History of The Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ)

The Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ)

Denomination·Founded 1809 CE·About 1,113,362 members in roughly 11,790 congregations in the United States, from the directory maintained since 1973 by 21st Century Christian and now the Church Research Council. Both figures have fallen every year since the 1990s. Substantial churches also exist in Nigeria, Ghana, India and Brazil, counted separately and not reliably.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → The Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ) → 1 branch

History & overview · every faith gets one

No creed but Christ, no name but Christian — and no piano.

The American frontier movement that set out in the early 1800s to abolish denominations by going back to the New Testament and doing only what it authorises. Christians, not Baptists or Presbyterians; the church of Christ, not a denomination; baptism by immersion for the forgiveness of sins; the Lord's Supper every Sunday; elders in each congregation and no organisation above it. The a cappella Churches of Christ are the wing that held the strict reading and separated in 1906.

Why it is filed this way

The Churches of Christ regard the word denomination as a description of what they reject and generally refuse it for themselves — the claim is to be the New Testament church rather than a branch of Christendom. Sociologically they are a denomination with a directory, colleges, papers and recognisable boundaries. Both statements are true and the tension is the movement's defining feature.

The founding

Two movements met and merged. Barton W. Stone came out of the Cane Ridge revival in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in August 1801 — a camp meeting of perhaps twenty thousand people — and in 1804 he and five other ministers dissolved their own presbytery, writing that they wanted to sink into union with the Body of Christ at large. Thomas Campbell, an Ulster Seceder Presbyterian disciplined for serving communion to the wrong Presbyterians, published the Declaration and Address at Washington, Pennsylvania, in 1809, with the rule that where the Scriptures speak, we speak, and where they are silent, we are silent. His son Alexander built the movement. The two streams united in Lexington on 1 January 1832 with a handshake.

Its founding is bound to Barton W. Stone, Thomas Campbell and Alexander Campbell — 1809 CE.

What it holds

Reality. A New Testament pattern that can be read off the text and reproduced, so that division becomes unnecessary.

The divine. The Trinity is held but the word is often avoided as unbiblical language, on the same principle that rejects creeds — the movement prefers to say what Scripture says in the words Scripture uses..

Death and after. Resurrection and judgment; the movement has argued about hell and about the millennium without ever making either a test.

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 Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ) — 1809 CE

Branches:

The International Churches of Christ — The Restoration Movement with a discipler assigned to you.

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 Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ) — inherit everything, change what you must