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The Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement (or simply, Restoration Movement) is a religious reform movement born in the early 1800s. The nickname is taken from the names of Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell, who are regarded by some historians as the leading figures of four independent movements with like principles who merged together into two religious movements of significant size. Many of the more conservative members of the churches of Christ object to the phrase "Stone-Campbell Movement" as being derogatory.
Although Stone and Campbell were to become the best-known and most influential early leaders of the movement, others preceded them and laid the foundation for their work.
The Christian churches of Smith and Jones came into contact with some of the Christian churches of James O'Kelly and found they had enough in common to join forces. This coalition, referred to as the "Christian Connection," joined with Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell's "Christians" in 1826.
Stone spent several years trying to reconcile the Christian Connection with Alexander Campbell, but distrust between Campbell and the Connection caused it to fail. Some members united with Campbell and Stone when they split off, however most of the Christian Connection merged with the Congregational Churches, which in 1957 united with other churches to become the United Church of Christ.
In 1906 the Church of Christ split from the Disciples of Christ over many issues that ran back to the Campbell-Stone Union in 1824. Actually, it is more correct to say that a split which had been brewing for decades was formalized in 1906, when it was agreed that the religious census which was in that era conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau would list the groups separately. One of the issues that lead to the split was exclusivism. Since 1836 Campell and Stone noticed a growing "furious zeal for orthodoxy". The exclusivism faction never comprised a majority within the whole of the Restoration Movement, but it did eventually dominate the Southern churches.
On October 23, 1849, a group of individuals, acting without the consent of the other churches of Christ, met in Cincinnati, Ohio with the intention of creating a "general church organization for the furtherance of the work by the church collectively." This action caused immediate disagreements among the churches, because such organizations had previously been abolished. Barton W. Stone himself had in fact taken part in the abolition of the Springfield Presbytery, and authored at that time a very influential document, The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, which contained within it the idea that the existence of all such bodies was necessarily divisive and hence sinful.
About nine or ten years after that, L. L. Pendleton, who was a member of the Midway, Kentucky church brought a piano into the church building. One of the elders of that assembly removed the piano that evening but it was soon replaced by another. Until that time all singing in the churches had been a capella. Mr. Pendleton, therefore started the creation of dissension over a topic which previously had not been an issue. Generally speaking, the bulk of the urban congregations, particularly in the Northern states, were not totally adverse to this development, which was also gaining momentum in the other religious groups around them, while rural congregations, particularly in the Southern United States, tended to oppose this trend.
About 40 years later, the U.S. Census Bureau, in consultation with the leaders of the two factions, decided to list the members of these two movements separately. Although exclusivism was one of the factors involved in the split it was not the only factor. Other issues revolving around baptism, and the missionary society and insturmental music issues noted above also contributed to the split. In fact, in most Churches of Christ to this day it is maintained that the prime issue was that of instrumental music in services of worship.
After the split the Churches of Christ generally became more exclusive, while the Disciples of Christ became more inclusive. The Churches of Christ became more rigid in their interpretation of the Bible, while the Disciples became less so, becoming more "mainline", where for the most part they remain today. By 1926 a split began to form within the Disciples over the future direction of the church. Conservatives within the group began to have problems with the perceived liberalism of the leadership, upon the same grounds described earlier excepting instrumental music. In 1927 they held the first North American Christian Convention, and the Independent Christian Churches/Churches of Christ began to emerge as a distinct group from the Disciples, although the break was not totally formalized until the late 1960s; by this time the decennial religious census was a thing of the past and it is impossible to use it as a deliniation as it was in 1906.
The Disciples today are still not totally devoid of the conservative-liberal tension. Within the Disciples is Disciples Renewal, a movement calling the church back to its roots in Restorationism and away from the Mainline liberalism of the National Council of Churches. It is closely related to the Confessing Movement found in several other Mainline denominations.
After the Church of Christ split from the Disciples of Christ they found that many of the churches could not agree on any issues except the issues which started the split from the Disciples of Christ.
Since the members of the churches of Christ agreed that there was no scriptural basis for an association of churches or a synod, the churches were all independent and autonomous. All disagreements in doctrine were handled locally, although open discussion was encouraged on a national or international basis. Most issues were discussed by the publishers of religious periodicals, who used their periodicals to present their own views and to debate the views of others. Between 1920 and 1960 over 20 sects within the Church had formed. The Church of Christ had in some ways become a series of denominations within a denomination, exactly what Stone and Campbell had worked so hard to avoid.
The most notable sects were:
It should be noted of the first three groups listed that there is a considerable overlap in viewpoints. For example, almost all in the "one-cup" group also reject both Sunday School and "institutions". Most in the non-Sunday School group likewise also reject "institutions". All three of these groups, and to a far lesser extent the mainstream as well, have been at odds over whether to hire a full-time "minister", titled as such, for a congregation or whether this was in fact an acceptance and endorsement of the extra-Biblical concept of clergy and that preaching is best and only properly done by regular male members of the church, perhaps occasionally reinforced by a travelling evangelist engaged only for a specific event or series of events. There has also been some discussion about whether anyone now living truly meets what are seen as the New Testament requirements for the office of elder. At one time, pacifism was an issue of serious concern; in recent decades the pacifist faction of this group has largely died out.
Perhaps the largest schism, which ultimately split the Church of Christ again, was the Crossroads Movement which started in the 1960s and 1970s. The Crossroads Movement initially started as a somewhat radical, although largely accepted, movement within the Church. Under the Crossroads Movement, the Church was divided into "Prayer Cells". Each Cell had a "Prayer Brother" who was assigned newer members in the church. Within each prayer cell the members would confess their sins, in "Soul Talks", and offer support. Each cell's brother would then form Prayer Cells with other Prayer Brothers in a pyramid orginization. The Crossroads Movement started at the 14th Street Church of Christ in Gainesville, Florida, which became known as "Crossroads Church of Christ". The Crossroads Movement spread across the Churches of Christ as a means to revitalize smaller churches and evangelize college campuses.
In 1979, the Lexington Church of Christ in Lexington, Massachusetts, a struggling congregation in the Boston metropolitan area which had shrunk to 30 or 40 members and suffered from financial problems and low morale, invited Kip McKean to become their pulpit and campus minister. McKean employed the techniques he had learned at Crossroads to spearhead a new evangelistic outreach to the Boston area college campuses. McKean later established many "Pillar Churches" in key metropolitan centers that could in turn evangelize the cities around them. The Boston Movement, as it became known, added an additional criterion for baptism, that the individual must be a "disciple" prior to baptism. By 1988, most of the leading and more influential members of the Church of Christ had denounced the Boston and Crossroads Movements. The final split happened in 1989 when McKean appointed nine "World Sector Leaders", each responsible for a different sector of the world. A World Sector Administrator was appointed to oversee the finances of each sector. The Church of Christ sued the Boston Movement churches for the use of the name Church of Christ. The latter eventually changed their name (in 1993) to the International Churches of Christ. The Crossroads Movement and Boston Movement have since severed all ties with one another.
Partially in reaction to the Crossroads Movement, many Churches of Christ split from the mainstream Church of Christ, with their elders sometimes hiring preachers from outside the Churches of Christ and generally taking a more tolerant stance toward other churches. Essentially, these more liberal congregations now constitute yet another subgroup.
Five modern religious groups trace their heritage back to roots in the Stone-Campbell Restoration movement:
See also Restorationism and Second Great Awakening
A different view of the history of this movement may be discovered by studying the publications of Truth Magazine publications and Florida College publications. External links for these two publishing sources are:
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