History of The Christian Churches and Churches of Christ

The Christian Churches and Churches of Christ

Denomination·Founded 1927 CE·No membership roll exists and none can, since there is no body to keep one. The Christian Standard directory listed about 5,200 congregations at its last compilation, down from nearly 6,800 six years earlier, and a new count was under way as of late 2024. Estimates of adherents commonly run above a million and are not from an audited source.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → The Christian Churches and Churches of Christ

History & overview · every faith gets one

The third stream: instruments yes, denomination no.

The middle wing of the Stone-Campbell movement — congregations that kept the organ and the missionary agencies but refused to be organised into a denomination, and that separated from the Disciples over roughly 1926 to 1971 as the Disciples restructured. They have no headquarters, no convention that can bind, and no membership roll; what holds them together is a network of Bible colleges, mission agencies, the North American Christian Convention and the magazine Christian Standard.

Why it is filed this way

These congregations reject the word denomination more consistently than either sibling body, and there is genuinely nothing to join — no roll, no charter, no assembly with authority. What exists is a directory, a convention, a set of colleges and a magazine. Sociologically that is a denomination held together by institutions rather than by government.

The founding

The separation had no founding act, which is exactly what its participants intended. Conservatives within the Disciples brotherhood, alarmed by the theological liberalism of the mission agencies and by open membership on the mission field in China, began holding the North American Christian Convention from 1927 as an alternative gathering, and built their own colleges and mission societies alongside the existing ones. The break became visible when the Disciples adopted the Provisional Design in 1968 and asked congregations to declare themselves; roughly three thousand declined and were listed separately from 1971.

Its founding is bound to By descent from Barton W. Stone and the Campbells — 1927 CE.

What it holds

Reality. The New Testament church as a pattern, read with the Restoration hermeneutic but without the strict prohibition on silence.

The divine. The Trinity, held plainly and evangelically; these congregations are broadly conservative in theology and would be recognised as evangelical by anyone visiting..

Death and after. Resurrection and judgment, preached directly.

The line

descent is public here — where it came from, what left it

Judaism — c. 1000 BCE Christianity — 30 CE Catholicism Protestantism — 1517 CE The Christian Churches and Churches of Christ — 1927 CE

Keep going

Back to the overview — the living page: elements, discussion, the web The Belief room — the claims themselves, with sources and context Branch The Christian Churches and Churches of Christ — inherit everything, change what you must