The first of the newsletters was sent out in the fall of 1950, and due to McAllaster’s ingenuous networking across acquaintances, college advertisements in Christian Life magazine, and various other efforts spanning Christian Higher Education, the newsletter soon became a successful network of English professors who shared “new courses, new jobs, travel, writing, speaking engagements.”[12] With McAllaster as lead, the newsletter soon functioned with the coalescing goal to, “encourage each other to newer, deeper levels of Christian faith and practice as well as to professional excellence.”[13] McAllaster’s ongoing compiling of newsletters, correspondence, and organizing a national network of professors continued through the spring of 1951 when McAllaster, Tenney, and the newsletter helped bring about a key development in the newsletter becoming the CCL.
In a third document, personal correspondence from McAllaster to her family dated on March 3, 1951 identifies two key factors in the success of McAllaster’s newsletters and the beginning of the CCL. First, the structure of Elva’s correspondence to and from her family reveals how she successfully built a national network of English professors across CHE. Joining Elva’s letter is a corresponding letter from her mother that includes curated responses and questions from the letters of Elva’s brothers who were away from home studying across the country. Although curating letters and dispersing questions and responses to multiple family members was likely common practice of the day, Elva’s mother’s newsletters function as an example of, and mirrors Elva’s methodology for, correspondence in the “Newsletters for Christian Teachers of College English.”
The second key factor highlighted in McAllaster’s correspondence with her family in March of 1951 is her inclusion of how the newsletters inspired the planning committee of the Free Methodist “General Conference Education Workshop,” to select the field of English to “be the one to study,” and to hold a special section for English professors at the 1951 General Conference.[14] In her correspondence to her family, McAllaster excitedly includes these key details to what would later become the CCL in large part because her participation as a Seattle Pacific representative would allow her to attend General Conference, all expenses paid. In her concluding remarks on the topic, she states that, “I’m thinking and praying as to what should come after that, but I don’t know yet…Miss Tenney has written to me at length about our part in it, but all the plans are still quite tentative.”[15] Later in the spring, McAllaster’s burgeoning network led to invitations beyond Free Methodism, and ultimately, the first regional meeting of what would later become the CCL. McAllaster described the workshop at the 1951 General Conference in Hillsdale, Michigan as “small-scale, but something new under the sun. Something heartening and inspirational.”[16] McAllaster’s newsletters continued throughout 1951 and soon began the construction of a national organization that was made official in 1956 as the Conference on Christianity and Literature.
The fourth key document outlining the ongoing development of McAllaster’s vocation and the development of the CCL is the final iteration of the “Newsletter for Christian Teachers of College English” published in the Spring 1956 highlighting the inauguration of the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Key to the newsletter’s official announcement of the CCL was 1) the announcement of its inaugural “forthcoming conference”; 2) the inclusion of the CCL’s original leadership; 3) McAllaster’s outlining of the CCL’s purpose as a scholarly conference; and 4) the not yet decided name of the CCL.
In the newsletter, it was announced that the inaugural organizational convening was to be held alongside a literary conference at Wheaton College, June 12-15, 1956. The newsletter's next major announcement was that of the CCL’s original leadership which included both Greenville’s Dr. Tenney and McAllaster. Dr. Tenney was assigned the Vice President role and McAllaster was assigned the Secretary role, which included the ongoing editorial duty of the CCL’s newsletter. Next, the newsletter stated the missional purpose of the CCL as the following: 1) Christian fellowship; 2) discussion of problems of the classroom; 3) promotion of higher standards of Christian scholarship; 4) contribution to current thought on the Christian approach to college teaching; 5) encouraging our students toward the highest goals; 6) efforts to pool institutional needs in the placement of English teachers; 7) study of the possibilities and potentialities of some sort of scholarly periodical; and 8) continuation of the Newsletter to keep unity in fellowship and purpose.[17]
Described by McAllaster as the “now-historical organization meeting,” the inaugural meeting of the CCL convened in June 1956. Unfortunately, McAllaster was absent from the meeting because of her moving and touring in Europe. In her absence, it was decided that the previously unnamed organization of English professors at Christian colleges should be named the CCL. In response to the naming, McAllaster stated that she felt “less than perfect gladness over the name that had been settled upon,” because it “could suggest the mere study of historic and scholarly information about Christianity as it related to literary studies, rather than implying our commitment both to each other as Christian believers and to our Lord Christ.”[18] Regardless of her feelings for the organization’s name, McAllaster’s role as the CCL’s secretary and editor of its mimeographed newsletter continued through 1961.
In the 1960s, the CCL transitioned away from producing its Newsletter that began with McAllaster in the fall of 1950 when it became one of Modern Language Association’s (MLA) Allied Organizations. In the place of its McAllaster-esque newsletter, it began producing a quarterly journal that published scholarly articles and book reviews. Amid the CCL’s transition, McAllaster’s leadership role transitioned to part of the CCL’s advisory council.[19] What informally began in 1950 and formally in 1956, the CCL would soon take roots and grow into what McAllaster would describe in 1980 as a “sturdy oak of the national organization” that began as a “little acorn,” that she had “lightly toss[ed] into moist humus.”[20] When reflecting on her newsletter and how it came to be the CCL she stated,
my dream for the organization now known for these twenty-four years as “CCL” was, and is, a brighter, taller dream than for mere bibliographies of research…I am like a first-century merchant sketching fish symbols in the sand and watching faces to see who will respond; I am messenger of and servant to the Lord Jesus Christ…When I hear how He is at work in any life, I rejoice; when I hear of something He has been doing within my professional brotherhood, I especially rejoice.[21]
McAllaster would maintain membership, actively participate, and maintain a close relationship with the CCL throughout the remainder of her life.
Ultimately, McAllaster’s ongoing discernment of her vocation that was germinated in her educational experience at Greenville College demonstrates the far-reaching branches of Greenville’s English department insofar that it was instrumental in the CCL’s development and commitment to both the Christian faith and scholarly excellence. Moreover, it reveals how the CCL was an extension of Greenville’s English department and its commitment to academic excellence and scholarship. Articulated in the fifth and final document, it was ultimately Greenville’s commitments to Free Methodism and academic excellence that led McAllaster to leave her chairship at SPC and return to “God’s local enterprise called Greenville College,” in 1956 to rejoin the solitary trees of Greenville College’s English department.[22]
