By Brian Sevits
When I stepped onto the campus of Central Christian College of the Bible in the fall of 2005, I could not have told you anythingabout the roots of the Restoration Movement or its principles. Like many of my peers, I had grown up in a denomination and chose to come to CCCB because of its proximity to home and affordability.
Just two years later, I had been hired at the Restoration Movement church around the corner. Many of the members and leaders at that church share a similar story—we come from various backgrounds and have been welcomed into this fellowship of people committed to being “Christians only” and who base our faith and practices solely on the Bible.
In some ways, I was welcomed into this movement in a manner that has been ongoing for more than 200 years and which contributed to its rapid expansion.
A Movement Away from Denominations
Although he isn’t considered a primary “father” of our movement, John Wright played an important role in our history. I originally was drawn to him because, like me, Wright was a former Free Will Baptist minister, and he had helped form an association of over a dozen Baptist churches in Indiana in the early 1800s. He decided to simply go back to the Bible and rejected doctrinal statements that were counter to Scripture or which unnecessarily divided Christians into sects. He is but one of the early leaders who invited hundreds of people and congregations to become undenominational churches of Christ.
Around that same time period, others—including James O’Kelly, Elias Smith, and Abner Jones—were leading similar movements of people stepping away from the denominations they had brought to the United States from Europe, abandoning man-made creeds and traditions, and advocating for the restoration of Christianity according to New Testament teachings.
The Cane Ridge Revival in 1801 involved preachers and individuals from several different denominations who worked together and spread out across that landscape to preach and minister to thousands of attendees. The event advanced the notion of Barton Stone and some of the other preachers that they had improperly divided over nonessential matters. Many people consider Cane Ridge to be the official birthplace of our movement; with the writing and signing of the Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery there in 1804, many people from various denominations left behind their creeds and confessions for the sake of unity around the essential truths of Scripture.
Simple Faith—Explosive Growth
It has been said they preached one gospel at Cane Ridge; it was a simple message that Christ’s salvation is offered to all. In subsequent years, this inviting message helped the movement to spread like a wildfire across the western United States. Tens of thousands of people responded (especially at revivals and camp meetings) to the preaching of the simple gospel message. Dozens of those who had sometimes traveled great distances to these meetings became passionate evangelists, church planters, and promoters of New Testament Christianity.
I spoke with Lloyd Pelfrey, one of my former professors at CCCB, about notable evangelistic individuals in our movement’s history.
“Remember the preaching of Walter Scott!” Pelfrey said. “At that time it was taught that you had to wait on the Lord to give an experience that was an assurance that you were among the elect.” But Scott had studied the book of Acts and disagreed. Scott was similar to the preachers at Cane Ridge in that he preached a simple message that salvation was offered to anyone who would believe and obey.
Scott developed a systematic plan for sharing the gospel and inviting people to become followers of Jesus. The “five-finger exercise” emphasized faith, repentance, baptism, remission of sins, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. In his first year as an evangelist, Scott presented this message to thousands, and more than 900 people were baptized.
One of these individuals was William Amend, a Presbyterian who had come to a conclusion about the importance of baptism but could find no preacher who agreed with his interpretation of Acts 2:38. Hearing Scott speak from the overflow crowd gathered out in the yard, Amend made his way into the church building and responded to the invitation to be baptized.
Many people still use Scott’s simple evangelistic tool, or a variation of it, as their method of inviting others to become a Christian.
Continued Expansion
As people moved west across the American frontier, the movement’s leaders and preachers encouraged unity. Settlers were urged to strive for unity when starting churches in new communities. The pleas for unity were not always successful, but the invitation was compelling to many, and the movement continued to grow steadily as a result of impactful leadership, widely circulated publications, and church-planting efforts.
Men such as “Racoon” John Smith and John Rogers traveled across the countryside on horseback baptizing thousands; these men fostered unity among the churches that had up until the early 1830s been in two distinct groups associated either with Barton Stone or Alexander Campbell. At the meeting in Lexington in which the two groups came together, Smith emphasized that the divisions between Christian groups are almost entirely built upon matters of opinion that are treated by men as gospel. He insisted that Christians can come together if those opinions are put aside for the sake of unity.
More than 70 years later, P. H. Welshimer was bringing people together in other ways. Three times he served as president of the North American Christian Convention. He preached a message so compelling that he even won over an Episcopalian minister at the church across the street from his own and baptized him.
Welshimer was not afraid to partner with other churches in Canton, Ohio, where he ministered. He was very involved in events of the ministerial alliance, but he provided good follow-up to those events in his own way, leading hundreds of people to faith in Christ. As a result of his large revivals, Sunday school recruitment efforts, and door-to-door evangelism in neighborhoods around town, his congregation grew to be the largest church in our brotherhood at that time.
Today, the methods often are radically different, but the message of simple faith and unity amid diversity is very much alive. Let us be creative and energetic as we seek to continue in the footsteps of the pioneers of our movement.
Brian Sevits serves as minister of worship and administration at Timber Lake Christian Church in Moberly, Missouri. He is also an adjunct instructor in the worship arts department at Central Christian College of the Bible.
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