Two Frontier Movements That Chose to Stop Being Two

Restorationism in America traces to two independent revivals that reached the same conclusion from different starting points. Barton Stone's Cane Ridge camp meeting in Kentucky in August 1801 drew tens of thousands and left Stone convinced that denominational creeds were obstacles to the unity Christ had actually asked for; he and his colleagues dissolved their own presbytery in 1804, declaring in a document they called its Last Will and Testament that they wished only to sink into union with the body of Christ at large. Alexander Campbell arrived at nearly the same position by a different route, publishing his Declaration and Address in 1809 to argue that the New Testament alone, read without the accumulated weight of confession and council, was sufficient to reconstitute the church. J. Gordon Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religions records that the two movements, Stone's Christians and Campbell's Disciples, did not merge because a central authority ordered it; there was none. They united on the last day of 1831 at a Lexington, Kentucky meeting house because leaders on both sides recognized they were already pursuing the identical restoration and had no principled reason left to remain apart.