The Census That Recorded a Division It Did Not Create

The united movement's own insistence on New Testament practice eventually produced a division inside itself. Through the second half of the nineteenth century, congregations disagreed sharply over instrumental music in worship and over missionary societies organized above the local congregation, both of which one wing read as unauthorized additions to the New Testament pattern the movement existed to restore, and the other read as reasonable means to a shared end. Neither side changed the other's mind, and the disagreement widened for decades before any outside body acknowledged it. When the United States Bureau of the Census conducted its special religious census in 1906, it listed Churches of Christ separately from the Disciples of Christ for the first time, a recognition the editor David Lipscomb accepted as accurate and James Garrison, on the Disciples side, did not. The government had not ruled on the question or forced the split; it had simply reported what congregations already knew about themselves, that two identifiably different bodies existed where one restoration movement had begun. Weekly communion and a plain reading of scripture as the sole rule of faith survived in both wings; the instrument and the society did not.