A presbytery writes its own will and dies.
On 28 June 1804 Stone and five colleagues dissolved the Springfield Presbytery they had just formed, in a document written as a last will and testament, bequeathing their power back to the churches. It is a strange and funny piece of writing and it is the movement's founding gesture.
The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, written by Barton W. Stone, Robert Marshall, John Dunlavy, Richard M'Nemar and others on 28 June 1804, is a genuinely peculiar document: a church court disbanding itself in the legal form of a will, with items bequeathing its authority back to the congregations, willing that preachers earn their living by honest labour, and that the people read the Bible for themselves. Stone had come out of the Cane Ridge camp meeting of August 1801 in Bourbon County, Kentucky, an event that lasted about a week and drew crowds variously estimated between ten and twenty-five thousand, with the physical phenomena — falling, jerking, barking — that made it notorious. Stone's wing was more revivalist and more egalitarian than the Campbells', freed enslaved people, and was less legally minded about the text. The union of the two streams at Lexington on 1 January 1832 was sealed by a handshake between Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell's colleague Raccoon John Smith, and the difference in temperament between the two founding groups is still visible in the movement.
We will, that this body die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large; for there is but one body, and one Spirit, even as we are called in one hope of our calling.
The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, 28 June 1804, Item 1
The same ground, other faiths
claims that share this one's ideasSign in to open the first thread. Everything here is attributed.