The One Practice Neither Side Gave Up

When the Restoration Movement divided over instrumental music and missionary societies, weekly communion was conspicuously not one of the disputes that split it. Churches of Christ and the Disciples of Christ, recorded as separate bodies in the 1906 religious census, disagreed sharply enough over worship style and denominational organization to become two distinct religious families, yet both sides carried the weekly Lord's Supper forward unchanged from the united movement's founding generation. That continuity is itself evidence of how the practice functioned inside the movement's self understanding. Instrumental music and missionary societies were read by conservative congregations as additions the New Testament never authorized, matters open to dispute precisely because scripture was silent on them; weekly communion was read as a matter scripture had already settled, at Troas and by implication everywhere the apostolic pattern applied, which left it outside the argument entirely. J. Gordon Melton's survey of American religious bodies records both wings continuing the practice into the twentieth century without controversy between them on this specific point, even as they organized separate colleges, publications and eventually separate identities around everything else that divided them.