Stone-Campbell: Recommended resources

Books

• William Baker, ed., Evangelicalism and the Stone-Campbell Movement. Essays by Stone-Campbell authors and responses by leading evangelicals on where the movements diverge and where they find common cause. The second volume focuses on what the two groups think about the Trinity, Christ, the Lord’s Supper, the Second Coming, and the Scriptures.

• Glenn Thomas Carson, Douglas A. Foster, and Clinton J. Holloway, One Church: A Bicentennial Celebration of Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address. A history of Campbell’s groundbreaking document and a plea for unity in the twenty-first century.

• D. Duane Cummins, The Disciples: A Struggle for Reformation. A history of the one stream of the movement that, quite self-consciously, re-invented itself as a mainline Protestant denomination.

• Douglas A. Foster, Paul M. Blowers, Anthony L. Dunnavant, and D. Newell Williams, eds., The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement. Over 700 entries—and lots of pictures—bring alive thepeople, places, and debates that have shaped the movement fornearly two centuries.

• Leroy Garrett, The Stone-Campbell Movement: An Anecdotal History of Three Churches. How the streams of the movement related and separated over the years.

• Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. Focuses on the broad context of early American religion, a time when “common people became powerful actors on the religious scene.”

• Richard Hughes, Reviving the Ancient Faith: The Story of Churches of Christ in America. Sets the movement in the context of the American impulses toward primitivism and restoration of the “ancient order of things.”

• George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture. Gives a thorough picture of what was “in the air” intellectually in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American religion.

• Robert Richardson, Memoirs of Alexander Campbell. The standard biography of Campbell and a good history of the early movement. Also of interest is a biography penned by Campbell’s second wife, Selina Huntington Campbell, Home Life and Reminiscences of Alexander Campbell.

• Various authors, Renewing God’s People: A Concise History of Churches of Christ; Renewal for Mission: A Concise History of Christian Churches/Churches of Christ; and Renewing Christian Unity: A Concise History of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). This trilogy of books on the history and thought of the three North American streams is a “short course” in the unique stories of each group.

• D. Newell Williams, Barton Stone: A Spiritual Biography. The life and theological struggles of Stone as he sought to find a way to “sink into union with the Body of Christ at large.”

• D. Newell Williams, Douglas A. Foster, and Paul M. Blowers, eds., The Stone-Campbell Movement: A Global History. How a quintessentially American movement spread worldwide.

• Eva Jean Wrather, ed. D. Duane Cummins, Alexander Campbell: Adventurer in Freedom: A Literary Biography. A thorough journey through Campbell’s life and his writings.




Websites

• Both the “Last Will and Testament of Springfield Presbytery” and the Declaration and Address are online.

• The website of the Disciples of Christ is www.disciples.org. The other two streams do not maintain unified websites, although there are many sites for individual churches and movement-related schools. The World Convention of Churches of Christ, which seeks cooperation among all streams of the movement globally, is at www.worldconvention.org.

• Much work has been done on preserving the history of the movement by the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, www.discipleshistory.org (check out the colorful and entertaining online exhibits!) and the Center for Restoration Studies (CRS) at Abilene Christian University, www.bible.acu.edu/crs. The CRS also hosts many, many texts and pictures relating to the movement compiled by Dr. Hans Rollmann.

• If you think you might have Stone-Campbell ancestors, visit “Restoration History,” with its extensive listing of genealogical resources along with biographies, articles, and interesting tidbits at www.therestorationmovement.com.

• Many materials relating to the Great Communion (p. 37) are at www.GreatCommunion.org. The Abilene, Texas, Great Communion service is available on YouTube, here and here and you can also check out a map on Google showing a few of the places that celebrated the Great Communion.




Related DVDs from Vision Video

Several DVDs about American history and American Christianity are helpful in understanding the contexts that gave birth to the Stone-Campbell Movement:

The Christian Story (vol. 4,The Church in America)

Gospel of Liberty

The Great Awakening

People of Faith

Proof through the Night

Saints and Strangers

We the People: Character of a Nation

• Wrestling with God




Past Christian History issues

Back issues telling the story of the American church and particularly relevant to the themes of this issue include

• 23: Spiritual Awakenings in North America

• 45: Camp Meetings and Circuit Riders: Frontier Revivals

• 92: America’s 20th-Century Evangelical Awakening

• 102: People of Faith



Back issues of Christian History can be read in full at www.christianhistorymagazine.org. DVDs and print copies of many back issues of Christian History magazine are available for purchase at www.christianhistoryinstitute.org/storefront.

By the editors

[Christian History originally published this article in Christian History Issue #106 in 2013]

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