The Global Church Era · 1906-present · N. America (upper South), then global
Churches of Christ
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About This Movement
In 1906 the United States religious census listed the Churches of Christ separately from the Disciples of Christ for the first time — a bureaucratic act that recorded a division which had been widening for a generation. David Lipscomb's own correspondence with the Census Bureau is part of how that listing came about. What was listed was the a cappella wing: congregations that sing without instruments and recognize no authority above the local congregation. Their journals did the work an office would have done elsewhere — the Gospel Advocate, the Firm Foundation and others carried the arguments, the news and the appeals for money. They founded colleges, sent missionaries widely, and divided again in the middle of the century over whether congregations could support institutions in common. They confess the content of the historic creeds while refusing to make subscription to any creed a test, and they say so plainly.
In Its Own Record
Formed From
- The Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement — The a cappella wing of the Stone-Campbell movement, formed at the division the 1906 U.S. religious census recorded in its separate Churches of Christ listing. This was a formation, not a continuation: a single identity can't split into two separate successors.
Sources
- The 1906 United States Religious Census listing of the Churches of Christ, with David Lipscomb's correspondence with the Census Bureau (primary) — The division's dated institutional marker, from the same period as this tradition's own founding dates.
- The movement's journals: the Gospel Advocate, the Firm Foundation and their contemporaries (primary) — The wing's own running record, doing the work a denominational office does elsewhere. Details from standard reference.
- The movement's college and mission records (primary) — Congregationally funded institutions, tracing this movement's twentieth-century arc of growth, division over institutional cooperation, and world missions.
- Douglas A. Foster, Paul M. Blowers et al. (eds.), The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement (Eerdmans, 2004) (reference) — Covers the twentieth-century successions of both wings directly.
- Richard T. Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America (Eerdmans, 1996) (secondary) — The standard history of this wing.