One Movement Divides: Instruments and Societies

The Churches of Christ began life inside the same nineteenth-century Restoration Movement that produced the Disciples of Christ, sharing its appeal to the New Testament alone as the rule of faith and its rejection of denominational creeds and names. As that movement spread from Kentucky and Pennsylvania across the American frontier and then the South, congregations began to diverge over two practical questions rather than any single doctrinal creed: whether local churches should support centralized missionary societies to coordinate evangelism, and whether instrumental music, chiefly the organ, belonged in New Testament worship.

More urban, generally Northern congregations adopted both, judging them useful means not forbidden by Scripture. Congregations concentrated in the South, poorer and more rural on the whole, came to see both as unauthorized innovations that exceeded what the New Testament commanded, a principle of strict scriptural warrant central to their reading of the Restoration ideal. David Lipscomb (1831-1917), the influential editor of the Nashville-based Gospel Advocate, became the clearest voice for this noninstrumental, anti-society position, arguing that only what Scripture explicitly commanded or exemplified should be practiced in worship and church organization.