History & overview · every faith gets one
The wing of the Restoration Movement that decided unity mattered more than the pattern.
The stream of the Stone-Campbell movement that kept the missionary societies and the organ, built a denomination with a General Assembly in 1968, ordained women from the nineteenth century, joined the ecumenical councils its founders would have had no use for, and now practises the most open communion in American Protestantism — anyone at all may take it, with no examination and no membership required. It has lost roughly six in seven of its 1958 members.
Why it is filed this way
The Disciples are the one Stone-Campbell body that accepted the label. Adopting the Design in 1968 formally restructured a brotherhood of independent congregations into a denomination with regions and a General Assembly — the act that finished the separation from the independent Christian Churches, whose objection was precisely to being organised.
The founding
The Disciples are one of the three bodies that came out of the union sealed at Lexington on 1 January 1832 between Barton Stone's Christians and Alexander Campbell's Disciples. Where the Churches of Christ read the silence of Scripture as prohibiting, the Disciples read it as leaving liberty, and the two positions separated over the American Christian Missionary Society founded in 1849 and over the introduction of the organ. The 1906 census counted them separately. In 1968 the Disciples adopted a Design that made them formally a denomination with regional and general expressions — an act the movement's founders had spent their lives arguing against.
Its founding is bound to Barton W. Stone and Alexander Campbell, by descent — 1832 CE.
What it holds
Reality. A church whose unity is the point, and whose doctrine is deliberately not policed.
The divine. The Trinity, held loosely; the Disciples have no binding confession and the only question historically asked of a candidate for membership is whether they confess Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the living God..
Death and after. Resurrection; the denomination does not legislate on the details and mostly does not preach them.