The Christian Church

At this same meeting, June 28, 1804, it was agreed that the name “Christian” should be adopted, to the exclusion of all sectarian names. This was suggested by Rice Haggard, who had made the same suggestion to the O’Kelly group ten years earlier when the Republican Methodists were looking for a new name. Haggard had been active as a minister of the Christian Church in North Carolina and Virginia from 1794 until his removal to Kentucky about the time of the Cane Ridge meeting.

The “Christians” of Kentucky immediately became a group of churches as well as a group of preachers. Fervid evangelists as they were, the ministers immediately won to the movement several of the Presbyterian churches for which they had preached and organized some new ones. By the end of 1804 there were at least thirteen Christian churches in north-central Kentucky and about seven more in southwestern Ohio. Presbyterians called it the “New Light schism.” The number of preachers was increased by the adherence of a few revival Presbyterians, by the coming of some Christians from the East, and by recognizing as preachers a good many men who had little or no formal education.

Shaker missionaries came to Kentucky in 1805, attracted by reports of the marvelous manifestations of the Spirit in the great revival. McNemar and Dunlavy soon joined them.

In the new Christian Church, no question was at first raised about baptism. Within a few years, Stone 57 came to the belief that only the immersion of believers was scriptural baptism, and this view spread gradually through the group. Stone immersed many, including some preachers, before he was himself immersed. But it was not made a test of fellowship. Twenty years later Stone wrote:

It was unanimously agreed that every brother and sister should act according to their faith; that we should not judge one another for being baptized or for not being baptized in this mode. The far greater part of the church submitted to be baptized by immersion, and now [1827] there is not one in 500 among us who has not been immersed. From the commencement we have avoided controversy on this subject. (Christian Messenger, Vol. I, p. 267, Oct., 1827.)

This trend toward immersion existed only in the West. In the East it became a divisive issue in 1809, and only a minority adopted it. Immersion never became the common practice with the New England Christians.

For some time there was no organization among the Christian churches. A “general meeting” of the ministers was held at Bethel, Kentucky, August 8, 1810, at which they “agreed to unite themselves formally.” This suggested to some the need of a clearer definition of doctrines, especially those of the Trinity, Christ, and the atonement. After statements had been drafted and discussed at a later meeting, it was agreed by almost all that freedom of theological opinion was better than conformity to a standard. Marshall and Thompson, feeling that the creedless Christians were too loose in doctrine, returned to the Presbyterian Church. This left only Stone, of the original five who 58 had seceded from the synod on account of the heresy charges against McNemar and Thompson. So it was by survival, rather than by pre-eminence at the beginning, that Stone came to be considered the founding father of the Christian Church in Kentucky. Later, especially after he began the publication of the Christian Messenger in 1826, his leadership is evident; and in guiding the greater part of the Christian Church in the West into the merger with the Disciples, his influence was probably decisive.

The growth of the western Christian Church was not confined to Kentucky. It took root immediately in Tennessee and in southern Ohio and Indiana. Traveling evangelists went also into the South. As the tide of migration moved to new frontiers, unordained elders, farmer-preachers, and sometimes regular ministers carried it to Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa. The position of Kentucky, as a breeding ground of pioneers who went out in steady streams to aid in laying the foundations of these states, made it a strategic point from which a new religious movement might make its influence felt throughout the Middle West.

Such was the emphasis upon the independence of local churches and of preachers, and so firm the determination to avoid anything like the Presbyterian or Methodist systems of centralized control, that organization was slow and weak. That meeting in 1810, at which it was agreed to “unite formally,” did not in fact lead to any formal organization. District conferences were arranged. There was a Deer Creek (Ohio) Conference as early as 1808, and in the following years there were many such. But as late as 1826, Stone felt it necessary to defend the practice of holding even district conferences for worship, to exchange 59 news of the churches, to arrange appointments so as to supply destitute churches, and (a tentative suggestion) “for ordination, if thought proper,” but emphatically with no authority over local churches. In the same year the Wabash (Indiana) Conference agreed that it would be well “to have a general conference established in some convenient place in the western states,” but this was not done. The Christian Church in the West had nothing corresponding to what is now called “cooperative work,” and no agencies or structures through which such work could be carried on. The churches of the Northeast had their so-called United States Conference, but sometimes they had qualms about so much ecclesiasticism. The (New England) general conference of 1832 voted to dissolve forever, but revived the next year.

Though there was no inclusive organization, the three main divisions of the Christian Church had some acquaintance with one another’s work and a sense of being parts of one enterprise. The Herald of Gospel Liberty circulated widely. Stone had an agent in New York for his Christian Messenger. When he reported, in 1828, that “the sect called Christians have, in little more than a quarter of a century, risen from nothing to 1,500 congregations with a membership of 150,000,” his estimate—doubtless much too large in any case—evidently includes all three, and his reference to “more than a quarter of a century” shows that he was thinking of beginnings earlier than the dissolution of the Springfield Presbytery.