Pearl Howard Welshimer served First Christian Church in Canton, Ohio, from 1902 until his death in 1957 — fifty-five years in one pulpit — and built a Sunday school that at points reported enrolments over eight thousand, the largest in the country. He is the movement's emblematic figure precisely because he held no office beyond the local church: no board, no bishopric, no denominational post, and yet enormous influence exercised entirely through preaching, the convention platform and the pages of Christian Standard. That is the model the movement holds up. It is also, as its own critics inside note, a model that concentrates authority in whichever preacher builds the largest church, with no structure above him to check it.