BY ANDY TAYLOR
Montgomery County Chronicle
INDEPENDENCE — Montgomery County will be the national center of the Bible Holiness Church denomination starting next Thursday, Aug. 6, when several hundred church members from across the country gather for a 10-day camp meeting in Independence.
Independence has been home to the annual camp meeting for the Bible Holiness denomination since the 1930s. Prior to that time, camp meetings were held in Cherryvale. Baxter Springs served as the first location of a camp meeting, which took place 112 years ago. Oswego, Chetopa and Mound Valley also hosted the annual camp meeting in the denomination’s early days.
The 10-day camp meeting will include several prayer meetings and special services each day at the Bible Holiness Church campgrounds located on College Boulevard near the Independence Community College campus.
“We’re known for having a lot of services,” said Joe Davolt, pastor of the Bible Holiness Church in Independence and a member of the camp’s governing board.
New to this year’s camp meeting will be a new tabernacle, which, Davolt said, is air conditioned. Previous camp meetings were held in a sweltering sanctuary — without air conditioning — where air movement was only created by Mother Nature and church members keeping themselves as cool as possible with hand-held fans.
“It would get awfully uncomfortable in that old sanctuary building,” Davolt said.
A new dining hall also is scheduled to be ready for use for the church members.
Southeast Kansas is regarded as the original home of the Bible Holiness Church, which was previously known as the Fire Baptized Holiness Church. The church movement began in 1890 when disgruntled members of the Methodist Episcopal Church of southern Kansas separated to form their own denomination. The original name, the Southeast Kansas Fire Baptized Holiness Association, was changed in 1945. The Fire Baptized Holiness Church officially dropped the “Fire” from its name in 1995 so as not to confuse the denomination with a similarly-named Fire Baptized Holiness Church denomination that is prevalent in the southern United States.
The denomination is primarily centered in the midwestern United States (one church has been established in New York state) with Independence serving as the denomination’s headquarters.
Exactly how Independence became the home of the Bible Holiness Church is largely unknown, Davolt said. However, a church leader named D.W. Young established the Door of Hope Orphanage on South 10th Street in 1919. The establishment of that church-related orphanage and its location on South 10th Street may have led the denomination to build a campground on nearby property, said Ruth (Smith) Taylor, a church member and historian now living in Mexico, Mo.
“There were camp meetings held in Oswego, Chetopa, Mound Valley and Cherryvale in the early years of the church,” said Taylor, who formerly lived in Independence and was a teacher at the Independence Bible School. “The church’s annual camp meeting naturally gravitated toward Independence.”
In 1983, Pittsburg State University graduate student Craig Charles Fankhauser presented a master’s thesis on the Holiness movement in America with emphasis on the Fire Baptized Holiness Church movement that started in southern Kansas in the 1890s.
According to Fankhauser’s research, the church formed under the name of the Neosho Valley Holiness Church with annual camp meetings in Chetopa that attracted — by some accounts — as many as 2,000 church members from Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Indian Territory. The Fire Baptized Holiness churches of southern Kansas largely stayed away from the larger Fire Baptized Holiness movements that were taking place in other parts of the country, especially in the southern states. Instead, the Kansas-based churches remained close to the theological center of their predecesors: the Methodists or Wesleyans. The southern Kansas churches focused their attention on helping underprivileged youth with the church-sponsored orphanage in Independence, establishment of a school in Independence, and construction of a campground for annual meetings and assemblies, Fankhauser concluded in his thesis.
