American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
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    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
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      • Growing Up
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    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
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      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

CLARK, FRANCIS EDWARD

EDWARD (12 September 1851, Aylmer, Canada- 26 May 1927, Newton, MA). Education: B.A., Dartmouth College, 1873; B.D., Andover Seminary, 1876. Career: Minister, Williston Congregational Church, Portland, ME, 1876-83; minister, Phillips Congregational Church, Boston, 1883-87; president, United Society of Christian Endeavor, 1887-1925; editor, Christian Endeavor World (called Golden Rule, 1886-1897), 1886-1919; president, World's Christian Endeavor Union, 1895-1925.

Since the seventeenth century, Congregationalists had been troubled from time to time with the problem of attracting young people to the church. Early Puritans were bothered with the rarity of conversions among the youngsters of the second generation. And their eighteenth-century descendents were delighted when young parishioners were attracted to the church during the Great Awakening. In the era of the Industrial Revolution no Congregationalist was more active than Francis Edward Clark in harnessing the energies of young people to the church.

Orphaned at age seven and raised by an uncle who was a clergyman, he showed an interest in Christian youth from the first days of his ministry. He appealed to adolescents in his congregation with colorful lectures on such topics as gambling dens and "king" alcohol. He involved them in moral reform and Christian missions through a new organization, the Young People's Society of Christian Endeavor. In an age of giant corporations, Clark developed his idea into a worldwide Christian Endeavor movement. In 1887 he resigned his pastorate to devote full time to organizing and publicizing youth activities. Eventually there were 80,000 Christian Endeavor societies in forty countries, which met occasionally in world congresses. A meeting on Boston Common in 1895 attracted 56,000 delegates. Clark founded the Golden Rule Company and edited Christian Endeavor World, which reached 100,000 readers.

Cotton Mather* had devoted part of his considerable energies to evangelizing the young people of colonial Boston. Clark's worldwide mission to the young is one measure of the emergence of Congregationalism from a provincial faith to a modem church.

Bibliography
A: Children of the Church (Boston, 1882); Looking Out on Life (Boston, 1892); A New Way around an Old World (New York, 1901); Training the Church of the Future (New York, 1902); The Christian Endeavor Manual (Boston, 1903); Christian Endeavor in All Lands (Philadelphia, 1906); Memories of Many Men in Many Lands (Boston, 1922).
B: DARB, 99-100; SH 3, 125; NCAB 13, 51-52; DAB 4, 126-27; NYT 27 May 1927, 23; William Shaw, The Evolution of an Endeavorer (Boston, 1924); Eugene F. Clark, A Son's Portrait of Dr. Francis E. Clark (Boston, 1930).