
