Journey to the CRA, Alexander Campbell

From his earliest days as editor and publisher, Alexander Campbell took a clear stance in opposition to any organization outside the local church as the instrument for God’s work in converting the world to Christ. In the first article he wrote and published in his newly formed periodical, the Christian Baptist, Campbell wrote: 

The societies called churches, constituted and set in order by those ministers of the New Testament, were of such as received and acknowledged Jesus as Lord Messiah, the Saviour of the World, and had put themselves under His guidance. The ONLY BOND OF UNION among them was faith in Him and submission to His will … Their churches were not fractured into missionary societies, Bible societies, education societies; nor did they dream of organizing such in the world. The head of a believing household was not in those days a president or manager of a board of foreign missions; his wife, the president of some female education society; his eldest son, the recording secretary of some domestic Bible society; his eldest daughter, the corresponding secretary of a mite society; his servant maid, the vice-president of a rag society; and his little daughter, a tutoress of a Sunday School. They knew nothing of the hobbies of modern times. In their church capacity alone they moved. They neither transformed themselves into any other kind of association, nor did they fracture and sever themselves into divers[e] societies. They view the church of Jesus Christ as the scheme of Heaven to ameliorate the world; as members of it, they considered themselves bound to do all they could for the glory of God and the good of men. They dare not transfer to a missionary society, or Bible society, or education society, a cent or a prayer, lest in so doing they should rob the church of its glory, and exalt the inventions of men above the wisdom of God. In their church capacity alone they moved.i 

Furthermore, Campbell explained, “THE New Testament … teaches us that the association, called the church of Jesus Christ is, in propria forma, the only institution of God left on earth to illuminate and reform the world.” 

If a Christian Church were to be placed in a heathen land, Campbell further wrote: 

Then the heathen around them will see their humility; their heavenly mindedness, their hatred of garments spotted with the flesh, their purity, their chasity [sic], their temperance, their sobriety, their brotherly love; they will observe the order of their worship, and will fall down in their assemblies, as Paul affirms, and declare that God is in them of a truth.ii 

So vehement was Campbell’s early opposition to missionary societies that Disciple of Christ historian Alfred T. DeGroot borrowed the thought of William Warren Sweet, a noted historian of American religion, to describe him and two others as an “‘unholy trinity of American anti-missionism” in the early American west.iii Yet, as advocates for Campbell’s program of reform were steadily added and a growing number of churches sympathized with his movement, it became clear to Campbell in the 1830s that the advancement of his Christian reform movement would require a level of cooperation and unified effort that was not necessary or feasible in the movement’s earliest days. As Sweet notes, Campbell “opposed missionary societies as being an unscriptural means of carrying the gospel,” yet he later “gave up his opposition and … became the first president of the Missionary Society of the Disciples.” Those within his movement who “strongly opposed” missionary societies “got their best arguments against the society from the columns of the Christian Baptist.”iv 

Although Campbell doesn’t specifically mention it as the event that refined his views on cooperative efforts, one might presume that the accomplishments of Walter Scott’s evangelistic campaigns into Ohio’s Western Reserve—where he is reputed to have baptized over 1,000 people per year between 1827 and 1830—impacted him. Obviously, Scott’s service as the evangelist for the Mahoning Baptist Association, the group with which Campbell fellowshipped at that time, was a cooperative effort (not just an individual congregation). Moreover, the fact Scott was sent to the frontier area of Ohio suggests something of a missional aspect to his work.v Interestingly, however, in August 1830 at the association’s annual meeting, where “the Mahoning churches were shaking off their allegiance to the Philadelphia Confession of Faith and were determined to give up every man-made tradition,” Scott backed a resolution stating “that the Mahoning Association, as an advisory council, or an ecclesiastical tribunal, should cease to exist” because there is no Scriptural basis for it. While Campbell opposed the motion, it passed with Scott’s backing.vi 

An additional mile-marker in Campbell’s transition from opposition to acceptability of the use of cooperative efforts in evangelism emerged in a letter he received from M. Winans of Jamestown, Ohio, in 1835. In his letter, Winans reports the churches of Clinton and Greene counties in Ohio have “for the purpose of selecting one or more evangelists, and appropriating for them a sustenance—while they are engaged in the re-proclamation of the gospel to the world in order to the obedience of the faith.” 

In response, Campbell wrote, “I am glad to hear that the brethren in many places are waking up to a sense of their responsibility in reference to the conversion of the world.” Furthermore, he wrote, “co-operation among Christian churches in all the affairs of the common salvation, is not only inscribed on every page of apostolic history, but is itself of the very essence of the Christian institution.”vii 

Again, in an 1838 article with the same title as his past correspondence with Winans, Campbell opened his essay by noting the harmlessness of a few drops of water in relation to “the torrent that rushes from the mountain, or the overflowing floods that sweep the vallies [sic] along the water-courses,” and the “impotence” of “the single flakes of snow” compared to a “descending avalanche that rolls from its rocky summit, and in its mighty descent overwhelms families and flocks under the ponderous mass of its immense accumulation!” He then advanced this contrast by relating it to human endeavors: “So feeble are the individual efforts of a scattered few, compared with the concentrated power of co-operative hosts in any enterprize [sic] of good or ill to humankind!” With these comparisons in mind, he went on to write, “We want co-operation.”viii 

What began for Campbell as an ardent opposition to cooperative efforts that extended beyond the local church began to be reconsidered in the early 1830s. By the late 1830s and early 1840s such cooperation was fully embraced. While Campbell never gave up on his belief the local church is God’s instrument for bringing the world to know Jesus as Lord, his views on organized efforts to accomplish this goal changed drastically. By late 1842, Campbell published “Five Arguments for Church Organization” in the pages of the Millennial Harbinger, with the subheading, “Great need of a more rational and scriptural organization.”  Campbell’s arguments (there are six of them) are: 

We can do comparatively nothing in distributing the Bible abroad without co-operation. 

We can do comparatively but little in the great missionary field of the world either at home or abroad without co-operation. 

We can do little or nothing to improve and elevate the Christian ministry without co-operation. 

We can do but little to check, restrain, and remove the flood of imposture and fraud committed upon the benevolence of the brethren by irresponsible, plausible, and deceptions [sic] persons, without co-operation. 

We cannot concentrate the action of the tens of thousands of Israel, in any great Christian effort, but by co-operation. 

We can have no thorough co-operation without a more ample, extensive, and thorough church organization.ix 

Campbell’s call for the use of organized efforts was in no way an argument for the development of a denominational structure with control over the local churches and he never suggested individual churches surrender their autonomy. He merely cultivated a previously unrecognized appreciation for how the churches could work together and achieve more than they would individually. While Campbell may have been the most widely recognized figure in the early Restoration Movement, he was not the movement’s authoritarian figure or controller, so his opinion on this issue was nothing more than his individual opinion. Yet, his acceptance of organizations as a method for expanding the co-operative efforts of the churches made it far easier for the movement to hold a general assembly in 1849, resulting in the creation of the American Christian Missionary Society.