Robert Henry Boll

His mother remarried when he was 14, prompting Boll to emigrate with a maternal aunt and friends to the United States, settling briefly in Zanesville, Ohio, in 1890.

Encouraged by friend and fellow student Bob McMahon, he planned a "protracted meeting" of three weeks' duration which would begin on 1896 June 15, at a small log schoolhouse named "Accident" near Nashville.

One more attempt at rallying the intensity of the meeting met with apparent failure as Boll finished a sermon he had considered to contain an hour of his strongest material in only 20 minutes.

[6] In 1904, Boll became a located minister at Portland Avenue Church of Christ in Louisville, staying until his death in 1956,[7] with exception of a one-year period from 1910 to 1911 during which he was the Bible teacher at the high school in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, "on behalf of" (likely underwritten by) J. H. Stribling.

By 1915, however, a more ambitious series of articles led to Boll's forced resignation from the Gospel Advocate by a board consisting of J. C. McQuiddy, F. W. Smith, H. Leo Boles, A.

[11] In 1916, after Boll's resignation of the front page editorship of the Gospel Advocate, he purchased an existing publication, Word and Work (founded in 1908 by Dr. David Lipscomb Watson), from its owner, Stanford Chambers, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and moved the journal to Louisville, Kentucky, to continue advancing his theology in print as well as from the pulpit.

Following the publication of a sharp critique by R. L. Whiteside and C. R. Nichol, of Clifton, Texas, Boll participated in a written debate with H. Leo Boles in the Gospel Advocate in 1927.

[citation needed] Nonetheless, in 1933 Foy E. Wallace, responding to an invitation from Boll associate Charles McKendree Neal to debate the millennial issue, entered into the rambunctious Neal-Wallace Discussion on the Thousand Years Reign, held at Winchester, Kentucky, in January 1933; this debate jarred open a fissure which roiled congregations not only in Kentucky but also in other parts of the United States as well as overseas.

The converse is true from the other side to some extent, though the pleas for continued fellowship in the face of what could be seen as a non-essential disagreement are especially pathetic and depressing to read in light of their historical failure to prevent a division.

[16] Among various geographical areas, congregations which bear Boll's premillennialist and other influences can most easily be found in Louisville, southern Indiana, and Louisiana, and in the Philippines.