Restoration of the New Testament church

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.

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.