Being Buckeye Disciples, or
A Reminiscence, A Rant, Some Consequences, and A Conclusion

Prologue

“It’s not about you.”

Rick Warren opens his best-selling “The Purpose-Driven Life” with these words, which I would heartily echo to our Futuring Task Force as to the Christian Church in Ohio.

“It’s not about us.”

We are called into existence by God to share the Good News of freely given love made known in Jesus Christ. Organizationally, we have problems rooted in a lack of vision, and we have to admit that (harder than it sounds when you get to specifics), identify what our vision is, and lay out the first steps to reorienting our work around that vision. But the Gospel will go on regardless. It really isn’t about us, since God has many ways to share the Gospel besides through Buckeye Disciples.

Covenant is the key element of the vision I see laid out before us, the course I believe God has prepared that is most beneficial to follow. We need to define what covenant means for us at this place and time. We have some covenant language among us, but varying usages, historic and cultural, mean that we can’t just simply or uncritically announce “covenant” as our vision for the Christian Church in Ohio. We also need to take some steps to re-establish the kind of theological conversation that can interpret, with integrity, how a renewed covenant can bring us closer to God. . .oh, and help renew the region, but don’t forget: it’s not about us.

Let’s be willing to think the unthinkable, and not get too concerned about the earthen vessel, the “clay jars” we’ve been given to carry treasure in, the gifts from God for this common ministry we have together. (II Corinthians 4:1-12)

Part One -- A Reminiscence
Above all, maintain constant love for one another,
for love covers a multitude of sins.
I Peter 4:8

I didn’t meet Jesus in Ohio. Not at first, anyhow. We first became acquainted in my home church, in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he was a more distant authority figure when I was younger, and then seemed more and more a friend and companion as the years went by. There were times, even years, when I didn’t stay in touch, but I never really forgot about him, and was reassured that Jesus kept coming to look for me when I stayed away too long.

Jesus was sort of an absentee landlord in my home church, a respected name who everyone knew, but with varying degrees of familiarity from nodding acquaintance to close friendship. It did seem that those who knew him best knew others who were Jesus’ friends, both in other Indiana communities as well as far away from the Midwest. There was some kind of correspondence, it seemed, between how close you felt to Jesus and how well you were aware of the size of Christ’s community.

In high school and college, I started meeting people who acted like we were both friends of Jesus, which made me look more seriously at how good a friend I really was, to Jesus or to my fellow Christians, who proved to be a varied lot even within the Disciples’ fellowship I’d been born into. Exposure to and work with other Christians, Disciple and otherwise, made me feel like I was becoming more of a friend of Jesus than I had been, and also showed me through some others how much farther I had to go – even in learning about my relationship with distant others, long dead, through an ever-more-living Christ. Alexander Campbell, Barton Stone, Julian of Norwich, John Woolman, Brother Lawrence, Dorothy Day, Francis of Assisi, George Fox, David Zeisberger, all challenged and encouraged me in my friendship with them through Christ.

On moving to Ohio, I was pleased to learn that Jesus was well known in that state as well, and that many of his friends in the Buckeye State had a relationship with him similar to the one I grew up with. There are times when he seems to be away for a bit, but I know better than to assume he’s gone back to Indiana and is absent from Ohio; while Jesus stays active, we just get busy, and it can be easy to lose track of him. But he always comes back to look for his friends, wherever they may be found.
* * * * * * *

All of the interviewing, reading, e-mailing, blogging, prayer, and discernment had to come to an end, at least momentarily. It was now time to write up for you, the other members of the Futuring Task Force, what inspirations and anticipations and conceptions I had come to through our shared and assigned reflections. The books read from the Alban Institute, Rick Warren, and Marva Dawn, works consulted by Len Sweet, Herb Miller, Robert Putnam, Thom Rainer, Walt Wangerin, Bill Hybels, and Robert Bellah (plus a little Harold Bloom, believe it or not), as well as many re-read DoC Restructure era materials from the Blakemore “Panel of Scholars” report thru Ronald Osborn on Restructure and Loren Lair’s “The Christian Church and Its Future,” plus pamphlets and booklets by O.L. Shelton and Willard Wickizer on “Functional Church Organization” (predating and prefiguring the Restructure materials), as well as Hayden, DeGroot, and Shaw’s historical works on Restoration Christianity in Ohio – and the 1999 Regional Long Range Plan, electronic files, weblogs, and scribbled notes, index cards and notes from pockets -- all of them had to go into the pile by the computer, and it is/was time to write.

This feels as much like seminary as anything I’ve done since graduation, even though I write professionally and personally for a wide variety of venues apart from the usual scripting of sermons and slapping together of church newsletter articles. The process of research combined with a discipline of prayer, ending with a product that is intended to be both personally revelatory and institutionally functional, created a context that was/is oddly familiar and strange, almost but not quite like writing a systematic theology paper for reading aloud in class to my peers.

Like most contemporary theology, I can neither ignore my immediate context nor do I assume readers expect me to do so. Right now both my local and cultural contexts are placing the question of covenant in the forefront of my mind, whether I’m directly addressing that subject or not. That’s both in the setting of the larger church (middle judicatory, region, whatever), but also in the sense of weddings and marriage. Formal and informal cohabitation, civil unions, same-sex marriage, Episcopal leadership issues, divorce rates, when and how the church should bless a variety of informal and irregular relationships, all are intruding into my consciousness these days as I work out, with the requisite “fear and trembling” (and remember where Paul said that, long before Kierkegaard got to it) my understanding of Christian faith and practice in relation to our cultural moment.

So this is what I’m thinking about: “covenant” is the crucial model coming to mind for interpreting where the fellowship of believers called the Christian Church in Ohio is being called by God. The covenantal relationship we live in as fellow Christians in a congregation, in a region, in the general manifestations of the Disciples of Christ as well as in the wider, global embrace of the Body of Christ is the kind of relatedness that gives focus to my thinking these days. But what in God’s name do we mean by covenant, and how do we, as the CCiO, live out that meaning?

The Biblical and organizational principle of “covenant relationship” has been frequently invoked and less often practiced in the Disciple fellowship, aka “our Brotherhood” as the Stone-Campbell Movement once called itself. In the process of fratricidally subdividing ourselves within Restoration Christianity into tighter and tighter sub-groups over the last hundred years, we have used “covenant” as club as much as shepherd’s staff, as crowbar to pry apart more than to heave together, as an exclusionary tool rather than a safe enclosure. As a result, fragmentation and elusiveness are characteristics of contemporary Disciple understandings of covenant that we’re going to have to work through, not wish away.

Obviously, the current setting of covenant by way of marriage and family is not an uncloudy comparison or even, some would argue, a healthy context. And I’ll admit that my perception of that kind of cultural covenant is a fragmented and elusive one these days, but that may be as much help as hindrance in determining the direction God is calling us towards. The renewal of covenant is a constant theme of scripture, and is even a recurring element in our common history as Buckeye Disciples.

Such is one other idiosyncratic element of my personal context: before starting work on our futuring/visioning task, two years ago, I was asked to write the Disciples of Christ portion of the Ohio Bicentennial Commission volume on “Religious Experience in Ohio.” A similar volume was produced 50 years ago, and Henry Shaw, author of “Buckeye Disciples,” the standard Christian Church in Ohio history, wrote the Disciples’ section in 1953. For Ohio’s 150th anniversary, Shaw looked back and also forward, and his hopes and dreams, his insights and misinterpretations became my bifocals while putting together a version for the 200th. As a moonlighting history teacher and archaeologist, I can’t help but wonder how what we say today will look in 2053. . .and trust me, someone will read this stuff, and wonder “what were they thinkin’?”
* * * * * * *

So how’d we get here? The following historical narrative is an informal organizational and evolutionary gloss on the more formal version found at the end of the document. It tends to focus on the Ohio and Anglo-European stream of development and does not pretend to be a normative description of even every early experience of Restoration origins and growth.

After the initial 1804-1809 withdrawal/expulsion from the Presbyterian structure of the Stone and Campbell groups, Restoration congregations were linked by their origins and originators, either through the Campbells, Scott, Smith, or a few others. “Our congregation was founded by Alexander Campbell on a preaching tour,” or “Samuel Rogers, one of the original Cane Ridge preachers, established this church with a series of evangelistic meetings” are typical statements at the head of congregational histories.

Ongoing connectedness, for the early group, was three-fold: through founder-preachers in their sermonizing (even non-resident evangelists tended to come back regularly and preach “the simple New Testament plea” or re-teach the initial “five finger exercise” as well as share stories of fellow new church starts), through publications (“Disciples don’t have bishops, they have editors” was a long time catch-phrase of our movement, and still is in the Independent/NACC wing) such as The Millenial Harbinger, Christian Messenger, or American Christian Review, and by means of “The Christian Hymnbook,” published by A. Campbell at Bethany and re-released in successive editions that steadily incorporated works by W. Scott, B. W. Stone, and J. T. Johnson, further consolidating various branches of the Restoration Movement (aka “the Stone-Campbell movement”).

In the pages of The Millenial Harbinger discussions were early and often about how to maintain ties of fellowship and encouragement, with annual meetings in a “district” or a “School of Preachers” on a semi-annual basis serving some of those purposes. Shortly these informal gatherings began to collect offerings for various causes heard abroad, and no doubt just as quickly appeals began to be made at these meetings. Proper distribution and administration was a concern, and officers were elected in a manner well described by DeTocqueville as common on the early frontier in the 1830’s.

By 1849 the pressures, emotional and logistical, had grown to form an official “American Christian Missionary Society,” to join together the work of various district and state missionary funds. Individuals like the doctor/preacher James Turner Barclay had shown an interest in being sent to serve as missionaries, with Barclay arguing from the “scripture principle” that, as the early church, we should send our missionaries “first to Jerusalem, and then. . .to the ends of the earth.” The outlay to support a mission in Jerusalem could only be underwritten by a number of churches together, and a large number of churches could, at that date, only be pulled and held together by Campbell, Stone having died a few years before.

The formal organization into a “missionary society” began a process of division that both preceded and followed the Civil War, while drawing no small measure of strength from the divisions causing and deriving from that conflict. The “scripture principle” mixed with the strong preference for radical independence and autonomy of the frontier areas to empower a loud challenge: “where do missionary societies appear in Holy Scripture?” Paul may have taken up offerings to carry to Jerusalem, and John may have encouraged mutual support and upbuilding, but “the question of societies” would plague the Restoration Movement into, well, the present day.

Various evangelists, publications, and institutions took up a variety of stances, but Campbell himself tried to finesse the question by a) not showing up in Cincinnati for the founding meeting of the ACMS in 1849 and b) accepting the presidency of the new organization. On this subject, as with slavery, the entire movement would likely have benefited from a strong, clear statement staking out a position for the movement and challenging opponents to account for themselves, but Campbell’s fear of outright division likely led, sadly, to greater division in the long run. A lesson here, perhaps. . . . .?

“Our” wing of Restoration Christianity is sometimes referenced as “the cooperatives,” or “those defending the societies.” Coordinated mission work is one of our distinctives within the history that produced us, but is so typical in the rest of Christendom as to provoke no notice at all, as is our use of musical instruments, which also led to separation in the era following the Civil War, considered by some a reaction against the North by the South, by others a screen on which the battle against “modernism” was projected, and by a few, a simple case of literal faithfulness or lack thereof to the words of the Bible.

The point I would like to make here, before moving on to illuminate some key aspects of our structure today with developments of the 1900’s, is that both early and late in our history, the Disciples of Christ have struggled with distinctive features that need explaining to show why they’re distinctive. Cooperative missionary societies and melodeon/pipe organ use in worship over a century ago, or open and weekly communion with acceptance of Christians from other traditions more recently, are elements of our history that we’re used to thinking of internally as defining, but that to the newcomer looks pretty much like how everybody else does things, so what’s the fuss? Let’s just move on. . .lightin’ out for the territories, headin’ for the frontier where we can leave controversy behind us, even as we pack those debates into our interior baggage.

In that same way, allow me to lightly skip across some other issues that were seen as titanic, fellowship-breaking controversies in their day, and simply note that from the American (and later United) Christian Missionary Society we saw (State Name Here, such as Ohio) Christian Missionary Societies around the US and Canada, working sometimes with and more often alongside equally well developed and staffed structures for the International Sunday School Society, plus officers and women’s relief society subgroups of the International Convention (predecessor of what we now call the General Assembly), boards and occasionally staff of conference grounds, and state/district ministerial associations. All these groups, plus agents for Disciples’ colleges and charitable institutions, were holding meetings, rallies, and doing fundraising in and among the congregations of the now well established Christian Churches.

Some states merged their missionary society and Sunday School association organization and staff fairly early in the 20th century, and Ohio was an “early adopter” in this respect. While ministerial associations tended to stay independent longer, the centrifugal force that slowly urged those groups toward an accountability relationship with the “state secretary” was the ministerial search process. In those days, pulpit committees would write, and later call, the nearest Disciples’ college president, their friends in the relief societies (proto-ICWF and/or Disciples’ Men), and most importantly the State Secretary for guidance and recommendations. With no national “database” to draw on, and no recommended procedure to follow, these informal networks were (were?!) the main way ministerial relocation took place. Obviously, these state secretaries, of whom our own Gaines Cook and Herald Monroe were exemplars, gained a large measure of informal but unmistakable influence over both church life and clergy, even in areas not related to the formal roles of their job as state secretary of the Ohio Christian Missionary Society.

More uniquely, Herald Monroe pulled into the growing nexus of influences for state society life the power of the camp meeting, the youth conference, the burgeoning camp movement post-WWI. Few state societies carried their assembly ground structure with them into the pre-Restructure fellowship they were creating (such as our neighbors in Indiana, who saw only debts and maintenance worries after the Depression neglect of such institutions as Bethany Park), but the energy of Chautauqua-type events and their own network of contacts carried into the Monroe years in a manner few regions took advantage of.

Is this “just” history? Obviously I don’t think so, and my point here is that these influences still affect the Christian Church in Ohio today. The sense, at least, of the independence of some districts, the semi-autonomous role of the Commission on Ministry, the influence of camp and conference ties in regional life, right down to the fact that many congregations still have a Sunday School Superintendent (or even Christian Ed department) with relative autonomy from the rest of the organizational structure, as well as the peculiar assumptions people bring to the regional staff and their given authority versus their assumed responsibility – all of these have specific ties to sources of authority and practices in pre-Restructure Disciple life. The roots of why congregations and pastors give no formal authority to regional staff, even when they ask them to intervene, but have very high expectations of regional impact, are not shallowly placed in modern trends against institutional structures, but have deep sources in how we put our current structure together.

We have a strong dose of what Harold Bloom calls in literary studies “the anxiety of influence,” where we in the West, and especially America, want to show ourselves as both inheritors of distant tradition and as self-generating unique creations. The idea that we are direct beneficiaries of an immediately preceding tradition is something to be quashed or hidden: but by being unacknowledged, it controls us all the more. For a quick example, look at how, in a tradition whose deep roots are supposed to be in “New Testament faith and practice as our only rule,” we go through paroxysms of angst over changing phrasing in the printed bulletin at most congregations. The fact that it might be largely lifted from Methodist or Presbyterian sources is not even a conversation starter, let alone a resolution for how to proceed. Influence must be consciously acknowledged in order to be deliberately shaped.

So, the main sources of regional influence historically derive from the state missionary society, the Sunday School association, and the camp & conference system. An overarching focus of authority from those three is the ability to recommend pastors to pulpits and vice versa. Today, with mission passion at an ebb, and Sunday School more a function than a vital source of fellowship and identity, the main flow of influence between the region and congregation is through ministerial placement and Camp Christian. When, due to factors largely beyond the staff’s control, the ministerial search function is a source of frustration and not of empowerment (fewer candidates to choose from, lower quality in the pool, new packets slowly forthcoming after the initial round), it isn’t surprising from an historical perspective that camp and conference (and to a lesser degree the women’s and men’s work) are the primary springs of regional vitality.

Another odd factor to note here is that as our regional presuppositions aren’t what they used to be, it is also the case that much of what once was controversial and somewhat exciting to be involved in – doing cooperative missions, introducing organs into worship, starting a Sunday school class -- is now mundane or defunct. Regional work, which was actually a theologically risqué area of church life less than a hundred years ago, is now mainstream, everyday work in a streambed whose sources are drying-up.

What do Christians in congregations look to regions for more recently? For that perspective, let me turn to a little personal history.
* * * * * * *

Looking back to growing up between my home Disciples congregation and an independent Christian church in my mother’s hometown (Kansas IL, Z. T. Sweeney’s home church), somehow I learned through both that congregational life had particular purposes common to each, even though individual conversion was the only language I remember hearing. I’d try to put this clear but unspoken teaching into words thusly: “The Work of the church is to care for its members and manifest God’s love through charitable works and social action in Christ’s name.” But if it was unspoken, where/how did that image come? How was it taught?

I knew myself as part of a congregation before I ever thought of myself as a Christian. That may be described as an experience unique to those born and raised in the church, but the reading and talking I’ve done both before and during this temporary covenant of futuring together tells me that most unchurched are looking for belonging before they take much interest in believing.

Belonging to the church family, I knew congregational life as a rhythmic cycle of setting up folding chairs and unwieldy tables, decorating the sanctuary and stowing away the last round of wreaths and banners, with worship services in between. Without worship, there would be no point to most of the other activities, but all of the potlucks and meetings (while we kids played in the nursery or colored in the library) and conversations in the parking lot were the location where I got my clearest picture of how church was more than building, that others like and unlike me were doing much the same in other places (but differently).

Perhaps it should have been (should be?) otherwise, but I recall little within worship itself that made an impact as to the reach and scope of Christendom beyond our own walls. I can affirm my home congregation’s effectiveness in communicating the mission and ministry of the Disciples of Christ, but it was through Sunday School and evening programs, in the newsletter and on bulletin boards.

The quotidian affairs of First Christian Church, Valparaiso, Indiana, were where I was most likely to encounter the “larger church,” the “mission field,” or “the Brotherhood.” I’m sure that announcements or offering meditations touched on the Christian Church in Indiana or the Unified Promotion theme or Basic Mission Finance, but I can honestly report that I left for college without consciously hearing about any of that in worship, save a single dimly recalled missionary in the pulpit on a Sunday.

As of this date, I have only eight total years of personal experience in Ohio, but I pray you allow me the ethnographic ear of a pastor and the insights of a historian to claim that, heresy though it may be, it does not seem that Indiana and the Buckeye State, neighbors that they are geographically, are not significantly different. In fact, Henry Shaw went on to write “Hoosier Disciples,” the still definitive history of that region, and made much the same point – at least as of the mid-1960’s. My memories kick in just after that, so. . .

Covenant, the bond initiated by God as a free and grace-filled gift to a lost and wandering people, was not a hard concept to understand when it was first introduced to me. As I said, I was made to feel part of a supportive and affirming community long before I had anything to contribute or offer, and well in advance of when it might have been obvious how I might respond to the gift of being made part of that covenant. Just as God to Abraham or Moses took the initiative in offering the relationship, and much as the Creator had no intrinsic need to be obligated to the creation, let alone to any individual created being, the congregation “named me and claimed me” and made me their own.

As my earliest memories of church life came out of the period right around “restructure,” that contentious period of the late ‘60’s for the Disciples, I have a number of recollections around seeing posters and bulletin boards proclaiming our obligations to “the Brotherhood” in faithfulness and faithful giving, exhortations around the tables in Fellowship Hall but dimly understood to a child about our “sister congregations in Indiana and around the world,” and “the sacred debt” owed to the missionaries who served in our name from Tibet to inner city Chicago. There were flyers and displays about Disciple-related colleges, projects for the youth group supporting NBA homes, and traveling speakers and choirs from other outposts of Discipledom (who often stayed at our house as they passed through).

Learning about the Disciples of Christ came through things we did and people we saw, not what we were told. On one level, I would like to think that this is a more ideal form of learning, but looking around me today, I do wonder just how well it worked. A preliminary thought: perhaps the object lessons needed some intentional grounding, not to replace but to reinforce the meaning behind the activity.

When a bit older, I got a clearer – or at least more specific – image of the wider church when serving on a pulpit committee, and meeting the first person I recall as a regional staffer (Jim Powell, for those curious about such things) when he came to meet with us about the ministerial search process. From Rev. Powell to y’all on the Futuring Task Force, my ongoing best sense of what it means to be part of the wider church has been through personal relationship: names and faces and overheard stories brought back from General Assemblies and CWF Workshops and State Youth Conventions about people.

What I hear today, in congregations I serve or pass through regularly, is a gravely attenuated sense of what it means to be part of the Christian Church in Ohio, because the relationships aren’t there. A few in each church go to all manner of events, and even tell stories about who they saw and what they heard, but most are only vaguely aware of faces and names they can associate with “the region.” Mind you, they don’t mean full-time paid staff, they mean “other than you, Jeff, who represents the region?” Does the district president? The CCH rep in the pulpit? The state CYF officer visiting on a Sunday in a pew? The sense that one is “encountering the region” is limited, but does it have to be; how could many others appropriately embody the regional church? And how can most of those many responsibly teach the meaning of covenant relationship along with their ministry of presence, in harmony with the “preaching and teaching elder,” the pastor?

But along with good teaching necessarily comes truth-telling.


Part Two -- A Rant
(From the last two paragraphs of the book:)
Five hundred churches, many schools and colleges, missionary and benevolent agencies, and a voluminous literary heritage have been bequeathed to next century Disciples . . .The second century of Ohio Disciples’ history should be more glorious than the last.
Buckeye Disciples (1952)
Henry Shaw



Many of us, Buckeye Disciples or not, know the story of the James DeForest Murch letter(s) out of Canton that, through misstatement and deception, led hundreds of congregations to withdraw from the yearbook in the late 1960’s and early 70’s. That accounts for at least 200 of that 500 now independent, or closed . . . as independence was far from the panacea Murch and others proclaimed. But we can also look at recent yearbooks of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and see that, realistically speaking, we are far under 200 congregations still in covenant, still self-identified as “Disciple” congregations, still contributing to ODO or DMF or whatever one wants to call it: 170? 165 perhaps? Counted by congregations that choose to support the capital campaign even in the most minimal fashion, one could even argue for a number around 100. Look at the “Keep The Fire Burning” numbers, if you like. I don’t like.

So at least another 125 or more congregations have either gone independent or gone under in the last 25 years, then. Institutions have gone independent or gone away as well, under a variety of auspices – Hiram College, Cleveland Christian Children’s Home, ecumenical campus ministries, to name a few.

Have we somehow betrayed a glorious future Henry Shaw saw in store for us? Or was he looking with unreasoning eyes at an already implausible prospect in 1953?

Shaw was no Pollyanna; the line immediately after the epigraph cited above (and next to last of the entire work) says “So it will be if the spirit, courage, and resourcefulness that characterized the pioneers remain at the core of the movement.”

Resourcefulness, in a pioneer context, is flexibility, is adaptability. Many of the closures or departures represented a healthy break with the past. What seems less healthy is the sense that the rest of what we’re doing now, what hasn’t closed or ended, is fine as it is; that the diminution is a loss only of the unfit and unwilling, and that we somehow grow in strength as we decline in numbers.

While we seem to share a fair degree of anxiety on individual issues and in particular situations, the institutional impression projected is one of “stay the course,” keep on within the same general outlines of the Christian Church in Ohio, with the same governance structure, same staff priorities, same programs at camp, conference, and regional meetings, since this carefully constructed plan has served us well thus far.

My concern here is to show that a) we didn’t really carefully construct the framework we’re using, we just compromised our way into it, which itself is a reason to be open to reform; and b) for all the outside factors which have challenged us, from Murch et al to a modern culture of narcissism, it is the structure itself that hasn’t served us well at all, the most compelling argument for “blank sheet of paper” reforms.

Aside from shrinking numbers from departures and decay, on what do I base my internal sense of how Buckeye Disciples need to radically rework our covenantal life? For this process, along with the readings we assigned and the additional ones I chose to take on, I’ve spoken to 47 clergy/church staff; of that number, 27 are Disciple (22 CCiO, with five from other regions), 9 UCC, 4 Church of Christ, 4 United Methodist, and 3 Episcopal clergy, all from Ohio or neighboring parts of West Virginia.

In these conversations, what I’ve heard is this:

• Institutional Trust is gone, gone, gone. Skepticism is part of the landscape, and travel in any direction has to take that into account. Institutions may be used or worked with, but skeptically: no one should take that personally, but no one gets a personal exemption from it, either.

• Clergy alienation and isolation is “deep and wide” and real. . .and while known, is in practice not acknowledged. (“Why, sure most clergy feel alienated, but not you, Jeff, right?” “Um, why yes; yes I am. . .sorry about that!”) Loren Mead in “The Once And Future Church” has this well analyzed and defined.

• There is an over-focus on what is wrong, what’s missing, which keeps us from building on what we’re doing well (gotcha: you just thought “what on earth does he think that would be?” which kinda makes my point, doesn’t it?)

• Deep breath: we have lots of money and plenty of people. Yes, we do, just not as much as we think we should, or as much as we’d like (a good impulse, that), but there are 15,000 to 18,000 souls worshipping in our sanctuaries and 1,500 going through our camp and conference program and a seven figure budget, however we choose to spend it. Would we like more? Welcome to the club. . .but are we valuing properly what we have? (Which is my Counsel Number One to couples talking to me about financial crisis, who usually make more than I do, but feel poorer.)

• Fear of failure is so strong we self-limit our chances to ever succeed at anything. If the Christian Church in Ohio was really about the work of dynamic mission & ministry, we’d have more big, splashy failures to reminisce about these days. To start a Sunday school class or any small group with “legs” you have to start three, of which maybe one will last the year. That’s true on the regional level as well, but we don’t let anything live until we’ve studied it to death. . .or something like that.

• Parallel point: Let things die! Stop reading and look up John 12:24! Shaw’s “Buckeye Disciples” is filled with fascinating sounding regional programs and annual events from the 1920’s through the 50’s that don’t exist anymore, but worked fine then. If A. Campbell had kept Buffalo Seminary going, he would have never started Bethany College; when the Christian Baptist lost its reason to be, he closed it and started The Millenial Harbinger.

• Our Long Range Plan(s) in 1994 and (mildly) updated in 1999 were good; I’ve given them to a number of trusted, active lay leaders here in Hebron, and their reactions parallel mine: this is good stuff. . .why didn’t we follow it? A good question, and one worth our time: how did we end up doing fifteen other things than the helpful handful prioritized by these folks tasked by the region to do that for us? (Come to think of it, that’s kind of discouraging for us, but nevermind. . .) Which leads directly to:

• Any coalition/aggregation (like, say, the Christian Church in Ohio) can do one new thing a year. Maybe two, possibly three, but. . .wait, see, now I’m doing it. Let’s go back and try again – A freely associating organization can do one new thing a year well. And as my wife is always reminding me about new books in the house: when one new one comes in, probably an old one goes out. OK, maybe we can do two new things a year. . .

• We have a great resource in the role of elder in our congregations, and we don’t use them. This office is a gift of the Disciple ethos to the church in reclaiming this scriptural role for local leadership, and unless we just want to disavow it (yes, I have my concerns about CUIC, and no, Dick Bowman and I aren’t good buddies by a long shot). The pre-General Assembly event for congregational elders and the “regional elders” concept for pastoral care to clergy, staff, and congregations represent huge steps forward in my opinion (but see immediately previous point), and this revitalization area has plenty of acreage to plow.

• Preaching and teaching elders, aka clergy (I Timothy 5:17) are doing precious little of either, and this represents a challenge for the faith and a dilemma for the region. With clergy using pre-packed sermons in large numbers (10% a minimum, some analysts say closer to 50%), and very few pastors regularly teaching in any way with the congregation (see a random sample of newsletters), how are we communicating our wider connection and the deeper meaning of that covenantal relationship to the membership, let alone new Christians who likely come with a) no church background, or b) a Catholic, Methodist, or other very different set of understandings. Do we take a “if we can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” tack and prepare our own pre-written sermons for pulpit use? How do we resource ministries and ministers to communicate the meaning and the method of co-operative missions?

Obviously, there’s what people thought they were telling me, and what I thought I heard them saying. I take full responsibility for this formulation of what my conversations may have added up to. But the status of “covenant” among Disciple clergy is barely that of an abstruse Biblical concept, not a living principle binding us together. We’ve forgotten much we once knew, and practice little of what once gave us vitality – though we sing the songs we sang then with gusto tinged with sadness.

How’d we get there?
* * * * * * *

To answer that, let me go off on another historic tangent.

Covenant’s closest analogue is modern church life is marriage. When it comes to Restoration Christianity and weddings, our history is rather interesting. Campbell and most of the early reformers, concerned about ecclesiastical abuses and a profusion of sacraments, stepped way, way back from weddings as part of church life, refusing to conduct them within the church building.

In fact, up to and through WWII, even in the Disciples’ wing of the movement, weddings were conducted either in the bride’s home or in the parlor of the parsonage: not in the church itself. (Believe it or not, Campbell and others early in the movement would not perform weddings at all, but only quietly relented in the face of seeing couples go to other clergy when judges were hard to find on the frontier.) Church weddings were for sacramental traditions, and most of the full-blown ritual surrounding a wedding was tied to such theology. Having no theology of marriage, the vacuum of Disciples’ wedding practice was gradually filled by Methodist and Episcopal service books, the wedding sliding over to the church parlor, on down the hall into the auditorium/sanctuary, and the next thing you know (but not until well into the 1950’s) we have bridesmaids, groomsmen, Lohengrin, and aisle runners to match the lengthy train of a vast dress topped by a veil (symbolic meanings available on request).

Today, many Disciple clergy struggle to reform a set of assumptions around when and how the congregation affirms weddings which are themselves based on assumptions largely foreign to our own basic understandings of church. We’re trying to tidy up loose ends on a sweater that isn’t ours and that we don’t know how we ended up with – and we’re not sure how to get rid of, or even if we can. Did we get it from Mom, or was it just a grab bag present we can unload painlessly?

In this regard, allow me to sound again as if I’m changing the subject – trust me, that’s not the intention here, either. Here’s a piece of a conversation between two Vineyard pastors on the dilemma all too familiar to Disciples’ pastors as well: how to respond to certain wedding requests. Noted – I’m aware that every DoC pastor handles this a bit differently, but I doubt any of this dialogue will require much translation. (The full conversation can be seen at: http://www.next-wave.org/may03/marriage.htm)
“So where did you leave it with that young couple?”
“I don’t know. I guess I kind of wimped out. I talked to them about the idea of covenant relationship, but they just didn’t get it. It was like I was speaking Latin.”
“I guess the language of covenant is not familiar to people in general.”
“I’m not even sure it’s familiar to me. This getting married thing is starting to make me crazy. We are increasingly operating around a traditional paradigm of marriage that presupposes pre-marriage celibacy accompanied by deep lifetime commitments. The statistics just don’t bear that out anymore.”
“I know what you mean, Mike. I recently attended a wedding where the bride was marrying a guy she had lived with for over a year. She had two other live-in boyfriends before that. Nobody seemed to see the irony in her wearing of a beautiful white dress that has traditionally symbolized virginity. It does become a little surreal when you really think about it.”
“I think I’m beyond just despairing over the state of the culture. That really isn’t my primary issue. My concern is how to authentically address the reality of the life situations without seeing my job as reorganizing their lives to give the appearance of respectability.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think about it: A typical conservative pastor meets with a couple for the first time. He finds out they are living together or at least sleeping together regularly. What does he advise them to do?”
“Move out. Quit having sex.”
“Right. I understand a couple making a new commitment about their lives before God and then separating temporarily as an act of faith. I think that can be a profound symbol of trust and faithfulness before God. But what does it really, truly change? What if the couple has been together for a number of years—maybe they even have had a child together—are we OK with dismantling them for the sake of appearances—for the sake of performing a ‘sin free’ wedding?”
“But Mike—Isn’t it for more than just the sake of appearances? Isn’t it a statement of their lives? On the other hand, I see what you mean about the incredible disruption in someone’s life. That’s a tough one.”
“Here’s what I’m thinking about: What if we began to see our roles more in terms of being spiritual directors for people? What if we let people tell us about their lives, and then, in the context of our understanding of covenant relationship, identified the truth of their lives and led them from that point? Is it possible that we have allowed the validation of a marriage by the civil authorities to become the benchmark of legitimacy? Have we somehow submitted ourselves to the wrong standard?”
“Wow. You’re suggesting something that could be really disturbing.”

The dialogue “Stumbling Towards A Theology of Getting Married” goes on, but our implications take off from here. What’s disturbing in the context of the Christian Church in Ohio is not a matter that is liberal or conservative, but the question of benchmarks, of submitting ourselves to the wrong standards. These pastors are trying to resolve a functional problem by thinking theologically; they’re taking the current situation, laying it next to the ideal of a closer relationship with God through Jesus Christ mediated within a community of faith, and looking at how to get from one to the other.

Disciples tend, in my experience, to take a felt need or perceived problem, and lay it next to what we expect people to do, or in Bellah’s formulation of “a nation of behavers,” how to behave in conformity with expectations. When those expectations are grounded in societal norms instead of theological assumptions, they can change out from under us in the blink of a societal shift, and we’re left looking for solid ground.

Covenant and modern American marriage do not, of necessity, have much in common. Covenant and a wider understanding of the Body of Christ, such as in the regional and general manifestations of the Disciples of Christ, do not automatically compute for most people; if their basic understanding of covenant is based in societal norms of marriage, they may relate it much more closely to contracts and contract law. . .and the language of duty, obligation, and accountability heard in the church around covenant tends to hew much closer to legal norms of contract than self-giving, mutual standards of covenant out of Scripture.

Do we have a Disciples of Christ theology of covenant? If we had one, how would it be taught? Who would embody this theology into the common life of our communion? What structures and traditions would model the teaching described and lived out by clergy and regional/general staff? How are we already communicating such a theology through our actions as a region, and how does that hold together?

Our theology of covenant is much like our theology of marriage: we’ve accidentally and unintentionally borrowed much of it by default from sources that carry other baggage. We need to develop a theological, a “God-talk” understanding of why we structure our common life the way we do, just as those marryin’ pastors were willing to go back to first principles to re-vision their approach to weddings and marriage, even if it wasn’t in line with behavioral expectations that are more societal than theological.

How do we do this? Well, to borrow a line from a friend who borrowed it himself (thanks, Bob), “we make the road by walking.” Let’s head down the Way toward a closer relationship among the various parts of the Body of Christ, and re-member them, knit them together in a new shalom for a new day, a new wholeness for these times. But we need to be willing to face that we have been walking for some time down a road which defines us in ways that may not be what we intended.


Part Three -- Some Consequences
“Christ has risen.” Whoever believes that
Should not behave as we do,
Who have lost the up, the down, the right, the left, heavens, abysses,
And try somehow to muddle on, in cars, in beds,
Men clutching at women, women clutching at men,
Falling, rising, putting coffee on the table,
Buttering bread, for here’s another day.
Six Lectures in Verse, Lecture V
Czeslaw Milosz

Some of the concerns recently voiced among Disciple clergy have to do with a trend that is seen by many as a more coercive, punitive, and legalistic approach toward forcing coherence and community among the members of the Body. Frankenstein methods make for monsters, bolted firmly together but only weakly in harmony between the constituent parts. Good intentions, whether as to clergy sexual ethics or a stand against racism as sin, can pave a long stretch of road to perdition.

How are some of these dismembered, reanimated parts related to who and how we as Disciples understand covenant? Are we digging up limbs from Episcopal or Reformed traditions and trying to graft them with lightning bolts of authority onto our own wounded body? Is there an integral reason for some of the most public actions we’ve taken recently as a region other than “other Christian bodies have done it, and so can we”? We can teach a good thing in a bad way, further undermining by unconscious example the fragile connections we carry into those interactions.

I’d like to go back to my marriage example, and quote a stretch from the tentative close of the meditation, a hypothetical wedding speech/message, especially since covenant is the key concept at work here:
“But today, Bill and Serena are making a new claim: Their relationship will not be characterized by condition, but instead by something that is called covenant.
Please notice that I didn’t say contract. A contract is an agreement between parties under certain conditions and is enforceable by law. Certainly the marriage license that will be signed later has a sense of contract to it, but that license isn’t what makes the marriage.
The kind of covenant that I’m talking about has a lot to do with the God of the Bible. According to the Bible, God established covenant relationships with people. He didn’t negotiate or bargain with them, but in essence said to them, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” God took the initiative in these relationships and promised to be faithful to the people. In turn, he called them to be faithful in their love and worship of him.
The people didn’t always live faithfully toward God. Yet, God remained faithful to them. Covenant is all about faithfulness and promise.
So what does this have to do with Bill and Serena? They have already spoken to me of their shared commitment toward one another. They have made promises to one another to live faithfully together. In a few minutes they are going to speak those commitments and promises before you and before God. They are making public something that already exists in their hearts: The transition from the world of condition to the world of covenant. There will be no looking over the shoulder, no question about permanence. It is their intention that theirs be a life of faithfulness and promise.”

How do we live out covenant without contracts and enforcement? With the Biblical example of loving initiative as our guide, started with Noah and Abram and vividly fulfilled in the person of Jesus Christ, let me offer these self-giving proposals for our regional life. Most of these are means of providing an example, of living out a different kind of embodiment appropriate to the kind of “church” a region is to Disciples:

1. A Training emphasis for the region, aka “equipping the saints.” Seminary is not seen by hardly anyone (including many seminary faculty) as a place where the work of parish ministry is communicated – or even necessarily affirmed. So why not take our vaunted Ohio certification and supervisory process, plus the human resources of a region like ours, and create a benchmark training program for new pastors during their first three to five years. . .when the odds of departing ministry are also the highest. This also allows us to offer a gift while mandating a certification or set of benchmarks, instead of just imposing requirements.

Elders also need and in many cases want training, but our workshops at regional assemblies et alia assume basic training and orientation to Disciples’ theology, history, and polity, and offer advanced skills, which can be confusing for many/most elders who aren’t up to speed with the concepts and principles involved. A majority of elders in many/most of our churches (to repeat myself) did not grow up Disciple, and carry a wide variety of assumptions about how the larger church works into their service and teaching.

And the diaconate and officers common to most of our churches would benefit from the availability of regular baseline training. Each of these would give regional staff and leadership an opportunity to scout for prospects to groom for regional leadership.
(Note: we and other regions/conferences already do this for camp directors and counselors, which gives us a good model to work from and an example to point towards.)

2. Focus on Gift and Call. If you know how to translate from Catholic dialect to Protestant lingo, see www.siena.org for a model here. If covenant has any meaning at all, then God is giving to us more than we are being asked to give: how are we faithfully expecting and anticipating God’s participation in this covenant?

The unique training issue for us as Ohio Disciples is the near-universal phenomena of “Nominating Committees,” which in many congregations are statutorily required to exclude key leadership (pastors, even elders as a whole) and are deeply shaped by secular models of “slot filling” along the lines of Kiwanis, Lions, and Eastern Star. Christian leadership needs to focus on identifying spiritual gifts, from administration (Rom. 12:8) to hospitality (Rom. 12:13) to persistence (II Tim. 4:2), and the ministry of linking, of re-membering the Body of Christ together with where their vocation, their calling can be fulfilled. My favorite quote as to this profound theological truth is Fredrick Buechner’s: “God’s calling is where your heart’s desire and the world’s deepest need intersect.”

This also has everything to do with burnout as both a clergy and laity phenomena. I have a near heretical belief that burnout has almost nothing to do with how much/how hard you work, and everything to do with whether or not you have a sense of calling about your work, with the consequent ability to be spiritually fed by right use of the gifts God gives you. You can burn out on one small task or in a 30 hour a week job if it feels at odds with where and who you are called to be, or if you cannot be filled faster than you are being emptied by the work.

Elected, appointed, or employed staff of the church (in any manifestation) need to have gifts identified in line with the call to be extended. Job descriptions help, but they don’t replace a whole lotta prayer and discernment versus slot filling, whether for the diaconate locally or for regional president and pastor. And the discernment goes both ways, toward what we call someone to do, as well as illumining whether an individual is the one gifted to fulfill the call, even when the search has gone on a long, long time.

By the same token, if the responsibility/authority balance is out of skew (“You are held entirely accountable for how this turns out, and we give you precisely no influence in how the task will be done”) then whether extravert or intuitive, introvert or sensing, the person in the role will be drained while the structure blocks the hidden sources of renewal, the involvements that can fill one even as the demands tax you to your limits. God’s gifts are promised to those involved in the work of the vineyard, but we can stop their delivery at the garden gate; for our leaders in congregation, region, and general life, we often do just that, and then wonder why the ideal person for a job staggers away some time later looking dazed and weary.

3. Regional elders. Well, recent developments have outstripped suggestions here, and save me some space; but let’s make sure this isn’t seen as simply a cost savings measure for the short term – this is a good idea even if we had tons o’ cash and staff to spare. We need to be visible, be present, be embodied, and be teaching and preaching as the region in the congregations, and for most of our folk, that rarely happens. For implementation, see items 1 and 2.

4. Who’s Afraid of WWW Woolf? Again, we’re already seeing some movement on this front with the ministers’ mailing, but under the auspices of “cost savings.” Nope, this is just plain a good idea; it is, in fact, the iceberg tip of a good idea. We need further conversation and communication about what the Restoration Christianity theology and ethos in Ohio means for our day, and in our day that means a) e-mail lists, message boards, and weblogs, b) on-line publicity and registration for events and programs, c) teleconference and internet connectivity for regional staff and contract workers (see items 3 & 5), and d) distance learning for things like items 1 & 2. Until recently, it appeared that faxes were about the only technology we had adopted since 1975.

This point is not about efficiency only, but one about increased communication on intentional, structured grounds to explore what contemporary Disciple theology says about the questions that nag at us, and to share the results of that conversation. As the general office discovered through the discussion boards at disciples.org, there are many challenges to doing this, but the problem is that someone has to be willing to shape the discussion – it doesn’t just happen. A discussion board left to its own devices is not pure democracy, but becomes total anarchy in a matter of months. A managed, moderated discussion (see http://www.marriagedebate.com/mdblog.php for one example) can move in constructive directions fairly steadily, but someone has to be willing to take on the teaching office, on-line just as in a circle of folding chairs.

5. Staffing and Portfolios. Along with technology, new approaches towards organizational strategy and institutional affiliation indicate that a more dispersed approach to staffing should be deployed. This may include a new look at what makes for an ideal location, or even the best configuration is for the regional office, as well. Rented space, contracted work, and more effective use of volunteer help are more and more common in congregational life and with new church starts – should the region be able to model and teach by example on this, as well? Fellowship ministries (women’s, men’s, youth and young adult), special initiatives (see items 1 through 4, for instance), and other programmatic administrative responsibilities could be assigned to volunteer or short-term paid individuals who have the identified gifts for a particular task and who can embody calling in their context. We already do this with three camps, but some still see that as “what we have to do because we don’t have enough staff.” Affirming and supporting that kind of regional ministry as a positive option instead of “a second best that we’re settling for” opens the door to further application of the principle of “a pilgrim people.”

We will always need full-time, set-apart, called individuals to serve the regional office; but “until someone can articulate a clear, strong vision for the regional manifestation of the Christian church, it will be difficult to support these regional positions.” A gifted, talented lay member of our congregation here in Hebron said that in response to “how many regional staff do we really need;” which is another way of saying: first, we have to explain to people why we need one. Then, later, we start to extrapolate from that how many the region needs. That’s what my wife says, anyhow.

Part Four – A Conclusion

The Prince of This World governs number.
The singular is the hidden God’s dominion,
The Lord of rescues and exception’s Father
Who from the start inhabited my errors.

One against the multiplication table.
Particular, free from the general.
Without hands or eyes yet real.
Who is, every day, though unrevealed.
One And Many
Czeslaw Milosz


One place where covenant still feels real, where it never really went away, among both conservative and liberal Disciples’ congregations and even in the midst of some of our independent kin as well as with ecumenical partners, is at the communion table. We come to be made one, and where God has promised to be present, the signs of God’s presence are made manifest. God’s love is embodied in the beloved community assembled around the joyful feast, whether in the form of fish food and thimbles of grape-like juice (symbolizing our too often frugal parceling out of good news?), or through a hearty loaf and rich red wine. One bread, one body, one Lord of all, one cup of blessing, which we bless. . .

Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope
Zechariah 9:12

We have some great strengths in our Stone-Campbell tradition, in this branch of the Restoration Movement. The central rock on which we stand is a broken loaf of bread and a cup of crushed grapes, which by eating and drinking as Jesus asked “in remembrance of me” makes of us a whole, as the living Body of Christ. Our times of communion together as Buckeye Disciples have seen us through many times of brokenness and season of fracturing. I wonder if there aren’t more occasions, when we are about the task of re-membering the divided and drained body, when we could have communion together? Do we do that often enough, at regional board and commission meetings, at other gatherings whether district assemblies or work group rallies? And when we have communion before starting a shared task, we create a circumstance for reflection and conversation on the meaning of what we’re doing.

All things are possible at the table of remembrance and re-membering, even Widow McGillicutty speaking warmly to Mrs. Wilson and her rambunctious brood in the pew behind her. Even Elder Morris to the pierced teen can show acceptance and welcome when sharing the loaf and cup; the grim relax their jawlines and the hopeless take heart, while the weak become strong and the mighty unbend, even if only just a bit.

Everything we do in reforming the Christian Church in Ohio should be measured against the yardstick of the communion table, and we should say so as we’re doing it. Can we say such and such an action is in harmony with our practice of the Lord’s Table? How does this decision fit into the example of the Last Supper? In a church body with little affection for theological benchmarks, the communion table is one standard that everyone can agree on.

But just as we shouldn’t unconsciously appropriate random elements of other faith traditions (signs of the cross over the elements, presence lamps in the “sanctuary”) without understanding the whole into which they fit, we shouldn’t imagine that our trials are ours in isolation, either. In the Catholic Church, where theology and ecclesiology is quite different from our own, the task of modern missions asks many of the same questions of Jesus’ friends, however they may live out that relationship. Quoting Amy Welborn on “open book,” her weblog: “People are just so tired of institutional conversations. They are so tired of programs and mission statements and policies and long processes that stifle the Spirit. They are tired of layers put by institutions between them and God. The Church is an institution, and its purpose is not to obscure, but to enlighten, to give people not only guidance, but a place, a moment in time in which they know the presence of Jesus - healing, forgiving, binding, nourishing, loving. It is not that complicated. . . . There is nothing to re-invent. There is merely the ancient charge, the commission of Jesus to heed and put into action.” (http://amywelborn.typepad.com/openbook/)

You, by reading this, have shown – embodied, even – your interest in the reformation and restoration of a community of believers who see weekly communion, lay leadership, and belief preceding repentance leading to baptism, as crucial means towards having a personal relationship with God, as the Way of Christ into deeper fellowship and lasting meaning for today and into forever. Thank you for your interest and commitment, and know that our prayers and reflections together are part of that movement towards perfect communion that is God’s purpose in creation. We are not alone, we should be unafraid, and Jesus has indeed prayed “that they may all be one.” (John 17:21)

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time . . .

Quick now, here, now, always –
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one
Little Gidding
T.S. Eliot

* * * * * * *

Appendix
[Due to budget, format, and various other unexplained changes in the proposed volume, “Ohio Religious Experience 1803-2003,” what will come out in March 2004 from OU Press will be about half of this, with assorted additions and edits for format consistency contributed by Dennis Sparks. – JBG]

Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
By Jeff Gill

Restoration of “the ancient order of things” and building Christian unity make up the core teaching, or “plea” of Restoration movement churches. Even in the division between Disciples of Christ, Churches of Christ, and independent Christian Churches, all three branches of the Restoration Movement (sometimes called the “Stone-Campbell movement” by historians) still claim this essential plea, and look back to early leaders like Thomas Campbell with their affirmation that “the church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.”

How did a movement based on the need for Christian unity, and discarding creeds and doctrine for a re-emphasis on New Testament teaching as a model for church governance, end up becoming a denomination, let alone three? The Restoration Movement story is told in Ohio much as it might be for the United States and Canada as a whole.

From frontier areas of America as they were around 1800, the need for flexible church organization and the desire for leadership (whether ordained or not) sent ripples of change through existing denominational structures. Starting in the Ohio River valley and other margins of settlement, preachers found themselves inviting Christians together who had not worshiped in one place back in Europe, or even along the Atlantic shore. People asked to join in communion celebrations who had not seen clergy of their denomination for months or even years, as well as needing baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Communities used to doing everything from barn raising to militia drill together wanted to hold revival services together, too. Pastors started to wonder, “Why not?”

Barton Stone, a Presbyterian pastor in northern Kentucky, hosted a revival at Cane Ridge in 1801. Methodists and Baptists and scattered other Christian groups were represented in both the preaching and hearing at this celebrated event which drew in thousands from both sides of the Ohio. Presbyterian authorities were highly critical after reports of the eclectic nature of the services, and their attacks led to Stone and others leaving their presbytery, or local organization of churches, and forming their own.

But even that they shortly dissolved, expressing their desire in 1804 to “sink into union with the Body of Christ.” This group, calling themselves simply Christians, acknowledged no organization above that of congregation, and pointed to the scriptures as their single authoritative guide. As Duane Cummins has pointed out, “the formalized church of the time. . .became irrelevant to the frontier settlers.” Tradition and distant formal authority was not a factor in their social setting, and carried little weight in how the settlers turned towards their God.

Not long after, and equally near the waters of the Ohio, a Scots-Irish preacher came by invitation to western Pennsylvania. Thomas Campbell was admittedly weary of the divisions in the Presbyterian church of northern Ireland, but hoped as he left family behind in 1807 that a new start for Christ’s church could be found in this New World. Instead, the disputes over doctrine had come with the other baggage into the frontier settlements along Chartiers and Cross Creeks, and Thomas was quickly embroiled in the same controversies over open communion tables and who was “fit” to serve and receive at the Lord ’s Table.

Like Stone in Kentucky, Campbell in Pennsylvania withdrew from denominational structures before he could be rejected, and organized on the local, congregational level. He defended his actions in a publication called “Declaration and Address,” which closed with thirteen propositions for the restoration of the New Testament church and Christian unity, starting with his declaration about the nature of “the church of Christ upon earth” and continuing in words best summarized by the reforming motto that predates both Stone and Campbell, “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”

Almost immediately upon the publication of “Declaration and Address” in 1809, the rest of Thomas Campbell’s family came to Washington, PA. His 21 year old son Alexander had helped his mother Jane hold the family together through a shipwreck during their first attempt to reach America, and nearly a year in Glasgow, Scotland waiting for their next chance to seek passage aboard the “Hibernia.”

Alexander had used the unexpected delay well, attending college at the University of Glasgow, in part out of a commitment to Christian ministry made during the shipwreck that brought them there. He was exposed to Scotland reformers like Glas, Sandeman, and the Haldanes, whose ideas about congregational independence, weekly communion, and believer’s baptism by immersion (given at the “age of accountability” instead of baptizing infants) were to have a lasting impact on the Campbells.

Thomas was relieved to find, when he and Alexander were reunited, that just before departing Glasgow, Alexander too had broken with the Church of Scotland, primarily over the practice of “testing” church members to determine their fitness to receive communion at one of the few times a year the Lord’s Table was set. Both father and son had come to see that baptism and communion are freely given gifts of God through the church to help make souls ready for grace, and that requiring signs of grace before permitting access to those sacraments (or “ordinances” in the language of the reformers) was putting human-made barriers in the way of God’s renewing activity in the world.

During the next year, father and son joined with other families in their area in forming the Christian Association of Washington, PA; meeting in a variety of locations, they soon felt the need to build a place of worship convenient to fellow believers who were coming from all along the valleys and ridges draining into the Ohio. At Brush Run in 1811, right up against the northern panhandle of what was still Virginia (now West Virginia), they built their first church. A fateful trip to borrow precious books, rare on the frontier, took Alexander across the Virginia border to what is now Bethany, West Virginia, where he would meet his future wife Margaret and the place where – when home! – he would live out the rest of his life. He would be ordained by the Brush Run elders on New Year’s Day of 1812.

The newly married couple almost made it to Ohio, now a state, when they considered a move in 1814 to the Zanesville area with a number of younger families out of Brush Run. The plan to pioneer a reforming community, worshiping together and educating their children in the light of “clear teachings of the Bible,” was put on a back burner when Margaret’s father offered his Buffalo Creek home and acreage to the young Campbells for one dollar.

Farming, raising a family, and leading a local congregation could have easily been the rest of Alexander’s story, but the desire to be part of a larger fellowship and supportive Christian community led the Brush Run reformers into and out of Baptist associations, which seemed at first a congenial home for their particular religious beliefs and practices. The frontier respect for autonomy and independence continued to attract supporters, and also kept them in conflict with church structures and traditions. These conflicts led them to a firm objection to doctrinal confessions and creeds “as a test of fellowship,” even when they might have agreed with the substance of their content. The “Christian Baptist” was a publication begun by Campbell in 1823 to share more widely their belief that a simple “Good Confession” of faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior was the only requirement for membership in a fellowship of “Disciples,” which was scripturally his preferred name for their churches.

The final break with the Mahoning (Baptist) Association in Austintown, OH in 1830 led to a change in the title of Campbell’s publication, and a new self-understanding as “a Restoration movement.” Named from Alexander’s belief that the work of the church was to teach and embody the future millennium of Christ’s reign over creation, “The Millennial Harbinger” would carry the Restorationist message not just all across the frontier but ultimately around the world. A compelling preacher from Pittsburgh named Walter Scott joined the growing movement, and began in the Western Reserve area of Ohio to preach in existing churches and begin new congregations. In years to come, many of these northeast Ohioans would follow the frontier to Indiana and Iowa, or south through Missouri to Oklahoma and Texas, repeating the process of church planting they experienced back in Ohio and spreading their model of congregationally governed churches with lay leadership empowered to serve communion and baptize upon hearing the simple words of Peter’s Good Confession.

When Scott moved the center of his ministry down to the Cincinnati area, more connections developed between the “Christians” of Barton Stone and the “Disciples” who had been influenced by the Campbells. New Year’s Day 1832 brought these two streams together in a formal greeting at a worship service in Lexington, KY. While these currents brought strength and power to the Restorationist movement, they also introduced strong forces that Alexander was only just able to hold together until his death in 1866.

As the 1800’s drew to a close, issues of slavery and the Civil War, modernism and “innovations” such as musical instruments in worship, and resistance to co-operative mission work as “unscriptural” led the Churches of Christ down a separate path. Independent Christian Churches have loosely organized around the North American Christian Convention as they parted from the congregations and state societies that came together as the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the formal name and structure adopted in the late 1960’s. The Christian Church in Ohio, one of over 30 regional bodies for Disciples’ congregations, grew out of those state missionary and Sunday School societies whose co-operative work had grown out of the initial association started in Cincinnati in 1849, with Alexander Campbell as first president.

Memorable figures from our past still inspire us today, reminding Ohio Disciples of their traditions of honoring education and public service: embodied by names like James A. Garfield, the only ordained minister to serve as President of the United States, and earlier president of Hiram College, a Disciples’ foundation following in the example of Campbell’s Bethany College. During the last century, notable figures like Gaines Cook, Herald Monroe, and Howard Ratcliff have led the evolving institution that we now call the Christian Church in Ohio, made up of 200 congregations around the state. Today, Ohio Disciples look with pride to their camp and conference programs for youth and adults celebrating over 50 years of vital ministry at Camp Christian near Magnetic Springs, and honor the leadership role our denomination continues to play in ecumenical bodies like the Ohio Council of Churches and Churches Uniting in Christ. With Barton Stone, we still affirm that “Christian unity is our polar star.”