Apparently, there's more than one way to welcome a new pastor to town. When Adam Crooks traveled from Ohio to North Carolina in the fall of 1847, he was greeted by the sight of a makeshift dummy with his name on it, tarred and feathered.
If the young minister felt unwelcome, it’s because he was — at least as far as most of the community was concerned. Only 23 years of age, single and newly ordained, he had come to pastor an anti-slavery congregation in the middle of a slave-holding state.
Months earlier a core group of 40 believers had heard about a new abolitionist denomination called the Wesleyans, spiritual descendants of John Wesley who dared to take a stand against slavery when other denominations were keeping silent. In a letter, they made what they knew was a difficult request: Would the Wesleyans provide them with a pastor?
Adam Crooks had been in the assembly when the request from North Carolina was read aloud. According to an eyewitness, he stood, “his cheeks pale as marble,” and volunteered for the dangerous assignment.
He answered the call.
Working through the winter months of 1847-1848, pastor and people built a simple but sturdy one-room church and named it Freedom’s Hill. The rough-hewn structure was far from ideal. It had bare benches for pews, which were constructed with wooden pegs rather than nails, and there was no heat source at first. The windows had no glass; only shutters kept out the elements. But to that courageous congregation, it was a cathedral.
Before long, though, they found their cathedral marked by bullet holes. The message was clear: next time the bullets may be for them.
A bullet-riddled door was only the beginning. One of the charter members of Freedom’s Hill, Micajah McPherson, was lynched for his anti-slavery views. The lynch mob then cut him down because, some heard them say, they needed the rope to hang another Wesleyan! What they didn’t realize was that McPherson was not yet dead. Rescued and revived by his family, he survived the lynching and continued to serve as a leader in the Freedom’s Hill congregation. He was answering a call too.
Pastor Crooks was threatened by mobs and beaten. An ambush laid for him one night failed, but other attacks were more successful. He was poisoned twice, and although he survived both attempts, the physical damage he suffered eventually shortened his life.
On one occasion he was arrested and jailed for distributing a tract on the Ten Commandments. Evidently his “crime” was pointing out that the commandment against stealing applied to man-stealing and woman-stealing as well. When he was arrested, he asked his jailor, “If Jesus were here, would you arrest him too?” The jailer replied, “If he were an abolitionist, we probably would!”
Over time Pastor Crooks was joined by two other Wesleyan ministers, Jarvis Bacon and Jesse McBride, and together they planted seven more Wesleyan churches in the area and established an additional two dozen “preaching points,” which were designated sites where pastors and people could meet to worship in the open air. Pastors Bacon and McBride were also assaulted by mobs and harassed by local law enforcement officials, much like the early church. Their story reads like an extension of the book of Acts.
Their story reads like an extension of the book of Acts.
Just as Wesleyan churches in the North were doing, Freedom’s Hill secretly operated as a station on the Underground Railroad. An escaping slave would hide in a hollow tree near the little church during the daylight hours, and after dark someone would come to lead him or her further north, to another hiding place, 20 miles closer to freedom. The congregation lived up to the name of their church. They stood for freedom — freedom from sin and freedom from slavery as well.
After four tumultuous years, Crooks and his fellow ministers were driven from the state, and the churches they had planted were left without pastors. But the people continued to be faithful to the gospel, and, after the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, Wesleyans returned to the area to find Freedom’s Hill and other congregations still proclaiming God’s truth. When the first new postwar Wesleyan church was built near one of those North Carolina preaching points in 1872, Adam Crooks came back to preach the sermon at its dedication. Today Shady Grove Wesleyan Church is a thriving congregation, still proclaiming the message of Christian holiness that was championed by the South’s first Wesleyans so long ago.
Adam Crooks kept a journal during his years in the South, a first draft of sacred history. On its pages, again and again, he asked himself the same question: “Can you give your life for the cause?” Every morning when he arose, he had no guarantee that he would live to see evening come. Fully surrendered to God, he met the challenges of each new day with steadfast faith and a self-sacrificial spirit.
In the year 2000, Freedom’s Hill was moved to the campus of Southern Wesleyan University with Civil War-era musket balls still embedded in the door. When graduating ministry majors are commissioned each spring on the campus of Southern Wesleyan, they kneel at the old church’s “anxious bench” where seekers found God’s love and grace so long ago.
If you come to the campus, you can stand in Adam Crooks’ pulpit. It’s holy ground. But what if Adam Crooks could stand in your pulpit? What would this Christian hero of the 19th century say to believers in the 21st?
My guess is that he would ask us what he asked himself so many times: “Can you give your life for the cause?”The God who called him walked with him every step of the way. That same God — the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Adam Crooks — calls us as well and promises to walk with us every step of our way, too.
How can we give him less than our ALL?