Ministers of Portland Avenue Church of Christ, Louisville, Kentucky (3)
Robert Burns Neal (1881-1883)
Hans Rollmann
Robert Burns Neal was born in Georgetown, Kentucky, on 19 February 1847. On 4 March 1866, when he was 19 years old, he became a member of the Christian Church. He received his education at Georgetown College in Georgetown, KY, and further training at Transylvania University in Lexington. For four years he was a student in the College of the Bible, which prepared him for his ministerial career.
In 1875 he was chosen as the City Evangelist of Louisville, a city in which he would spend nearly two decades and also find his wife. In this city on the Ohio River, Neal established two churches, one of which was the Campbell Street Christian Church, later renamed Haldeman Avenue Church. The founding of this congregation was an initiative of the older Chestnut Church, later named Broadway Christian Church. Neal also was involved in establishing the Christian Church Widows’ and Orphans’ Home of Kentucky in Louisville, the first of its kind sponsored by Christian Churches.
In Louisville, Neal also found the love of his life and untiring co-worker in Miss Lucy Snyder. While he was engaged to her he suffered serious injuries falling from a buggy. The injuries he sustained, which would plague him throughout his life, were so severe that one feared for his life. In fact, Neal thought it best to release his fiancée from her obligation to marry him, which she declined. Before their wedding on 6 December 1877, the couple spent a summer evangelizing on Prince Edward Island in Atlantic Canada. With them were John Simpson and his son R. N. Simpson, the future minister of Shawnee Christian Church in Louisville.
Neal served as minister for Portland Ave Christian Church from 28 December 1881 to 29 October 1883 after succeeding Christopher Columbus Cline in the pulpit. A few months after leaving his ministry in the hands of “Weeping Joe Harding,” Neal described the state and qualities of the church he had left behind with the following words:
“PORTLAND AVENUE CHURCH is in the western part of the city. The field of labor is large and difficult. The church owns a handsome lot, but the house is very indifferent, and owing to dampness, which we have tried in vain to remedy, unhealthful. It was first a stable, then a tobacco barn, then a Methodist church. My first meeting was held in it when it belonged to the Methodists. The Church has now one hundred and twenty members. It has never been strong, financially, is not now, but has always been liberal, giving more proportionately, than any other congregation in this city, so far as I could learn. It is true that a few of the members bear the money burdens. The majority are willing but not able to do much. Some few are able but not willing. In my labors in various cities and schools, I must put on record that Portland Avenue has the best teachers, and the best taught school I ever saw. A large number of the additions were from the school.” (R. B. Neal, “Portland Avenue Church,” Gospel Advocate 26, no. 3 [16 Jan 1884]: 40.)
Records for the period of Neal’s ministry with the church are sparse and reveal little, except for the occasional subscription drive for 1000 copies of Isaac Errett’s famous creedal statement Our Position, and his wife’s drive among church women to raise funds for church furniture.
But it is during his ministry at Portland Ave Christian Church that Neal became most heavily involved in one of his great public causes, the promotion of temperance and the fight for prohibition, in which he received the support of Sister Selina Holman, the State President of the Tennessee Woman’s [sic] Christian Temperance Union. While at Portland Ave, he published the prohibition paper, Prohibition League. Another paper he edited in the cause was The Worker. Later, in 1894, Neal even ran for a congressional seat on a Prohibition ticket, a contest which he lost.
In 1893, the minister and his family moved from Louisville to Grayson, located in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, where he had a successful ministry. His gift of communicating with children and young people became readily apparent. He is remembered by a former child as having brought the first stereopticon, a so-called “Magic Lantern,” into the mountains, which he used to the students’ delight in his ministry. In Carter County he is said to have kept alive some of the oldest churches of the Stone-Campbell Movement. He also organized and built the church at Oak Grove and labored in nearby counties.
During the 1890s, Neal was heavily involved in another public crusade: anti-Mormonism. He fought against the Latter-Day-Saints with a ferocity rivaling the early Disciples in the Western Reserve. When the polygamist Mormon Brigham H. Roberts was elected to congress, polygamy among Mormons became a heated issue during 1898 and 1899. Neal published the anti-Mormon paper The Sword of Lab and his anti-Mormon tractats received national distribution, especially in an effort to unseat Roberts. Among his anti-Mormon writings were Smithianity; or Mormonism refuted by Mormons (Cincinnati: Christian Leader, 1898), Was Joe Smith a prophet? (Cincinnati: Christian Leader 1898), The Stick of Ephraim vs. the Bible of the Western Continent (Cincinnati: Christian Leader 1899).
In 1908/9 Neal and his family relocated to Pikeville, Kentucky, where a missionary society was named in honour of his wife and his four-year-long ministry is still remembered today at the First Christian Church (Disciples). He was actively engaged in promoting public education, notably on behalf of Morehead Normal School (today’s Morehead State University), sponsored by the Christian Woman’s Board of Mission. He advertised the institution in his “Saddle Bags” contributions to the Christian Standard. Later the school was sold to the Kentucky State Board of Education. Christian Normal Institute at Grayson took over the training of mountain youth, which Neal often recruited on his itinerancies. Eventually it became Kentucky Christian College, today’s Kentucky Christian University.
Robert Burns Neal died on 14 September 1925 after preaching a sermon at Vinson Memorial Church in Huntingdon, West Virginia. His body was brought back to Grayson, where he was buried on 16 September 1925.
Literature:
I am especially grateful to Terry Gardner and Don Haymes for supplying information and materials for this biographical sketch.
- “Cash Book,” Portland Avenue Church of Christ; kindly made available by Alex Wilson.
- David Edwin Harrell Jr, Sources of Division in the Disciples of Christ, 1865-1900: A Social History of the Disciples of Christ, vol. 2 (Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press, 2003 [reprint of the 1973 edition]), 212-213, 225-226, 238, 321.
- Embrey Howson, “Early Beginnings [of the First Christian Church, Pikeville, KY],” in “An Historian’s Musings,” http://www.pikevillefirstchristianchurch.org/index.php?page=early-beginnings (accessed 6 June 2013).
- M.C. Kurfees, “The Passing of R. B. Neal,” Gospel Advocate, October 8, 1925: 970-971.
- R. B. Neal, “Portland Avenue Church,” Gospel Advocate 26, no. 3 (16 Jan 1884): 40.
- Ruby H. Ogden, “R. B. Neal,” in John William West, Sketches of Our Mountain Pioneers(Lynchburg, Virginia: 1939), 107-112.
No reproduction by any means is permitted of this biographical sketch without prior written permission by the author.
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