In Kentucky, 1804

Third in order of time, but first in importance in relation to the Disciples, among the three movements which together constituted the “Christian Church” was the one in which Stone emerged as the leading figure.

Barton W. Stone, born in 1772 at Port Tobacco, Maryland, was a member of one of the oldest American families. His great-great-great-grandfather was the first Protestant governor of Maryland, 1648-53. Barton Stone’s father, a man of some property, died just before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and his mother moved with her large family to Pittsylvania County, Virginia, very close to the North Carolina line. With his share of the money from his father’s estate, Barton spent three years in David Caldwell’s academy at Greensboro, North Carolina, thirty miles southwest of his home. Here he “completed the classical course” in 1793. This school was hospitable to revivalism. Caldwell himself was a Princeton graduate and a Presbyterian minister of the “New Light” type—that is, of evangelistic temper and with an easy tolerance in theology. McGready, the Presbyterian 48 evangelist who was later to set southern Kentucky afire, came to Greensboro and converted most of the students. Stone was stirred by the appeal but repelled by the theology. Meanwhile his mother, who had been an Anglican, had become a Methodist. William Hodge, a young “New Light” Presbyterian, who had been one of Caldwell’s boys, came preaching the love rather than the wrath of God. Stone abandoned his purpose to study law and decided to be that kind of Presbyterian preacher. The presbytery to which he applied for license directed him to prepare a trial sermon on the Trinity. He struggled with the theme, and his sermon was accepted, but he always had trouble with the doctrine of the Trinity.

While waiting for his license to preach, he went to Georgia to visit his brother and while there he served for about a year, beginning in January, 1795, as “professor of languages” in Succoth Academy, a Methodist school at Washington, Georgia. The principal of this academy was Hope Hull, a Methodist preacher who had been closely associated with O’Kelly in his protest at the Methodist conference two years earlier but who had remained with the Methodist Church when O’Kelly and the other insurgents withdrew to form the Christian Church. Stone and Hull became very intimate friends, and Stone accompanied Hull on a journey to Charleston, South Carolina, to attend a Methodist conference. John Springer, an ardently evangelistic Presbyterian preacher of the “New Light” type, whose field was only a few miles from the academy and who had the most cordial relations with the Baptists and Methodists in his neighborhood, became another counselor and friend and exercised, says Ware, a “decisive influence” on Stone.

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Returning to North Carolina, Stone received his license to preach from the hands of the venerable and liberal Henry Pattillo, who, in a published sermon on “Divisions among Christians,” had recommended the name “Christians” as the one “first given to the disciples by divine appointment at Antioch,” and who declared that men ought to be permitted to differ peaceably about the doctrines of religion.

To summarize the influences of Stone’s early background and environment, these items may be listed:

1. The Great Awakening, which, under the preaching of men trained in William Tennent’s Log College and of George Whitefield, beginning about 1740 but echoing through the middle and southern colonies for more than half a century after that in the work of Samuel Davies and many other evangelistic or “New Light” Presbyterians, had stressed the common elements of the gospel and put the divisive doctrines of the creeds into a subordinate place.

2. The Methodist movement, which did not cease to be a revival when it became a church and which challenged the Calvinism of the Presbyterian creed.

3. The “Christian” Church, which was having its first rapid growth in Virginia and North Carolina while Stone was in the first formative stage of his ministry in the same region.

4. The direct and personal influence of the men who have been mentioned in the preceding paragraphs: David Caldwell, James McGready, William Hodge, Hope Hull, John Springer, and Henry Pattillo.

After an experimental and not very successful missionary trip which took him through the eastern part of North Carolina and back through Virginia, and feeling that there was a better field on the frontier, 50 Stone headed west, on horseback again. Within three months he had ridden to Knoxville and, at some peril from Indians, on to Nashville (population 346 by the next census); had associated for a time with Thomas Craighead, a Princeton-trained Presbyterian preacher of independent mind, famous for his zeal for a “rational and scriptural evangelism” and his scant respect for the authority of creed and presbytery; had itinerated and preached in the Cumberland district of Tennessee; and had then crossed Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, spent a little time at Danville and Lexington, and by October, 1796, was installed as regular supply pastor of two Presbyterian churches at Cane Ridge and Concord. Cane Ridge was seven miles east of Paris; Concord, ten miles northeast of Cane Ridge.

The next year a call to the settled pastorate of his churches made it necessary for Stone to seek ordination from the Transylvania Presbytery. This would require a declaration of his adherence to the Westminster Confession. Renewed study did not resolve his doubts about the Trinity. Before facing the presbytery, he privately stated his trouble to James Blythe, then probably the most influential Presbyterian in Kentucky and later one of the severest critics of Stone’s views. In the public ceremony, Stone declared his acceptance of the Confession “as far as I see it consistent with the Word of God.” Upon that guarded statement he was ordained.