A Plea for Unity That Produced Three Bodies

The plea contained an unresolved question that its founders did not have to answer and their successors did. If the New Testament church is the pattern, what counts as part of the pattern and what is merely incidental to it? Weekly communion, congregational autonomy and baptism of believers by immersion were quickly agreed. Missionary societies, instrumental music in worship, salaried located preachers and later Sunday schools and colleges were not, because the New Testament says nothing about any of them, and the movement split on whether silence forbids or permits. The division ran along regional and economic lines as much as hermeneutical ones, the wealthier and more urban north taking to organs and societies while the poorer post-war South, led by figures such as David Lipscomb of Nashville, refused both. The 1906 United States religious census listed the Churches of Christ separately at the request of the noninstrumental churches, and that census is the conventional date of a separation that had already happened in practice.

A second division followed in the mid twentieth century, when the independent Christian Churches and Churches of Christ separated from the Disciples of Christ over the latter's restructure into a denomination with a general assembly in 1968. Three bodies now descend from a plea to abolish denominational division, and each holds that the plea is right and that the others have misapplied it. The atlas records the plea as one doctrine held in common because that is what it is, and records the readings of silence that divided its holders separately.