The Census of 1906 and the Line of Division

Instrumental music was not the only question at issue but it was the audible one, and it became the practical test of which side a congregation was on. The other question was organizational: whether the churches might form a missionary society to send and support preachers, since the New Testament shows congregations sending money but no society standing between them. Both questions were argued in the movement's periodicals from the 1860s onward, and both split along the same fault.

The Gospel Advocate in Nashville, revived after the Civil War under David Lipscomb, argued the noninstrumental and anti-society position for a Southern readership impoverished by the war and suspicious of northern institutional religion; the Christian Standard argued the other way for a northern one. By the 1890s many congregations had ceased fellowship with each other in fact.

In 1906 the United States religious census listed the Churches of Christ as a separate body from the Disciples of Christ, and that administrative act is the date usually given for a division that no council declared and no document records. The Churches of Christ remain congregational to the point of having no headquarters, no convention and no officer able to speak for them, which makes the persistence of the a cappella position across thousands of independent congregations a striking piece of evidence about how strongly the underlying reading of silence is held.