The restoration movement of the early eighteenth century in Britain and the United States attempted to return to the practices of worship outlined in the New Testament. This movement has shaped the worship life of several Protestant groups that use the name “Christian Church” or “Church of Christ.”
Worship practices of the restoration movement took shape during the eighteenth century, beginning in Britain. However, the idea of restoration can best be understood as a particular expression of the Reformation. Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and Knox sought, in various ways, to restore the faith and doctrine of the church to conformity with the Scriptures. During the 1600s, reformers shifted their attention to the issue of administration: Should the church be governed by bishops, by synods, or by independent congregations? Asking this question threatened the entrenched authority of state churches; spectacular power struggles typify Christianity during the seventeenth century. As opportunities for religious liberty opened, not only in North America but also in Britain, Congregationalists, Independents, and Baptists found ways to survive persecution. They disagreed among themselves and wrote definitions of what set their group apart and made it more correct in its application of the Scriptures than other fellowships. The number of small sects mounted.
John Glas, a Presbyterian minister, left the Church of Scotland in 1728 because he disagreed with the method by which that church managed its affairs. In separating himself from the state church, Glas began to commemorate the Lord’s Supper more frequently than the monthly observance practiced in the Church of Scotland. He read in the New Testament that the apostles came together on the first day of the week for the breaking of bread. In other ways also, Glas began to revive practices he believed accurately reflected life in the primitive or earliest church.
His son-in-law, Robert Sandeman, carried on the restoration movement. As a prolific writer and clear thinker, Sandeman influenced independent-minded Christians in Scotland and England in the second half of the eighteenth century. He promoted the weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper, greeted other Christians with a “holy kiss,” took regular collections of alms for the poor, and held love feasts—all practices he found in the New Testament. Eventually, at least twenty small churches began ordering their practices according to Sandeman’s views. In 1763, Sandeman settled in Danbury, Connecticut, where he founded a congregation that united with the Disciples of Christ in 1840.
A similar movement began in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland, led by the two Haldane brothers, James Alexander and Robert. These wealthy laymen thought the Church of Scotland was too formal and sterile, so they built an independent tabernacle in Edinburgh in 1799 and carried on an extended revival with the help of the English evangelist Rowland Hill. They also established a seminary in Glasgow, where they taught congregational independence and the weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper. In 1807, the Haldanes decided that immersion was the scriptural form of baptism.
Glas, Sandeman, and the Haldane brothers influenced many churches and Christian leaders in Britain in the late 1700s and early 1800s, including several who came to North America. Their ideas shaped the kind of Christianity that spread across the frontier in groups using the names “Christian Church” or “Church of Christ.” Even the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) was influenced by their thinking.
The most prominent attempt to apply the principles of the restoration movement in North America appeared in a body of believers now divided into three groups: (1) the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), (2) the Churches of Christ, and (3) Christian Churches and Churches of Christ not related to the other two groups. Ironically, these three groups emerged from an effort distinguished by its plea for Christian unity. Modern-day descendants of this American restoration movement look back to four men as founders: Thomas Campbell, his son Alexander Campbell, Barton Warren Stone, and Walter Scott.
The father of Thomas Campbell had been raised a Catholic in Ireland, but as a young adult, he conformed to the state religion and became an Anglican. Despite his conversion, he married a woman descended from French Huguenots. After launching his career as a school teacher, Thomas undertook five summers of theological training in order to receive ordination as a Seceder Presbyterian minister. In 1798 he became the minister of the Ahorey Church near Rich Hill in Ireland. In 1807, he left his family in Ireland and sailed for North America. He settled in Washington, Pennsylvania, and started preaching for the Presbyterians in the area. A year later, he sent for his family. Shipwrecked on the way, however, they were forced to stay in Glasgow for another year until they could try again to cross the ocean. While in Glasgow, Thomas’ son Alexander, now 20 and having been tutored by his father until he could teach along with him, attended the University of Glasgow. There he was swayed by the teaching of the Haldane brothers.
While Alexander Campbell was studying at Glasgow, his father left the Seceder Presbyterians because he disagreed with their restrictive attitude concerning who should be served the Lord’s Supper. In 1809, Thomas Campbell wrote a Declaration and Address. This important document, often considered the charter of the American restoration movement, outlines Thomas Campbell’s goal of recovering the unity of the church by means of restoring New Testament patterns of “doctrine, worship, discipline, and government.”
Within a year after joining his father in North America, Alexander Campbell preached 100 sermons. The next year he married Margaret Brown and was licensed to preach as a Presbyterian minister. In 1812, he and Margaret became parents and soon faced the decision of whether to baptize their infant daughter (according to Presbyterian practice) or wait until she could receive believer’s baptism by immersion. After a year of study, Alexander Campbell, his wife, his parents, and his friends in the Brush Run Church were immersed, and the Brush Run Church joined the Redstone Baptist Association. Eight years later, Alexander Campbell, having established a reputation as a skilled debater, started publishing a periodical called The Christian Baptist, which further enhanced his reputation. While on a trip to Kentucky the following year, he met Barton Warren Stone. For twenty years Stone had been preaching a message remarkably similar to that of the Campbells.
In 1827, Alexander Campbell persuaded the Mahoning Baptist Association to employ Walter Scott as a traveling evangelist. A few years later, when Campbell left the Baptists and took many congregations with him, he also retained the loyalty of this skilled communicator. This departure took place in 1830; Campbell ceased publishing The Christian Baptist and replaced it with a new periodical, The Millennial Harbinger. The millennium announced in this title was the golden age dawning as Christianity spread around the world. Campbell was optimistic about the United States of America as the land that best demonstrated how God wanted people to live. Many of Alexander Campbell’s views changed, and his tone certainly changed, when he started this new journal.
In 1832, “Raccoon” John Smith represented Alexander Campbell’s movement, now known as the Disciples of Christ, in a monumental meeting with Barton W. Stone and his followers, who preferred to be known simply as Christians. This meeting, which took place at Hill Street Church in Lexington, Kentucky, marked a merger of the Christians and the Disciples of Christ and propelled the American restoration movement forward.
Barton W. Stone, nearly sixteen years older than Alexander Campbell, was born on a small plantation near Port Tobacco, Maryland. One of his cousins had signed the Declaration of Independence when Barton was three years old; his older brothers had fought in the Revolutionary War. In 1798, when Stone was being ordained into the Presbyterian ministry at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, he answered the question, “Do you accept the Westminster Confession of Faith as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Bible?” by saying, “I do as far as I see it consistent with the Word of God.” He contended against the Calvinist doctrine of predestination. In 1804, a year after Stone and the ministers and members of fifteen churches left the Synod of Kentucky to form the Springfield Presbytery, they wrote The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery, wherein they declared their intention to seek union with the whole body of Christ. Within a few years, Stone and his friends began to practice immersion. Stone published a monthly paper called The Christian Messenger.
After settling in Georgetown, Kentucky, in 1819, Stone met Alexander Campbell five years later. They recognized the similarity of their ideas and began discussing the possibility of union. Their discussion climaxed in the handshake of Christian fellowship and unity in Lexington in 1832. Barton Stone lived until 1844 and Alexander Campbell until 1866. The movement that grew out of the teachings they advocated is still sometimes called the Stone-Campbell Movement, even by those who no longer subscribe to all of the assumptions or goals of the restoration movement.