The Restoration Plea

The plea was formulated twice, independently, within five years, by men who did not know each other. Barton W. Stone, a Presbyterian minister whose Cane Ridge revival of 1801 had drawn thousands into the Kentucky woods, found himself and four colleagues at odds with their synod over Calvinist subscription. In 1804 they dissolved the presbytery they had formed, in a document titled its Last Will and Testament which willed that the Springfield Presbytery sink into union with the body of Christ at large, and took no name but Christian.

Thomas Campbell, a Scots-Irish Presbyterian who arrived in Pennsylvania in 1807, was censured for admitting Presbyterians of other synods to communion, and answered with the Declaration and Address of 1809, holding that the church of Christ on earth is essentially, intentionally and constitutionally one, that nothing should be required as an article of faith which is not as old as the New Testament, and that the opinions and inventions of men are the cause of division rather than its cure. His son Alexander Campbell turned the argument into a career, debating Presbyterians, Catholics and the sceptic Robert Owen, and publishing periodicals that carried the plea across the American frontier. The two movements recognized each other and united at Lexington, Kentucky, in 1832, joining Stone's Christians to the Campbells' Disciples on a handshake between Barton Stone and John Smith rather than on any agreed constitution, which was consistent with the plea and stored up trouble for later.

The plea contained an unresolved question that its founders did not have to answer and their successors did. If the New Testament church is the pattern, what counts as part of the pattern and what is merely incidental to it? Weekly communion, congregational autonomy and baptism of believers by immersion were quickly agreed. Missionary societies, instrumental music in worship, salaried located preachers and later Sunday schools and colleges were not, because the New Testament says nothing about any of them, and the movement split on whether silence forbids or permits. The division ran along regional and economic lines as much as hermeneutical ones, the wealthier and more urban north taking to organs and societies while the poorer post-war South, led by figures such as David Lipscomb of Nashville, refused both. The 1906 United States religious census listed the Churches of Christ separately at the request of the noninstrumental churches, and that census is the conventional date of a separation that had already happened in practice.

A second division followed in the mid twentieth century, when the independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ separated from the Disciples of Christ over the latter's restructure into a denomination with a general assembly in 1968. Three bodies now descend from a plea to abolish denominational division, and each holds that the plea is right and that the others have misapplied it. The atlas records the plea as one doctrine held in common because that is what it is, and records the readings of silence that divided its holders separately.