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DISCIPLES OF CHRIST.(Converted to html from Hill, Samuel S. Encyclopedia of Religion in the South. Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1984. Used with permission of Mercer University Press) It is a body of Protestant Christians that emerged in the early years of the 19th century as an American religious movement that both reflected and shaped the ethos of that era. The movement came primarily from Presbyterian and Baptist antecedents and experienced its greatest growth and influence in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma. The name Disciples of Christ was first used by followers of Thomas (1763-1854) and ALEXANDER CAMPBELL (1788-1866), father and son, who emigrated from northern Ireland as Presbyterians in 1807 and 1809. Thomas Campbell was received as a minister in the Associate Synod of North America upon his arrival and assigned to Washington PA. He quickly fell into controversy over doctrine and church order with others in the presbytery and withdrew from the jurisdiction of the denomination in 1809. Campbell's simultaneous withdrawal from and expulsion by the Associate Synod led to the formation of the Christian Association of Washington. For this association, formed by Campbell and several of his former parishioners and conceived as an agency to propagate ideas of Christian cooperation, Campbell penned a Declaration and Address, which presented the principles of the association and subsequently of the Disciples of Christ. Central themes included the right of private judgment, the sole authority of the Bible in matters of religion, the evil of sectarianism, and the appeal for a restoration of biblical institutions and practices as a basis for Christian unity. Just as the Declaration was finished, Alexander Campbell arrived in America with his own reservations about Presbyterian polity and practices and eagerly joined his father in the new program of religious reform. The Christian Association constituted itself as a church in 1811, chose Thomas Campbell as elder, and licensed the younger Campbell to preach. This new congregation celebrated communion weekly and early adopted the practice of believer's baptism by immersion. It scoffed at hireling clergy and pressed the Protestant principle of the priesthood of all believers much further than most groups. Because of similarities with Baptist churches, the Reformers or Disciples of Christ associated themselves with the Baptists in 1815. However, the relationship was never without tension and the new movement grew within but was not entirely a part of the Baptist denomination. In 1830 the relationship was dissolved. Alexander Campbell married in 1811 and settled on his father-in-law's farm at Buffaloe in Brooke County VA, a few miles west of Washington PA. There, at a site renamed BETHANY (WV), Campbell published The Christian Baptist (18231830) and The Millennial Harbinger (1830-1866), periodicals that served to unite and direct an inchoate group of followers in congregationally governed churches into a coherent religious movement. Though the younger Campbell quickly emerged as the driving personality in the movement, themes enunciated by the father in the Declaration and Address remained normative. The movement stressed freedom from all nonbiblical authority and Christian unity to be achieved through a restoration of the forms and practices of primitive Christianity. The New Testament, particularly the book of Acts, was regarded as the model for ecclesiology and theology. Hence all divisive names were repudiated for the name Disciple or Christian, all postbiblical ecclesiological developments were repudiated for simple congregationalism, and the ecumenical creeds were rejected as tests of orthodoxy and fellowship for biblical formulas. Membership was extended to those confessing Jesus to be the Christ and accepting his commands. Though Disciples of Christ were concerned with the moral teachings of Scripture and maintained congregational discipline, their primary interest was in those dominical commands relating to the organization and governance of the church. They rejected Calvinism as an extrabiblical system. Like many others in the early nineteenth century, Disciples objected to Calvinism's tendency to emphasize divine sovereignty at the expense of human freedom. Disciples insisted that faith is a response to testimony and is a rational act. Faith leads to repentance and obedience and these to forgiveness and the gift of the Spirit. Thus, though they were active evangelists, there was a distinctly rationalistic character to their preaching. Disciples believed that their teachings were exclusively biblical and therefore provided a platform on which all Christians, regardless of denomination, might unite. A second group that became part of the Disciples of Christ movement emerged from Kentucky Presbyterianism in the aftermath of the revivals of the turn of the century. The Western revivals had a profoundly unsettling effect and stimulated denominational tension as well as a heightened religious interest. Following the CANE RIDGE Camp Meeting in Bourbon County KY in August 1801, the Presbyterian clergy found itself deeply divided and charges were brought against some of the New Lights (revivalists) who had clearly deviated from Calvinist orthodoxy. The New Lights avoided synodical examination by withdrawal and formed an independent Springfield Presbytery in 1803. The anomaly of their situation was apparent, and in 1804 this group dissolved their presbytery, thereby leaving their congregations independent of one another. In a published apology, the Last Will and Testament of Springfield Presbytery (SPRINGFIELD WILL AND TESTAMENT), the New Lights repudiated presbyterial government, ecclesiastical titles, and extrabiblical authority. They advocated congregational polity, biblical study as preparation for ministry, scriptural preaching, and Christian unity on a biblical basis. The similarity of their platform to that of Thomas Campbell's Declaration is striking. The group signing this Last Will and Testament adopted the name Christian for the new movement. Though some of the original group eventually became Shakers and others returned to the Presbyterian church, the new Christian church grew in Kentucky and spread southward and westward with migration. BARTON W. STONE, the one founder who remained in the Christian church, gave leadership to the movement; and its unity was strengthened by the Christian Messenger, which Stone began to publish in 1826. Stone's theological views were similar to those of the Campbells, but his rejection of Calvinism was more thorough. Even at the time of his ordination, Stone had been troubled by the doctrine of the trinity. He subsequently repudiated this doctrine along with Calvinist views of the atonement. Thus two similar religious movements, the Disciples and the Christians, emerged in the early years of the 19th century. By 1830 when the Disciples severed their Baptist association, congregations of the two movements existed in close proximity to one another. Meetings in Georgetown and Lexington KY in 1831 and 1832 led to a gradual union of the two groups. Both were congregationally governed and the merger therefore proceeded slowly and with considerable controversy. Though Stone's enthusiasm for union was great, many of the Christian churches remained apart and formed the Christian Connexion. Nonetheless, the majority of congregations entered the union, and the resultant denomination grew to a membership of about 200,000 by the outbreak of the Civil War. The Disciples of Christ were a people of America no less than of the Book. Their reading of Scripture reflected repudiation of the sectarianism and establishmentarianism of the old world and millennial hopes for the new. Their preaching emphasized freedom, equality, responsibility, and a hope that God's blessings would fall abundantly on a people whose lives, churches, schools, and government were founded on faith in Christ. Their quest for unity discouraged attention to such potentially divisive issues as slavery, and their congregational polity made possible considerable sectional variety in social ideas, preaching styles, and religious practices. While the first generation of Disciples was held together by charismatic leadership and religious journals, bureaucratic structure began to emerge in the 1830s with the formation of state associations for evangelism; and in 1849 a national association, the American Christian Missionary Society, was formed to support home and foreign missions. Even though Alexander Campbell was chosen president, a national association inevitably proved fractious during a period of sectionalism that would culminate in the Civil War. While most Disciples opposed slavery on moral or economic grounds, they professed to find biblical sanctions for the institution and rarely expressed sympathy for abolitionism. Yet although most Disciples preferred unity to clarity, small groups of the high zealous and abolitionists determined to use the society as a platform on which a denominational position could be established. Though the denomination did not divide at this time, the society greatly intensified sectionalism. A resolution adopted by the society in 1863 in the absence of representatives from the South endorsed the Union cause and alienated Southern Disciples, thereby laying the foundation for a denominational schism at the end of the century. The CHURCHES OF CHRIST, first enumerated separately from Disciples of Christ in the 1906 census, objected to the use of missionary societies and of instrumental music in worship on the grounds that these practices are not commanded in Scripture. However, virtually all of the churches of the new denomination lay in the states of the Confederacy, and the roots of the division were found in the period of war and reconstruction. Repudiation of theological study had profound effects on Disciple education. Though Alexander Campbell wrote a theology, The Christian System, he advocated the study of the Bible as the basis for both liberal arts and ministerial education. His own Bethany College, founded in 1840, was forbidden by charter from offering instruction in theology, even though study of the Bible was central to the curriculum. While Bethany remained the most important Disciple school until the Civil War, Lexington later emerged as a center for ministerial education. There the College of the Bible (now Lexington Theological Seminary) followed the Campbellian tradition and used the Bible as its principal textbook. Other Disciple schools of prominence in the South include Phillips, Texas Christian, and Transylvania universities. In the late nineteenth-century transformation of America, Disciples moved with the population to the South and West and to the industrial centers of the Midwest. Some Disciples adapted to the more cosmopolitan and pluralistic character of urban American society while others held firmly to the ways of an older, simpler, more agrarian society; and many sought to live in both worlds. Disciples thus came into conflict with one another over the use of instrumental music in worship and missionary societies in the work of the church and the admission of unimmersed members by transfer from other denominations. They also struggled to assess the significance of Darwinism and biblical criticism for religious life. To many Disciples it appeared that their traditional appeal for Christian unity through the restoration of primitive Christianity was no longer viable. While a few liberal Disciples were willing to reject restoration as a platform and move forthrightly into the modern ecumenical movement and while the Churches of Christ insisted upon a platform of restorationism at the cost of alienation from other Christian churches, most Disciples sought a middle ground. Gradually liberalism and ecumenism triumphed among them, but few were willing to admit their virtual repudiation of the restoration platform prior to the middle of the 20th century. This admission was accompanied by another major division as many conservative churches withdrew from fellowship and institutional cooperation. These churches maintain a strict congregational polity but meet for consultation and fellowship in the North American Christian Convention, and they call themselves CHRISTIAN CHURCHES AND CHURCHES OF CHRIST. Though this division was gradual after 1927, it was completed in the aftermath of Disciple denominational restructure in 1968. Disciple reluctance to grant titles and preferential status to clergy made the denomination particularly susceptible to demands for the education and ordination of women. Many Disciple colleges were coeducational from the beginning, and Bethany College admitted women in 1880. Women studied at the College of the Bible after 1895. Several women were ordained to the ministry in the late nineteenth century and most opposition ceased with the 1906 withdrawal of Churches of Christ. However, the positions available to women ministers were and are usually distinctive and subordinate. Though there were black members of early Disciple churches, few separate black congregations were formed. In 1860 there were probably no more than 7,000 black Disciples, a figure that had grown to about 48,000 by the end of the century. Since the 1960s most urban churches have come to accept the idea of a racially inclusive fellowship, but black Disciples remain few and largely concentrated in black congregations. The Disciples of Christ were founding members of the Federal Council of Churches in 1908 and of the National and World Councils and through these bodies have sought to witness to their traditional plea for Christian unity. Working with representatives of diverse traditions has compelled Disciples to reassess some of their own practices, and the 20th century has witnessed many changes. Disciples have developed an understanding of the role of theology in religion, and their seminaries today are ecumenically oriented and similar in curriculum to those of most Christian denominations. At their national assembly in 1968, Disciples adopted a Provisional Design for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), which provided a connectional polity by creating the offices of general minister, president, and moderator and establishing a biennial General Assembly of elected delegates, a general board, and an administrative committee. The character of Disciple missions has also changed in recent years with the growth of emphasis on cooperative work, on shared responsibilities, and on the development of indigenous leadership. At the end of 1979 there were 1,217,747 Disciples in the United States and Canada (776,378 active members) organized in 3,746 congregations. An American-born religious movement, the Disciples of Christ reflect in their own development the transformation of American thought and society in the 19th and 20th centuries. Bibliography. W. B. Blakemore, ea., The Renewal of Church; W. E. Garrison, Alexander Campbell's Theology, Religion Follows the Frontier: A History of the Disciples of Christ; Garrison and A. T. DeGroot, The Disciples of Christ: A History; David E. Harrell, Jr., Quest for a Christian America; William E. Tucker and Lester G. McAllister, Journey in Faith: A History of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ); Charles A. Young, ea., Historical Documents Advocating Christian Union. SAMUEL C. PEARSON
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