Consolidation and Expansion:

Living Theological Heritage of the United Church of Christ - Volume 4

Elizabeth C. Nordbeck, Lowell H. Zuck, Elizabeth C. Nordbeck, Lowell H. Zuck

• Publisher: United Church Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780829811100
• eBook ISBN: 9780829820966
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

"Consolidation and Expansion" studies the movements, controversies, and theologies of the four major precursors to the United Church of Christ: the Christians, the German Evangelicals, the Congregationalists, and the German Reformed tradition. Edited by Elizabeth C. Nordbeck and Lowell H. Zuck. Series editor Barbara Brown Zikmund.

PART I

The Christians

In 1793 the Christians adopted the Christian name, and it is prevailing. They took the Bible for their only creed, and its friends are multiplying. They confessed Christ as their only leader, and others are retiring. They adopted open communion, and it is prevailing. They restored apostolic usages, and they are prevailing. They bow to One God, and this doctrine is obtaining. They plead for the fellowship of all Christians, and few are now so bold as to oppose it. They started the first religious newspaper; built the first college extending equal privileges to the sexes; ordained the first woman presbyter; and are still going on adding new works of reform to the Christian temple; and separating the chaff from the wheat. Truth must triumph. Jesus must reign.

With these stirring words, historian Nicholas Summerbell in 1871 summarized the history and future of his denomination, known since the turn of the century simply as Christians or the Christian Connection. Seventy-five years later this once-lively movement was virtually unknown outside of a limited presence in the Southeast and Midwest, and it remains by far the most obscure of the four traditions that merged in 1957 to form the United Church of Christ.

Ironically, it was the Christians’ insistence on “gospel liberty” that brought their movement into being and promoted its demise. Their distaste for ecclesial structures, coupled with a profound mistrust of anything resembling creeds and confessions, retarded institutional growth and cohesion throughout the nineteenth century. Their bold willingness to entertain prospects of unity with groups as diverse as the Freewill Baptists and the Unitarians confused and angered fellow believers whose theological views were more nuanced and doctrinally narrow. Their early identification of democracy with true faith, of Jeffersonian republicanism with proper principles of biblical interpretation and ecclesial authority, made them seem increasingly parochial and anachronistic in a world growing suspicious of American individualism. Nevertheless, the Christians’ affirmation of theological diversity, as well as their pioneering efforts in religious journalism, women’s leadership, and ecumenics, cannot be ignored. “The Christians commence no great work,” wrote Summerbell with unintended clarity of vision, “but it becomes immortal.” Of the four merged traditions in the United Church of Christ, none more clearly represents the contemporary themes of inclusivity, openness, and unity than does this uniquely American movement.

Frontier Roots

From the beginning, the Christians differed from their future companion traditions in the United Church of Christ in several distinct ways. A product of neither the continental nor the British Reformation, the Christian Connection was an indigenous expression of popular piety, born in the wave of religious enthusiasm that swept through the former colonies in post-revolutionary North America. In a parade of sectarian and cultic movements that included Freewill Baptists, Shakers, Universalists, Unitarians, and Mormons, the Christians represented the most thoroughgoing fusion of the language and ideals of popular sovereignty with the structures and beliefs of traditional Christianity. Although their polity, as it developed, was essentially congregational, the Christians at first resisted formal structures and offices, preferring instead to imitate what they believed was the purity and simplicity of New Testament faith and practice. By mid-century, however, Christians reluctantly admitted they were becoming a denomination, one that included the same formal structures they had earlier criticized in other religious bodies. Nevertheless, throughout the century they retained much of the self-identity and dynamism of a movement, convinced, as Summerbell wrote, that their peculiar mission was to add “new works of reform to the Christian temple.”

Summerbell’s confident generalizations, written in 1871, suggest the remarkable development and consolidation of this diffuse movement. Just sixty years earlier, the Christians had comprised three entirely separate but similar bodies, distinguished by leadership, denominational heritage, and region of origin.

The earliest of these was a breakaway group of Virginia Methodists led by James O’Kelly, an obscure preacher of apparently limited education. A convert to Methodism, probably in the late 1770s, O’Kelly was ordained following the famous 1784 Christmas Conference that formally established John Wesley’s new denomination in the United States. As presiding elder over a group of twenty itinerants in Virginia and North Carolina, O’Kelly soon became convinced that ecclesial power should be vested, not in a limited council of bishops and elders, but in a more broadly representative body in which all preachers could participate. In 1792, when the General Conference met at Baltimore to debate the future governance and structure of the Methodist Episcopal Church, O’Kelly proposed that preachers should have the right of grievance to the conference if they believed the bishop had made an inappropriate territorial appointment (see vol. 4:1).

At issue for O’Kelly was the imposition of logical restraints on the virtually unlimited power of bishops, not the legitimacy of bishops themselves. His motion, however, was defeated after lengthy and acrimonious debate, and, with several like-minded colleagues, he withdrew from the conference. Attempts at negotiation and reconciliation during subsequent months failed. The following year O’Kelly, Rice Haggard, and their disaffected associates separated permanently from the Methodists to found a new movement in which power and authority were shared equally by clergy and laity. Adopting the name Republican Methodists initially to distinguish their polity from the hierarchic Methodist Episcopal system, they settled in 1794, at Haggard’s suggestions, on the simple and biblical name Christian (see vol. 4:2).

Under the energetic leadership of O’Kelly and Haggard, the new movement grew rapidly. Its early converts—as many as thirty-six clergy and four thousand lay members in the first decade—came mostly from the ranks of former Methodists. But O’Kelly’s vigorous proclamation of gospel liberty generated continuing interest throughout the territory from North Carolina to Washington, D.C., while Haggard’s itinerancy brought the message into Kentucky and as far north as Ohio. Formal organization came more slowly, although by 1814 a rudimentary conference structure seems to have been in place.

In New England, meanwhile, two men of dissimilar backgrounds were gradually reaching similar theological conclusions. Abner Jones was the son of Calvinistic Baptists who, in 1780, had removed from Massachusetts to farm in rural Vermont. Like those of many youths of his time, Abner’s boyhood and adolescent years were spiritually troubled, as he engaged in the familiar tug-of-war between religious fears and human appetites. Converted (by his own account, for the second time) around his twenty-first year, he was baptized and subsequently began to preach. His private studies, however, had led him increasingly to dissent from the Calvinism of his upbringing, and uncertain what he should preach, Jones took up the study of medicine. Careful reading of scriptures, meanwhile, gradually convinced him to abandon not only Calvinistic doctrines, but also the discipline and practice of his inherited faith. In 1801, a local revival again turned his thoughts to preaching, and that same year, having by now clarified his theological views to his own satisfaction, he formed what was “probably, the first FREE, CHRISTIAN Church ever established in New England.” Members called themselves simply Christians. Jones gathered a second church “without any creed, or confession of faith,” in Hanover, New Hampshire, before he was ordained in 1802 by a group of Freewill Baptists. Later that year he traveled to Portsmouth, where he met Elder Elias Smith, the recently installed pastor of a new church in that seacoast town. (See vol. 4:3, 4.)

Like Abner Jones, Smith came from religious stock, his father a Calvinistic Baptist, his mother a Congregationalist. Unlike the irenic Jones, however, Elias Smith was cantankerous, brilliant, and iconoclastic from his boyhood onward, and as peripatetic in his theology as in his preaching. Drawn early to the vocation of ministry, with none of Jones’s scruples about a stable theological location, Smith was baptized into the Baptist Church. He began preaching around the time he was twenty-one, was ordained two years later, in 1793, and commenced an itinerant ministry; during this time he became convinced of the errors of Calvinism. In 1801, shortly before his decisive meeting with Abner Jones, Smith lapsed into a brief flirtation with Universalism—one of several during his lifetime—and upon his “recovery” publicly renounced both Calvinism and Universalism. His association with Jones led him to bring the Portsmouth church into the Christian fold, and doubtless moved him toward greater—if temporary—clarity of vision. By 1804 he was prepared to denounce as “abominable in the sight of God” religious matters such as “calvinism, arminianism, freewillism, universalism, reverends, parsons, chaplains, doctors of divinity, clergy, bands, surplices, notes, creeds, covenants, [and] platforms.”

Although Smith periodically claimed to have been the founder of the Christian Connection in New England, that honor clearly belongs to Abner Jones. Together both men were influential in the development of a distinctively Christian identity, for example, through the publication of a hymnal for the movement in 1805 (see vol. 4:7). Nevertheless, it was Elias Smith, more than any other first-generation Christian leader, who propelled the movement forward, primarily through his pioneering journalistic efforts. Between 1805 and 1807, Smith published nine volumes of The Christian’s Magazine, Reviewer, and Religious Intelligencer, a quarterly that treated a wide range of historical, theological, and contemporary material. But it was the Herald of Gospel Liberty, first published in Portsmouth on September 1, 1808, that changed the parochial Connection into a national movement. The Herald was a religious newspaper published weekly and filled with accounts of local revivals, church plantings, and practical “religious intelligence.” Itinerant evangelists wrote in to report on their labors and whereabouts, and the Herald swiftly became the connective tissue that bound together not only the growing Christian population in New England, but Christians in other parts of the country as well.

By 1808, a third indigenous movement of Christians had emerged in Kentucky, under the leadership of Barton W. Stone. Like his Christian counterparts in the north and east, Stone spent his childhood in rural isolation, a setting in which his religious education was simple, biblical, and essentially nonsectarian. His widowed mother did possess the means to provide him with an education, however, and while studying at a private academy in North Carolina he was converted by Presbyterian James McGready, generally considered the father of the frontier camp meeting. Stone sought Presbyterian licensure at the age of twenty-one but discovered that dogmatic theology—in particular, the doctrine of the Trinity—was a stumbling block. After a stint of teaching in Georgia, Stone received his license to preach, eventually settling as a permanent pastor at Cane Ridge, Kentucky. He was ordained in 1798, despite continuing doubts about traditional doctrines such as election and reprobation.

In 1801, Stone visited a revival at Gasper River in southwestern Logan County, Kentucky, led by the same fiery and controversial McGready under whom he had earlier been converted. This was probably the first camp meeting in North America. So impressed was Stone with this “remarkable work of God” that he planned a “sacramental meeting” of his own at the Cane Ridge church. It was a decision that permanently changed the face of popular religion. In August 1801, between ten and twenty-five thousand men, women, and children descended on Cane Ridge in wagons and on horseback, while for a week Methodist, Baptist, and Presbyterian preachers forgot sectarian boundaries and preached free grace around the clock to the multitudes.

In the wake of the Cane Ridge revival, tensions swiftly emerged within the Presbyterian fold. Both the unrestrained style of the camp meeting revivals and their tendency to simplify theological doctrine engendered hostility between traditionalists and New Lights, or supporters of the new methods. Thus when fellow revivalist Richard McNemar was brought up on heresy charges before the Presbytery of Washington, Ohio, Stone and several others withdrew to form the Springfield Presbytery. Within months the group had come to question the validity of the Presbyterian system itself, and in June 1804 they dissolved the new presbytery with a famous “Last Will and Testament,” agreeing to call themselves “Christians only,” and to rely on the Bible as their sole rule of faith. (See vol. 4:5, 6.)

Unity and Structure

What themes connected these three movements that were both similar and distinctive in their origins? Although scholars have rightly pointed to the pervasive influence of Jeffersonian republicanism, which sought to enshrine in every arena of life the egalitarian goals of the Revolution, only James O’Kelly’s Republican Methodists actually rebelled against anything like ecclesiastical aristocracy. In New England, where Baptists and Congregationalists had long been self-governing, the dominant issue was church discipline: what place have creeds, confessions, or covenants in a pure, Bible-based church order? In Kentucky, the controversy centered primarily on doctrinal theology and revivalistic method. Nevertheless, all three movements in one way or another reflected the broad motif of freedom: the rights of individual Christians, unencumbered by hierarchy, dogma, or tradition, to organize, worship, preach, and evangelize without “pernicious and soul-binding” constraints. The rural and frontier character of the Christian movement was a second commonality. Although Christians achieved some small successes in older urban areas, especially in New England, theirs was largely a movement that took hold in more isolated settings, where traditional mores and structures were absent. In those settings innovation could thrive, and old habits were more readily overthrown. There, too, the daily demands of subsistence living provided a social equalizer that made former distinctions of class and education irrelevant.

Nowhere was this innovative spirit more evident than in the Christians’ early acceptance of women’s leadership. Fully four decades before Congregationalists reluctantly ordained Antoinette Brown, influential “female laborers in the gospel” joined their itinerant male counterparts in the field, preaching, converting, and planting new Christian churches across the northeast.

In this regard the affective dimensions (or “heart-centeredness”) of the Christians were especially significant (see vol. 4:7). Although few Christian leaders were overtly anti-intellectual—and many stressed the importance of good, basic secon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Living Theological Heritage of the United Church of Christ
• Part I. The Christians
• Part II. The German Evangelicals
• Part III. The Congregationalists
• Part IV. The German Reformed Tradition
• Sources
• Index
• Scriptural Index