“Members One of Another”: The Maine Interdenominational Commission and the Reshaping of Community, 1900–30

The Maine Interdenominational Commission, which flourished during the early decades of the twentieth century, offers crucial insight into the process by which religious organizations recast social and cultural divisions. The commission’s founders – including Bowdoin College president William Dewitt Hyde and Bates College theologian Alfred William Anthony – drew upon ideas of efficiency and managed competition that permeated national culture and applied them to the Protestant churches in their state. Their goal was to curtail the waste of resources by allowing only one church to be established in developing rural areas, and to combine churches of different denominations when they could no longer sustain themselves.

An organization created out of practical concerns quickly found itself enmeshed in more fundamental issues of religious, class, and ethnic division in Maine’s communities. Despite the insistence of Anthony and Hyde that their organization would not wade into matters of belief or practice, such discussions proved inevitable as the Interdenominational Commission sought to bring together congregations from denominations with such divergent ideas of polity as Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists. Even more crucially, disparities often existed between churches in the socio-economic status of their members. When the commission sought to federate or merge such churches, class relations within communities were invariably recast.

The leaders of the Maine commission played a critical role in the establishment of the Federal Council of Churches and of numerous ecumenical organizations in other states. Through an examination of the group’s published pamphlets and annual reports, the personal papers of its founders, and the records of churches that were established, federated, or merged through the work of the commission, this paper highlights the significant effect that ecumenical organizations had not only on churches, but on wider communities as well.