This Week in Texas Methodist History November 10

Texas Conference Calls on Churches to Celebrate Centennial of Texas Methodism,   November 1916

The Texas Annual Conference met in Lufkin from November 8 to 13, 1916.  Bishop McCoy presided over a most interesting session.  

Bishop E. E. Hoss came to Conference as the speaker in a special service in honor of the 100^th anniversary of the death of Francis Asbury.   The conference recognized the ethnic diversity in the Brazos Valley by appointing Francisco Zito to the Italian Mission and Josef Dobes and William Brichta to the Bohemia Mission all three were in the Navasota District.   Brichta came with ordination papers from the Presbyterian church and delighted the attendees with an account of his former life as a Roman Catholic priest. 

The Conference also called on churches to celebrate the centennial of Texas Methodism the following year, 1917.  What!???  I thought Texas Methodists celebrated that centennial in 1934.  

The 1917 date was chosen by relying (incorrectly) on Homer Thrall’s statement that William Stevenson organized a Methodist class in the Red River region in 1817.   Subsequent scholarship has shown that Stevenson actually preached south of the Red River even earlier than 1817. 

The resolution called for each pastoral charge to celebrate in May 1817 by compiling a history of that church, and that presiding elders were directed to write up a history of the district.  Each Methodist school in Texas was instructed to write up its history. 

The committee did not stop there.  It directed the secretary of each annual conference to compile a history of the sessions of that conference from its origins to 1917.  It further directed the Advocate to compile a Centennial Yearbook for all of the conferences in the state.

The resolution in 1916 sounds very much like what happened in 1934—even down to the compilation of a Centennial Yearbook.