Disciples of Christ

Origins

The movement emerged on the American frontier through various efforts to cut through the complexities of sectarian dogma and find a basis for Christian unity. Out of the Great Western Revival (1801) in Kentucky arose the short-lived Springfield Presbytery, which dissolved in 1804 so that its members might “go free” simply as Christians. Their leader, Barton W. Stone, championed revivalism, a simple biblical and non-creedal faith, and Christian union. In the upper Ohio Valley Presbyterian Thomas Campbell organized the Christian Association of Washington (Pennsylvania) in 1809 to plead for the “unity, peace, and purity” of the church. Soon its members formed the Brush Run Church and ordained his son Alexander, under whose leadership they accepted immersion of believers as the only scriptural form of baptism and entered the Redstone Baptist Association. Alexander Campbell rapidly gained influence as a reformer, winning fame as preacher, debater, editor (Christian Baptist), and champion of the new popular democracy. His colleague Walter Scott developed a reasonable, scriptural “plan of salvation.” Its “positive,” or objective, steps into the church (faith, repentance, baptism, remission of sins, gift of the Holy Spirit) attracted thousands who longed for religious security but had not experienced the emotional crisis and subjective assurance that characterized the prevailing revivalism.

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By 1830 the regular Baptists and the reformers parted company, the latter terming themselves Disciples. Two years later Stone and many of his followers joined with them, though continuing to use the name Christians.

Alexander Campbell from 1830 on turned to constructive church craft. He founded The Millennial Harbinger, established Bethany College, then in Virginia (1840), and agitated unsuccessfully for a general church organization based on congregational representation. The first general convention met at Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1849 and launched the American Christian Missionary Society as a “society of individuals” and not an ecclesiastical body. Similar cooperative organizations emerged in various states to support evangelists and to establish new churches. The Christian Woman’s Board of Missions (1874) and the Foreign Christian Missionary Society (1875) initiated successful programs overseas, and other boards were soon founded to promote building loans for new churches, care for aged ministers, homes for orphans and the aged, temperance, and other causes. The Centennial Convention at Pittsburgh in 1909 claimed an attendance of 30,000; they had come to celebrate a century of triumph for the New Reformation, or Restoration Movement.

Controversy and separation

Meanwhile, schism had begun to sunder the ranks, yet without shaking the confidence of the Disciples in their plea for union. They had held together during the controversy over slavery and through the Civil War, when major American denominations had divided. In the succeeding era of bitterness, however, the Disciples also suffered schism. New developments in response to growing urbanization and sophistication brought two sharply divergent responses. The conservatives regarded such developments as unauthorized “innovations,” while the progressives (pejoratively termed digressives) looked on them as permissible “expedients.”

Discord first arose over the “society principle” involving general missionary work. Alexander Campbell’s biblical view of the church had kept pushing him toward a general church organization, but he could never find a convincing biblical text to support his proposals. Frontier independence and pragmatic popular biblicism prevailed. The “society principle” seemed to its advocates a legitimate solution: entertaining no ecclesiastical pretensions as a secular corporation, the missionary society provided a means by which individual Disciples could work in voluntary cooperation. But the opponents saw in it a repudiation of the Bible as the determining rule of practice.

The introduction of musical instruments (reed organs) into Christian worship led to many local disputes. Other innovations added occasion for controversy—the infringement of the “one-man pastoral system” on the local ministry of elders, introduction of selected choirs, use of the title Reverend, and lesser issues.

In 1889 several rural churches in Illinois issued the Sand Creek Declaration, withdrawing fellowship from those practicing “innovations and corruptions.” In 1904 a separate “preacher list” issued unofficially by some conservative leaders certified their preachers for discounts on railway tickets. The Federal Religious Census of 1906 acknowledged the separation between Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ (who commonly used the name Christian Churches) even though many congregations did not decide which they were for some years.

The crucial issue centred on the manner of understanding biblical authority. Both conservatives and progressives accepted the New Testament as the only rule for the church. The conservatives, heavily concentrated in the South, applied a strict construction to Scripture; this required a specific New Testament precept to authorize any practice. The progressives tended toward a broader construction, accepting as expedient such measures as they found harmonious with Scripture or not in conflict with it.