American Realities with Bill Youngs
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    • American History >
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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
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • 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

SANFORD, ELIAS BENJAMIN

(6 June 1843, Westbrook, CT-3 July 1932, Middlefield, CT. Education: B.A., Wesleyan University, 1865. Career: Methodist minister, Thomaston, CT, 1865~7; minister, First Congregational Church, Cornwall, CT, 1868-72; supply preacher, Northfield and Thomaston, CT, 1872-82; minister, Congregational church, Westbrook, CT, 1882-94; secretary, Open and Institutional Church League, 1895-1900; general secretary, National Federation of Churches and Christian
Workers, 1900--1908; corresponding secretary, Federal Council of Churches (FCC), 1908-13; honorary secretary, FCC, 1913-32.

In the late 1800s, even as the Congregationalists were growing increasingly self-conscious as a denomination, the church also developed a renewed interest in interdenominational cooperation. One of the foremost representatives of this ecumenical spirit was Elias Benjamin Sanford. Raised a Methodist, he was a Methodist minister for a short time in Thomaston, Connecticut, before transferring to a Congregational pulpit. In 1873 he became editor of Church Union, beginning a lifelong interest in Christian unity.

Sanford did not advocate the complete homogenization of the denominations to a single unified church. Instead he favored programs that would allow the churches to cooperate while maintaining their own unique characteristics. He was instrumental in bringing about the Carnegie Hall Conference of 1905, which included representatives from twenty-nine denominations. At that meeting the delegates helped to create the Federal Council of Churches, which came into formal existence at a meeting in Philadelphia in 1908.

Sanford was a guiding spirit of the FCC, which acknowledged "the essential oneness of the Christian Churches of America" and soon undertook cooperative projects for social welfare.

Bibliography
A: A History of Connecticut (Hartford, Conn., 1887, 1922); Origin and History of the Federal Council of the Churches of Christ in America (Hartford, Conn., 1916); A History of the Reformation (Hartford, Conn., 1917).
B: DAB 16,347-48; DARB, 389-91; NCAB 24,256-57; NIT 4 July 1932, 11; SH 10, 203.