by Rick Cherok
The Restoration Herald - Feb 2025
Last month we explored the background of Thomas Campbell’s famous statement, “Where the Scriptures speak, we speak; where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent.” In the process of explaining the events that led to Campbell’s noteworthy phrase, we examined his difficulties with a schismatic Presbyterian Church that he initially encountered in Ireland, but which also plagued his ministry in the United States once he had immigrated to the New World. Campbell’s struggle, and ultimate separation from the Presbyterian Church on May 19, 1809, brought about the formation of an “association” in the summer of 1809 that became known as the Christian Association of Washington.
Because the Christian Association of Washington had a significant influence on the early development of what would become the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, nearly every history of the movement offers at least a few pages of explanation about the association. Far fewer historians, however, provide anything more than a brief mention of a relatively obscure missionary society in the north of Ireland that served as something of a prototype for the Christian Association of Washington. Both a continent away and a decade prior to the formation of the association in Washington, PA, Thomas Campbell was a founding member of the Evangelical Society of Ulster.
Background Influences
There are a number of events and related situations that influenced the development of the Evangelical Society of Ulster, which would have a pivotal influence upon the Restoration Movement as a stimulus to Thomas Campbell’s inception of the Christian Association of Washington. Four of the most important motivations for the Evangelical Society of Ulster were the Great Awakening, Thomas Campbell’s practice of “occasional hearing,” the London Missionary Society, and the civil commotions in Ireland around the start of the nineteenth century.
Great Awakening
The Great Awakening was an enormous Christian revival that impacted nearly every aspect of society in Great Britain and the American Colonies. Inspired by the “New Light” or “Evangelical” preaching of men like George Whitefield (1714-1770), John Wesley (1703-1791), and Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), among others, the revivals swept across England, Ireland, Scotland, and America with an evangelistic fervor that was carried forward in the lives of the next generation of “evangelicals” that followed in the footsteps of the revival’s early advocates. And, while it’s unlikely that Thomas Campbell had a direct connection with the primary figures of the Great Awakening, he would certainly have been influenced by the revival’s effects and the evangelical ministers who carried on the preaching and traditions of the awakening.
Occasional Hearing
In the fourth chapter of Robert Richardson’s monumental biography of Alexander Campbell, The Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, Richardson notes that Campbell’s ministry at the Ahorey Presbyterian Church was marked by a practice known as “occasional hearing.” When distinguished Christian preachers came into his area, Campbell regularly took the opportunity to attend their services. As a result, he was privileged to hear the preaching of notable Christian leaders like Rowland Hill, James Alexander Haldane, Alexander Carson, and John Walker. Most of these men identified as “independents” because they did not conform to the accepted denominational groups of their day, and some were even lapsed Presbyterians. Yet, Campbell accepted them as sincere Christians who were carrying on the evangelical tradition and seeking the salvation of souls through their ministries.
London Missionary Society
On September 22-24, 1795, a gathering of over 200 evangelical ministers from a variety of denominational backgrounds gathered in the Spa Fields Chapel near London to form an interdenominational missionary society that sought to unite the missionary efforts of the entire body of Christ for the purpose of worldwide evangelism. The London Missionary Society, which emerged from this gathering, emphasized unity and missions at its outset and certainly contributed significantly to world missions. Its ecumenical interests, however, had only marginal success as numerous denominations eventually formed their own societies for promoting missions and evangelism.ii
Civil Commotions
Since the sixteenth century, Ireland was the setting for numerous deadly conflicts and uprisings. Some were rebellions against British rule of the island, but others were struggles between the island’s Protestant and Catholic populations. While Campbell tried to maintain a distance from the political agitations that were prevalent in his day, he was very aware of the popular insurrections that unfolded around him. Around 1785, a Protestant agrarian group known as the “Peep o’ Day Boys” became known as the “Orange Boys” and became intent on driving Catholic economic competition out of County Armagh. The Catholic “Defenders,” a group formed to protect Armagh’s Catholics, lost a significant battle with the Orange Boys at the Battle of the Diamond in 1795. Following the battle, “the Armagh outrages” occurred when the Orange Boys embarked upon a series of atrocities (destruction of property, murders, etc.) against the Catholics.
Again, in the early 1790s, a Protestant lawyer from Dublin named Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) helped form the “Society of United Irishmen,” a secret society that brought Catholics and Protestants together against the British Crown. Tone’s activities ultimately led to the Rebellion of 1798, in which over 10,000 Irish combatants and civilians lost their lives.iii Amid the unfolding brutalities around him, Campbell refused to support the secret societies or to participate in the political or anti-Catholic agitations, but focused “his entire devotion to the interests of religion.” Undoubtedly, Campbell looked upon these barbarous events as evidence of a greater need for Christian charity and the advancement of the Gospel message.iv
The Evangelical Society of Ulster
In the aftermath of the violent uprisings of 1798, Campbell and others met in Armagh at a sacramental service that may have evolved into something of a prayer meeting as the recent atrocities in their region would have been in the forefront of their thought. Convinced they had to be more intentional about their evangelistic efforts, an additional meeting was planned for early October to form “a Society for the purpose of having the Gospel preached in those Towns and Villages which are destitute of it.”v
Amid heavy rains, a large crowd, including Campbell and twelve other ministers from four denominations, met in Armagh on Wednesday, October 10, 1798, to form the Evangelical Society of Ulster. George Hamilton, minister of the Armagh’s Burgher Presbyterian Church and recent moderator of the Seceder Synod, preached a sermon entitled “The Necessity of Itinerant Preaching.”vi Following his sermon, the congregation voted unanimously to accept “the sketch of a Plan” that Hamilton had adapted from the London Missionary Society, thus giving birth to the Evangelical Society of Ulster. “The majority of the elected officers were laymen,” according to historian Hiram J. Lester, but George Hamilton (Burgher Presbyterian), George Maunsell (Anglican), and Thomas Campbell (Antiburgher Presbyterian) were among a small group of clergymen elected as officers of the Evangelical Society.vii
The Christian Association of Washington
Campbell’s association with the Evangelical Society of Ulster was brief. In the summer of 1799, at a meeting of the Antiburgher Presbyterian Synod, Campbell was forced to withdraw from the society. His interest in an ecumenical evangelistic effort, however, did not die with his removal from the Evangelical Society. A decade later, in the United States, where Campbell had again faced numerous challenges from the Presbyterian Church, he convened a group that became known as the Christian Association of Washington.viii Soon after the association’s start on August 17, 1809, Campbell was commissioned to produce a document stating the purpose of their new association. On September 7, 1809, Campbell’s Declaration and Address of the Christian Association of Washington was read and approved by the members of the group.
Campbell’s Declaration and Address was certainly not a simple reproduction of the London Missionary Society’s “Plan of The Society,” but as Hiram J. Lester observes, “The parallels between Campbell’s Declaration and the LMS ‘Plan of The Society’ are obvious.”ix Moreover, Lester explains, “The contemporary reader is surprised to discover that the association was not founded ‘to work for Christian unity,’ but rather to function as a voluntary, para-church, missionary society and to encourage the formation of sister associations.”x
Campbell’s Declaration and Address has been widely recognized as the document which gave direction and purpose to the Restoration Movement. It consists of four sections: A “Declaration,” an “Address,” an “Appendix,” and a “Postscript.” Perhaps the heart of the document, however, is a set of “13 Propositions.” The first of these propositions reads, “That the Church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one; consisting of all those in every place that profess their faith in Christ and obedience to him in all things according to the Scriptures, and that manifest the same by their tempers and conduct, and of none else; as none else can be truly and properly called Christian.”
In Campbell’s desire to see a world brought to Christ, he had reached his limit with the petty denominational disagreements that had those who claimed Christ as Lord fighting against one another and ignoring the lost world around them. As a result, he explained, the church does not consist of our splintered and quarreling denominational factions, because there is truly only one genuine church. Campbell was not naïve; he realized human nature would result in church divisions (see his second proposition), but he insisted we receive others who call themselves Christians in a manner worthy of Christ.
While it’s undeniable Campbell’s Declaration and Address carries with it a plea for Christian unity, based upon the teachings of Scripture, too many in the past have overlooked the fact that Campbell’s documented was based and rooted in an appeal for evangelism and reaching the world for Christ.
~RH
(Endnotes)
1 Robert Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell: Embracing a View of the Origin, Progress and Principles of the Religious Reformation which he Advocated (1868, reprint, Indianapolis, IN: Religious Book Services, 1897): 1:60-61.
2 For additional information about the London Missionary Society, see Cecil Northcott, Glorious Company: 150 Years Life and Work of the London Missionary Society, 1795-1945 (London: Livingstone Press, 1945).
3 Thomas Bartlett, “Clemency and Compensation, The Treatment of Defeated Rebels and Suffering Loyalists After the 1798 Rebellion,” in Revolution, Counter-Revolution and Union: Ireland in the 1790s, ed. By Jim Smyth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 100. Others estimate the number of lives lost in the Rebellion of 1798 could have gone as high as 50,000 dead.
4 Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell, 1:41-45.
5 Hiram J. Lester, “An Irish Precursor for Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address,” Encounter (Summer 1989): 254.
6 Hamilton later published his sermon as The Great necessity of Itinerant Preaching. A Sermon Deliver’d in the New Meeting-House in Armagh, at the Formation of the Evangelical Society of Ulster, on Wednesday, 10th of Oct. 1798. With a Short Introductory Memorial, Respecting the Establishment and First Attempt of that Society (Armagh, n.p., c.1799).
7 Lester, “An Irish Precursor,” 254.
8 For additional details, See Rick Cherok, “Slogans of a Movement: Where the Scriptures Speak, We Speak; And Where the Scriptures are Silent, We are Silent,” Restoration Herald (January 2025), 13-14.
9 Lester, “An Irish Precursor,” 252.
10 Lester, An Irish Precursor,” 248-249.
Dr. Rick Cherok serves as the Managing Editor of the Christian Standard and Executive Director of Celtic Christian Mission. He taught Church History at Cincinnati Christian University and Ozark Christian College for over a quarter of a century.
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Christian apologists have long said that the three greatest miracles of the Christian faith are the creation of the universe, the incarnation of Jesus Christ, and His bodily resurrection from the dead. To these a fourth awesome miracle could be added—fulfilled Bible prophecy.