Christian Unity and the Stone-Campbell Plea
Douglas A. Foster reflects on the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement’s historic call for visible Christian unity and the divisions that later emerged. As the bicentennial of Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address approached, the article asks whether churches can reclaim the unity at the heart of Christ’s mission.
- Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address made a powerful plea for the visible unity of Christ’s church.
- The Stone-Campbell Movement both advanced unity and experienced painful divisions over doctrine and practice.
- The Great Communion offered churches a way to mark the bicentennial with a renewed witness to unity in Christ.
By Douglas A. Foster
Christ knew there would be trouble. He knew the human heart and its tendency toward pride. His intense prayer for his followers “that they may be one” was not a request for a good but optional addition to Christianity—unity was the very essence of it. The walls that separate humans were precisely what Christ came to destroy. Reconciliation is the point of Christianity! And reconciliation results in unity.
Tragically, the very people Christ entrusted with his ministry of reconciliation built walls of separation. Christians destroyed the visible unity of Christ’s body. The spirit of division has worked among us through divisive attitudes and complacency.
Unity at the Heart
The Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement was at its heart an attempt to both reject that spirit of division and bring visible unity to Christ’s church. When Irish Presbyterian minister Thomas Campbell came to America in 1807 to escape political and religious turmoil, he already had experienced the spirit of division. Campbell’s faction—the Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterians—reprimanded him for helping establish the Evangelical Society of Ulster that united ministers from different denominations to evangelize the lost. So he withdrew from the society.
When Campbell arrived in Pennsylvania, he found the spirit of division alive and well here too. After serving the Lord’s Supper to Presbyterians who were not part of his sect, he was tried for heresy. This time he didn’t back down. In 1809, he severed ties with the Seceder Presbyterians and helped form a unity society—much like the one he helped form in Northern Ireland—called the Christian Association.
That summer he wrote an explanation of the association’s goals and a call for Christian unity in the Declaration and Address.
THAT the Church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally and constitutionally one; consisting of all those in every place that profess their faith in Christ and obedience to him in all things according to the scriptures, and that manifest the same by their tempers and conduct . . .1
Campbell was embarking on a journey that included one of the most powerful calls for unity in the history of Christianity, a journey that would create a religious movement of millions around the globe that has contributed to both the unity and the division of Christ’s church.
Campbell’s family arrived in America later in 1809, and his son Alexander embraced his idea of Christian unity based on faith in Christ as revealed in Scripture. Alexander set the movement’s agenda—unity through a restoration of the “ancient gospel and order of things.” Correct doctrine and practice were key, though he insisted it was the “image of Christ” that we look for in others and not mere assent to doctrinal propositions.
In the 1820s, the Campbell reformers encountered another movement for Christian unity begun in Kentucky by American Presbyterians. For its leader, Barton W. Stone, the key was a right heart. He wrote in 1835:
The scriptures will never keep together in union and fellowship members not in the spirit of the scriptures, which spirit is love, peace, unity, forbearance, and cheerful obedience. . . . I blush for my fellows, who hold up the Bible as the bond of union yet make their opinions of it tests of fellowship; who plead for union of all Christians; yet refuse fellowship with such as dissent from their notions. Such antisectarian-sectarians are doing more mischief to the cause and advancement of truth, the unity of Christians, and the salvation of the world than all the skeptics in the world. In fact, they create skeptics.2
In the 1830s these movements began modeling the unity they called for, coming together despite significant differences in doctrine and practice. By the 1860s, this united movement was one of America’s largest religious bodies.
The Spirit of Division
Yet the spirit of division was not dead. Issues arose. Can you use instrumental music in worship? Can you have a society to organize and conduct mission work? By 1889 these and other matters were polarizing churches and members.
That summer, at an annual encampment at Sand Creek, Illinois, Daniel Sommer and elders from area congregations issued a document reflecting the growing division. Naming the issues, they declared:
We are impelled from a sense of duty to say that all such as are guilty of teaching or allowing and practicing the many innovations and corruptions to which we have referred, after having had sufficient time for meditation and reflection, if they will not turn away from such abominations, that we can not and will not regard them as brethren.3
When the data from the government’s 1906 Census of Religious Bodies was published in 1909, Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ were listed separately. In October, the Disciples General Convention met in Pittsburgh for a Centennial Celebration of Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address. On the final Sunday more than 20,000 people took the Lord’s Supper in a service at Forbes Field. Sadly, few if any members of Churches of Christ were there.
Even as the first division solidified, a second was beginning that would lead by 1968 to separation of “independent” Christian churches and churches of Christ from the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
The Spirit of Unity
Never, however, was the spirit of unity dead. Ernest Beam and Claude F. Witty from churches of Christ and William Jessup and James DeForest Murch from Christian churches led unity meetings from the 1930s to the 1950s. Consultations on Internal Unity in the 1960s sought reconciliation as the second division grew. Leaders like Leroy Garrett, Carl Ketcherside, Perry Gresham, and Don Dewelt worked for unity through the 20th century, including in the Restoration Forums between 1984 and 2007.
In 1999, Dick Hamm, then general minister and president of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), helped initiate the creation of the Stone-Campbell Dialogue. This body from all three streams of the North American movement wrote a “Confession of Sin and Affirmation of Faith” in June 2000 in which they invited members of all the churches of the Stone-Campbell Movement to join them. Part of that confession says:
[We] are part of a movement that was in its beginning given a special trust to promote the visible unity of Christ’s church.
Instead, we have been guilty of dividing the body of Christ in thought, word, and deed.
This betrayal of our trust has impoverished the whole church of Christ and weakened its mission.
We now bring to God our brokenness and repent of the sin of division. We ask God for forgiveness. We ask God to heal us so that our Movement within Christ’s church can more perfectly embody the unity to which we are called.”4
A Decisive Date
Now, we who share the Stone-Campbell heritage are approaching a decisive date—the bicentennial of the Declaration and Address. What will we do with this rich gift?
Seven years ago the Stone-Campbell Dialogue began dreaming of ways to mark this anniversary. The Disciples of Christ Historical Society sponsored a task force of 16 people from all streams of the movement to plan how our churches might use this event to reclaim the visible unity Thomas Campbell so much wanted and which we so much need.
The task force ruled out one massive event—too costly, people won’t come. Instead they worked to provide resources for “Great Communion” celebrations around the world on Sunday, October 4. A book, One Church, examines the Declaration and Address of 1809, and makes a new plea for unity in the 21st century. A Web site with materials on how to do a Great Communion service in your community is at www.greatcommunion.org
One hundred years ago a massive Communion service reflected the division that was virtually complete. In 2009—200 years after Thomas Campbell’s urgent plea—can we show the world in one small way what it means to be one in Christ?
1Thomas Campbell, Declaration and Address, (Washington, Pennsylvania: Brown and Sample, 1809), 16.
2Barton W. Stone, “Remarks,” Christian Messenger, August 1835, 180.
3“Address and Declaration,” By the Congregations Represented by Their Respective Church Officers in a Mass-meeting Assembled at Sand Creek, Shelby County, Illinois, August 17, 1889.
4“Confession of Sin and Affirmation of Faith: An Invitation from the Stone-Campbell Dialogue,” June 2000; presented to the Stone Campbell Dialogue, Madison Church of Christ, Nashville, Tennessee, June 1 and 2, 2000.
Douglas Foster is director of the Center for Restoration Studies and professor of church history at Abilene (Texas) Christian University. For the first two articles in his series, “The Point of Christianity,” see his pieces posted March 22 and May 17 this year.
Resources
- See the full text of the original Declaration and Address of 1809 at www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/texts/tcampbell/da/DA-1ST.HTM.
- See the papers and reports from the 10 years of the Stone-Campbell Dialogue at www.disciples.org/ccu/programs/stonecampbell/.
- See the rich resources available for planning and conducting a Great Communion service in your community at www.greatcommunion.org.
