Welch's Grape Juice

Thomas Bramwell Welch was born in England on the last day of 1825.  He emigrated to America with his parents at age 8.  As a teenaged young man, he became a staunch Wesleyan Methodist and heavily involved in the two social issues predominant in his day: temperance and abolition.  Throughout his late teen years, he was involved in the Underground Railroad, the transporting of escaped slaves surreptitiously into Canada.

Thomas graduated from a Wesleyan seminary at age 19 and became an ordained minister.  He served his church for a few years until his voice failed.  He went back to college and took up the profession of dentistry, but remained an active church member.

Wesleyans, as a number of denominations of the day, were Temperance-minded – prohibiting the manufacture, sale, or consumption of any intoxicating liquor.  A number of churches recognized the appearance of hypocrisy in offering fermented wine during the rite of the Lord’s Supper.  Welch’s denomination addressed this by mandating that only non-fermented grape juice be used in Communion.

This presented an issue – as pasteurization had not yet been invented and non-pasteurized grape juice naturally ferments when stored at rom temperature.  Individual churches took a variety of approaches to meet this requirement.  Some churches squeezed their own grapes during the week and would serve the juice before it had a chance to ferment.  The problem with this was that not all churches had a ready supply of grapes.  Others would pound raisins to a pulp and mix the pulp with boiling water – making their own “wine.”  Some churches did not offer Communion unless grapes were available to be freshly squeezed.  Other churches used water in place of the wine – using Jesus’ miracle of turning water to wine as Scriptural justification.

A staunch Temperamentalist, as well as a godly man who wanted to obey God’s word in all things, Dr. Welch pushed his own church in Vineland, New Jersey, to use unfermented grape juice.  After reading about the new process of pasteurization, Welch experimented with ways to apply the technique to grape juice – with the intent of supplying churches with an alcohol-free substitute for Communion.  For four years, he tried to sell what he marketed as “Dr Welch’s Unfermented Wine” to churches.  Unfortunately for him, the idea didn’t evolve into a sustainable business model and he had to give up his side business.

Two years later, Thomas’ son Charles – also a dentist – encouraged his father to try again with an expanded reach.  He published advertisements in Temperance magazines and offered samples to churches, marketing the product as “unfermented wine” and “the kind [of wine] that was used in Galilee.”  He later marketed the product as a health tonic.  The business took off when it samples were given out at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. 

Today, Welch’s is a multinational corporation offering many products.  It began, however, with the desire of a godly man to give his church an alternative to fermented wine during the Lord’s Supper.  In Charles Welch’s will he wrote, “Unfermented grape juice was born in 1869 out of a passion to serve God by helping His Church to give its communion the ‘fruit of the vine,’ instead of ‘the cup of devils.’”

https://www.umc.org/en/content/communion-and-welchs-grape-juice

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bramwell_Welch

Billy Sunday

Billy Sunday

Billy Sunday was a man unique among American preachers.  He was born in Ames, Iowa in 1862, the son of a Civil War soldier who died of pneumonia on the field five weeks after his birth.  His mother had a very difficult time raising her children – so much difficulty that she sent her children away to live in a Soldiers’ Orphans Home. 

Billy’s love of sports is what kept him sane in the orphanage, and he became very proficient at baseball.  He was eventually signed to the Chicago White Stockings in 1883, at age 20, and later played for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Athletics.  He was an average batter and a decent outfielder, but was mostly known as a base-runner.  Billy Sunday was literally clocked as the fastest man in baseball in his day, with the first-ever feat of being able to run the bases in 14 seconds!  He was quite the showman, sometimes doing a somersault on the field while stealing a base.  In one game he batted a single then, on the three subsequent pitches, stole second, third, and home!

In his youth, the liquor industry was predatory.  Americans at this time drank tremendous amounts of alcohol, more than at any time in American history – the equivalent of four shots of alcohol per person, per day.  Billy began drinking and it affected his performance on the field, as well as his personal life.  He tells in his testimony that he was with some fellow ball-players, very famous men like himself, and they were “pretty tanked up.”  They sat outside of the saloon on a curb in Chicago, where they could hear a small band playing.  The band was from the Pacific Garden Mission and they were playing hymns he could remember from his boyhood.  As inebriated as he was, he responded to the invitation of the band when they invited them down to the mission.

The mission cleaned him up and sobered him up and they introduced him to Christ.  Billy Sunday accepted Him and never looked back.  As a baseball player, Billy earned about $400 per month, in an era where the average wage was about $480 per year.  He left baseball and worked at the Chicago YMCA for less that a third of his previous salary.  He began revival work, initially under the tutelage of famous evangelist J Wilbur Chapman, who was himself the successor to D L Moody.  When Chapman stepped aside from his evangelistic work, Billy Sunday accepted the mantle.

As a traveling evangelist, he was without equal.  He drew quite a crowd, both from his initial fame as a baseball player and from his theatrics on stage.  He would pantomime boxing the devil and he would debate “Mr Booze.”  Billy would run back and forth across the stage, sometimes smashing chairs to make a point.  He used harsh, salty language at times.  He said of this, “I want to preach the Gospel so plainly that men can come from the factories and not bring a dictionary.” 

He was the master of one-liners, including the following:

-          The church gives people what they need; the theater gives them what they want.

-          Your reputation is what people say about you.  Your character is what God and your wife know about you.

-          It is everybody’s business how you live.

-          I believe that cards and dancing are doing more to damn the spiritual life of the Church than the grog-shops – though you can’t accuse me of being a friend of that stinking, dirty, rotten, hell-soaked business.

-          Churches don’t need new members half as much as they need the old bunch made over.

-          You will not have power until there is nothing questionable in your life.

-          Whiskey is all right in its place – but its place is in hell.

-          Some people pray like a jack-rabbit eating cabbage.

-          No man has any business to be in a bad business.

-          When you quit living like the devil, I will quit preaching that way.

-          The reason you don’t like the Bible, you old sinner, is because it knows all about you.

-          Going to church doesn’t make a man a Christian any more than going to the garage makes him an automobile.

-          If you want milk and honey on your bread, then you’ll have to go into the land of the giants.

-          What have you given the world it never possessed before you came?

As one formerly affected by ‘booze’, Billy Sunday was one of the driving forces of the temperance movement.  He often preached what probably his most famous sermon, “Get on the Water Wagon.”  In it, he forcefully denounced the predatory nature of the liquor industry, in addition to other vices such as gambling, prostitution, and the theater.  He often liked to say, “I’m against sin.  I’ll fight it as long as I’ve got a fist, I’ll kick it as long as I’ve got a foot, and I’ll bite is as long as I’ve got a tooth.  And, when I’m old and fistless and footless and toothless, I’ll gum it ‘till I go home to glory and it goes home to perdition!”

Billy, unusually for his day, supported other social issues of his day, including womens’ suffrage and against racial segregation, purposely including blacks in his revivals – even in the deep south.  He also spoke against child labor, and advocated for laws preventing the exploitation of children in this way.

Billy Sunday was a solid American, raising a great deal of money to support the effort of World War I.  He was often seen preaching to troops before they embarked to Europe.

In his day, he preached to more people than any person ever had in history.  In giving his testimony as part of his invitation, he often alluded to his past career as an athlete.  Teams had initially courted him after he started preaching, even offering him more than double his previous salary to come back and play.  He considered that a temptation from the devil and kept to his evangelistic circuit.  He spoke of some of his previous friends from baseball, names most of the people would have known.  He spoke of their lives and the money they made – and sometimes of the ridicule he faced for not going back to playing ball.  Billy would then tell what happened to those same men he was drinking with the night he got saved: one died in a saloon in his own vomit on a pool table, another jailed for neglecting his family, etc.  He would tell of a few of these men, then he would ask the crowd in conclusion: “Friends, did they win the game of life, or did I?”

https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/people/evangelistsandapologists/billy-sunday.html

Famous Conversions, Kerr, Hugh T. and Mulder, John M.  Wm B Eerdmans Publishers, 1994 reprint.

“Billy” Sunday – The Man and His Message, Ellis, William T. LL.D., L. T. Myers Publishing, 1914.