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By Melissa Lauber

"No one is worthy of a good home here or in heaven that is not willing to be in peril for a good cause." - John Brown

"History is to a country what memory is to an individual," says United Methodist professor the Rev. Diana Butler Bass. When people's memories fade, they lose a sense of self and of community. When cultures, or the church, lose touch with their history they become strangers in a landscape they can no longer read.

United Methodists in the Baltimore-Washington Conference are the bearers of a remarkable history. On March 16-18, Mt. Carmel UMC in Rohrersville lifted up a small bit of that history with its display of historical items related to abolitionist John Brown.

That weekend was the 200th anniversary of John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, which he perpetrated in order to gain weapons to lead an armed rebellion to end slavery.

While Brown's insurrection failed and he was hanged, many claim that the 1859 raid escalated tensions to the point that, a year later, the Civil War broke out.

Those who study history are divided between viewing Brown as a heroic martyr and visionary or a zealot and terrorist.

For Mount Carmel's pastor, the Rev. John W. Schildt, the most important thing is to not let our shared history be forgotten. Schildt knows that for a person to understand today, they have to remember and interpret yesterday.

A historian who has published several books on the Civil War battle at Antietem, Schildt wrote that the Church of the United Brethren (one of the bodies that merged to form The United Methodist Church, which was founded in this region) had a nodding acquaintance with John Brown's raid.

"During the summer of 1859, Mount Carmel Church was being constructed several miles south in Boonsboro. On a hot summer day, an elderly gentleman with some helpers and several wagons, stopped to chat with the carpenters," Schildt wrote.

"According to church history, it was none other than John Brown on his way to the nearby Kennedy farm, where he prepared for his raid on Harpers Ferry. The wagons contained pikes and other items to arm the slaves.

"According to other sources, Brown attended a service at the Samples Manor Church of God early in the evening of Oct. 16. The guest preacher was a United Brethren pastor from Rohrersville by the name of Grimm. His text was ‘I must work the works of him who sent me while it is yet day.'

"Before he was hanged, Brown stated that he was convinced that the slavery problem could only be corrected by the ‘purging of blood.' Three years later, New York troops camped around Mount Carmel Church enroute to the Battle of Antietam," Schildt wrote.

What United Methodists learn from this small interaction with rich details of history is hard to say.

Even today, John Brown's legacy remains a contradictory one. In recent news articles about the anniversary of the raid, he has been reviled as a monomaniacal terrorist who sought to lead a bloody insurrection against the U.S. government; and hailed as a prophetic leader who started the Civil War and gave his life that millions of others might be free.

This ambiguity of conclusion filters into the Methodist stance on slavery.

According to historian Ken Kinghorn, in the 1800s Methodism was the most influential church in America, shaping the nation's religious outlook and cultural values. Between the years of 1850 and 1860, Methodists built 6,603 new churches, more than all the other major denominations combined.

But the church's influence was dimmed with the split over slavery in 1844, when those who favored the institution left the denomination to form the Methodist Episcopal Church South, whose mother church was Mt. Vernon Place in Washington, D.C.

Some historians believe that the church schism gave the nation moral permission to divide over this issue.

There is no doubt that the church is a leading player in history's stories; and some say that the best predictor of people's future actions is how they have behaved in the past.

Being unaware of history, said author Michael Crichton, "is like being a leaf that didn't know it was a part of a tree."

How we grow, and the fruit we bear is yet to been seen. But we learn and are shaped from the lessons our common ancestors have sown.