Open membership — receiving into full church membership people baptised as infants and never immersed — was the issue that made the division concrete. It surfaced on the Disciples' China mission in the 1920s, where missionaries were found to be practising it, and combined with the theological direction of the College of the Bible at Lexington, Kentucky, whose faculty were accused of higher criticism in a 1917 investigation. Conservatives responded by building parallel institutions rather than by leaving: the Christian Restoration Association in 1925, the North American Christian Convention in 1927, and a run of new Bible colleges. The separation was slow, contested and never formalised, and the two bodies were finally listed separately in the 1971 Disciples yearbook, which recorded the congregations that had declined to be part of the restructured church.