Restorationism and the Disciples of Christ
The sense of new beginnings encouraged by America’s revolutionary separation from England and the opening of the trans-Appalachian West to white settlement found religious expression in groups seeking to liberate the original Christianity of New Testament times from subsequent institutional accretions and denominational divisions and restore its “primitive” purity.
Presbyterian minister Barton Stone. He organized the Cane Ridge revival and led the restorationist “Christian” movement in the trans-Appalachian West.
Small restorationist groups developed in North Carolina and on the New England frontier in the late 18th and early 19th centuries—coming together by 1820 as the “Christian Connection” and remaining strong in both areas—but the most influential movements of this sort developed west of the Appalachians. In Kentucky, Presbyterian minister and Cane Ridge organizer Barton Stone (1772–1844), alienated from Eastern denominational authorities by tensions over his revivalism and expelled from the Kentucky Synod in 1803, declared the Bible rather than creeds and ecclesiastical hierarchies as his only spiritual guide and formed a religious union under the simple name Christian in 1804. His movement spread among the Presbyterian churches of the Ohio River Valley, embracing about 10,000 “Christians” by 1830. A similar movement began in western Pennsylvania when Scotch-Irish Presbyterian immigrant Thomas Campbell (1763–1854) formed the “Christian Association of Washington County” in 1809 and then, in 1812, joined by his son Alexander (1788–1866), the Brush Run Church. Assuming leadership of the movement, Alexander formed groups called “Disciples of Christ” across the Midwest and upper South, attracting many Baptist congregations with his commitments to adult baptism, congregational polity, and equality of laity and clergy. Campbell’s became one of the fastest-growing religious movements of the period, numbering about 12,000 by 1830.
In Lexington, Kentucky, in 1832, Campbell and Stone, joined by several Christian Connection churches, merged their movements into the “Disciples of Christ.” The union remained loose, its component congregations protective of their autonomy but united on a platform of anticreedalism, Congregationalism, Christian union, and the sole authority of the New Testament. But the movement competed effectively with Baptists and Methodists on the Western frontier as farmer-preachers spread it from Ohio and Kentucky northward into Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York; eastward into Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas; and westward and southward into Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. Their growth was dramatic: about 118,000 by 1850,192,000 by 1860, and 500,000 by the early 1880s. They avoided denominational structure but gradually institutionalized nonetheless, by midcentury holding a national convention in Cincinnati.
By the early 20th century, the tension between local autonomy and primitive purity on the one hand and Christian union on the other led rural, conservative Southern congregations to take the name Church of Christ and separate from the increasingly urban, institutionalized, theologically liberal, and ecumenically inclined Disciples of the upper Midwest. But the continued growth of both groups suggests restorationism’s enduring appeal.
