There was a high point in 1910. It was higher still in 1914, with an abrupt drop of nearly 300,000 to 1915, and a fair rate of growth thereafter. An improvement in statistical methods probably explains the greater part, though perhaps not all, of the apparent loss in 1915. Certainly there was no great disastrous event in that year. Perhaps some of the "Churches of Christ" were included in the count until 1915. Here are the figures since 1900:
1900 1,120,000 1905 1,238,515 1910 1,363,533 1915 1,142,206 1920 1,178,079 1925 1,450,681 1930 1,554,678 1935 1,618,852 1940 1,669,222 1944 1,681,933
With the recognition of many fields of responsibility besides home and foreign missions and the consequent multiplication of societies, each having an annual "special day" to promote its work and raise its funds, a good deal of rivalry and confusion ensued. There were not enough days to go around. For example, the Foreign Society bitterly opposed the claim of the new American Christian Education Society (1903) upon the third Sunday in January as Education Day, because this interfered with the exclusive occupancy of January and February in preparation for Foreign Missions Day, the first Sunday in March; but it could do nothing about it because the latter was an independent and theoretically coordinate society. Moreover, the conventions were conventions of the societies rather than of the churches.
The first step toward remedying this condition was the appointment of a "calendar committee," at Buffalo in 1906, to devise a plan for reducing the number of special days. There was no immediate result. At New Orleans in 1908, the constitution of the American Christian Missionary Society was amended to provide for a delegate convention in which every church, whether contributing or not, should have elected representatives. So much parliamentary confusion attended this action that it was not carried into effect. The Centennial Convention of 1909 appointed a standing committee to consider unifying all missionary and philanthropic work under one or two boards. The committee's intimation that it would recommend a strictly delegate convention to which all societies should report touched off a long and heated discussion. "Delegate convention" became, for the more conservative element, a symbol of apostasy, as "higher criticism" and "federation" had been a few years earlier.