So far, I’ve just posted an introduction and chapter one of my 2021 revised version of “The Rise and Fall of the Ohio Region,” which does spend a fair amount of time talking about the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in general.
What’s gone up on this platform and been read has already gotten me a hatful of queries about sources, as well as a couple of seminarians and new-to-Disciples ministers asking “do you have a reading list?”
Full disclosure: I have taught early American history at Fairmont State University, been a guest lecturer at Bethany College and Ohio State Newark campus, and as an adjunct for Disciples history and polity classes for Methodist Theological School in Ohio & Ashland Theological Seminary, so I’ve got many reading lists. The combined opportunity & challenge of these last thirty years is I’ve gone from all textbooks to books and copied packets of out-of-print material to a couple of books and online links to essentially all online or ebook read materials. Have I done as well as I could have in keeping up with tech changes? Possibly not.
And since 2001 I’ve ended up teaching a two hour to two day session once or twice a year for commissioned ministers & clergy ordained in the United Church of Christ seeking ordained ministerial partner standing, sometimes with a mixed group. So I’m used to flexing the general outline of our movement’s story within whatever container, time-wise, I’m given to work with. It was a highlight for me to get to teach a six hour class across two days at the 2019 General Assembly in Des Moines, with my dad present, he who was the source of my history interest (or obsession if you wish), and an opportunity I value all the more for losing him early in 2020.
So what follows is a massive data dump of my most recent total set of resources, limited to those I can point people towards online. My older reading lists have some great books and pamphlets that are not even in most libraries; there are links I once used often that are now dead web addresses or 404s, and I’m still looking for a good way to offer some materials that illuminate odd corners of our history. Congregational histories are a unique source of highly suspect but always interesting insights, and like most of the 19th century writings I mention here, they’re an acquired taste, and if you never acquire it that might be a sign of good judgment on your part.
When I returned to Ohio in 1999 and was asked to provide some input on our then current reading list for what we called “licensed ministers” at the time, I saw at the top of the page “The Christian System” by Alexander Campbell . . . and that’s almost 300 pages of which I would commend about three paragraphs even to the highly engaged reader for their edification. Sorry Alex, but I read it once and that’s not a mistake I’ll make twice! But his Clarinda letters of the 1820s are fascinating . . .
To repeat, then, what follows is not exhaustive, but it’s pretty comprehensive. Few will or should read all of these entries and/or books, but you have the range of material present to get a mastery of the outlines of our story as a faith tradition. I’m starting somewhat at the end, with two quick overviews in online essay form from our general office and church-wide historical society. Next are the contexts and texts themselves of our two key founding documents, the “Last Will and Testament” which is both too short and too good for you not to read all the way through (effectively one page, really, c’mon!), and “Declaration and Address” which has one good line, but the main body is less than two dozen.
Thomas Campbell’s one line, his first proposition in “Declaration & Address,” is still an excellent starting place for any movement for wholeness, let alone Christian unity: “that the church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one; consisting of all those in every place that profess their faith in Christ and obedience to him in all things according to the scriptures, and that manifest the same by their tempers and conduct…” The point of our whole movement goes back to the idea that Christ’s people are already in essence, by God’s intention, within our very constitution, one church.
Of course, we aren’t: depending on who does the counting, we’re divided into at least three movements or groups or denominational fellowships from this one origin narrative. That should tell us something about the challenges of unity, of the difficulties inherent in being a movement for wholeness in a broken world. So I also include some history as written by those who “split” from the stream of this impulse that we call our own. They say (at least most of them) that we split, and they are the ones who have stayed faithful to the roots of our narrative and the faith of our fathers (sic). But I think it’s important we at least sample those, and think about how our decisions look institutionally from the point of view of those who chose a different path.
We have also been blessed in recent years with extened views from some of the groups within our shared story who have not always been mainstreamed in the teaching of the Disciples story, and reading those can inform both the named and unnamed. There are stories yet to be shared in our two hundred plus year narrative within the multi-millennia scriptural story. New pieces of our “journey in faith” are coming to light every year, and I’m delighted in a way that my reading list is constantly needing updated.
So I tend to write a different reading list each time I’m asked for one, depending on the gaps and fullnesses of the student needing assistance. But these are the bones, the steel skeleton of the rich and full-bodied story that is ours as members of the Restoration Movement within the vast, wonderful, and one church of Christ Jesus.
(And let me know if by the time you read this any are dead links, because any online resource is going to be a work in progress for the foreseeable future!)
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Overview – Office of the General Minister & President
https://disciples.org/our-identity/history-of-the-disciples/
Overview – Disciples of Christ Historical Society
https://discipleshistory.org/history/brief-history-stone-campbell-tradition
1804: Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery – Barton Stone
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Presbytery
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Last_Will_and_Testament_of_The_Springfield_Presbytery
1809: Declaration and Address – Thomas Campbell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_and_Address
1827: The History of the Christian Church in the West, by Barton Stone
http://articles.ochristian.com/book3475.shtml
Early Restoration Movement biographies & texts, emph. 1830-1920, much of it with an emphatically independent Churches of Christ orientation:
https://www.therestorationmovement.com/index.htm
Such as “The Addition of the Melodeon at Midway in 1860”:
https://www.therestorationmovement.com/_states/kentucky/midway.htm
Alexander Campbell writings, incl. Millennial Harbinger, 1820-1866:
https://webfiles.acu.edu/departments/Library/HR/restmov_nov11/www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/people/acampbell.html
1848: Address on War, by Alexander Campbell
https://webfiles.acu.edu/departments/Library/HR/restmov_nov11/www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/texts/acampbell/ac2.html
1876: Early History of the Disciples on the Western Reserve – A.S. Hayden
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=iitOAAAAYAAJ&rdid=book-iitOAAAAYAAJ&rdot=1
1889: Sand Creek “Address and Declaration” – Daniel Sommer
(Note: Sommer is a complex figure, but not in 1889. My personal opinion, but I believe historically rooted, is that he’s delighting in being the troll in the comments in an 1889 sense, and he sees an opportunity to take advantage of some of the still unstable aspects of our movement over two decades after Campbell’s death. He will make some very interesting pivots later in life, but here you get to “see” in real time how the instrumental split is going to get gamed into a pseudo-theological division that has separated churches right down to the present day. He will renounce much of what he says here later, but it is used as a rallying cry within the schism that’s still a reality on the American scene, so I think any Disciples’s church leader should know where it comes from.)
https://webfiles.acu.edu/departments/Library/HR/restmov_nov11/www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/texts/dsommer/guthrie.html
1905: The Disciples of Christ – Errett Gates (a very early attempt at a comprehensive history that’s more even-handed than the “Memoirs of Alexander Campbell”)
https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=oOURAAAAIAAJ&rdid=book-oOURAAAAIAAJ&rdot=1
1906: Disciples of Christ: One Hundredth Anniversary 1809-1909
(This is what was effectively the “docket” for our first true “International Convention” in Pittsburg, as they spelled it then, and also a first official history)
https://digitalcommons.acu.edu/crs_books/118/
1918: A History of the Disciples of Christ in Ohio – Alanson Willcox (one of the earliest state society, i.e. regional histories among Disciples)
https://www.google.com/books/edition/A_History_of_the_Disciples_of_Christ_in/y7TRAAAAMAAJ
1930: Disciples of Christ in Indiana:Achievements of a Century – Commodore Wesley Cauble (yes, that’s his first name, not a rank, and it’s of a state central to our story)
https://books.google.com/books/about/Disciples_of_Christ_in_Indiana.html?id=gBgQAQAAMAAJ
1948: The Disciples of Christ, a History – Garrison & DeGroot
https://books.google.com/books?id=U2BCAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_book_similarbooks
1952: Buckeye Disciples – Henry Shaw
https://www.amazon.com/Buckeye-Disciples-History-Christ-Ohio/dp/B002K4YNZ2/
1966: Hoosier Disciples – Henry Shaw
https://books.google.com/books?id=4xLnAAAAMAAJ
1966: Quest for a Christian America, 1800–1865: A Social History of the Disciples of Christ, Volume 1 – David Edwin Harrell
(Dr. Harrell’s work is sadly too little known even among Disciples history readers and scholars, largely because it’s been out of print more than in over the last fifty years; now, vol. 1 is on Kindle . . . vol. 2 I can hope, but it’s a hope for you, dear reader, because I have my own autographed hardback copy of it.)
https://www.amazon.com/Quest-Christian-America-1800-1865-Disciples-ebook/dp/B07YDTBHGV
1973: The Social Sources of Division in the Disciples of Christ 1865-1900 Volume II of a Social History of the Disciples of Christ – David Edwin Harrell (harder to find, but worth it in my opinion)
https://www.amazon.com/Sources-Division-Disciples-Christ-1865-1900/dp/B01FIZVX66
1973: Adventuring for Christ in Changing Times -- James DeForest Murch
[Very Cautious Note: this is an ambivalent read; Murch is the great Boogeyman of the Restructure Era, a leader of the “Independents” and a divisive yet bridgebuilding figure in a number of odd ways, especially in Ohio along with P.H. Welshimer*, from 1926 to the formal break with the passage of Restructure in 1968. True story: some of the keepers of the Ohio Disciples legendarium when I first came here in 1989 would blow their stacks if they knew I was even hinting there was any reason at all to hear Murch’s point of view. I think he was an opportunist in many ways, but he had an odd blinkered sincerity which I’ve come to appreciate, if not approve of.]
https://www.amazon.com/Adventuring-Christ-changing-times-autobiography/dp/B0006CA066
[*There’s a biography of P.H. out there from c. 1958, and I do NOT recommend it; a Disciples-oriented biography would be interesting, but it would sell about three copies. Hagiography is what it is, and it obscures more than it reveals. “Adventuring” is interesting to me in what Murch unintentionally reveals about motives and infighting in the whole 1926-1968 drama for our movement.]
1975: Journey in Faith: A History of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) – Tucker & McAllister
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Journey_in_Faith/XDBnRcyZAeUC
2004: Religion in Ohio: Stories of Faith Communities – Butalia & Small (& Gill)
https://www.amazon.com/Religion-Ohio-Profiles-Faith-Communities/dp/0821415514
2009: The Disciples: A Struggle for Reformation – Duane Cummins
https://www.amazon.com/Disciples-Struggle-Reformation-Duane-Cummins/dp/0827206372
2009: Born Apart, Becoming One: Disciples Defeating Racism – Chris Hobgood
https://www.amazon.com/Born-Apart-Becoming-One-Disciples/dp/0827202393
2009: Room at the Table: Struggle for Unity and Equality in Disciples History – Sandhya Jha
https://www.amazon.com/Room-Table-Struggle-Equality-Disciples/dp/0827236565
2012-2017: A Handbook for Today’s Disciples – Duane Cummins
https://www.amazon.com/Handbook-Todays-Disciples-5th/dp/0827215053
(More a thick pamphlet than a book, it’s the Disciples story most Disciples know, for good or ill.)
2015: Renewing Christian Unity: A Concise History of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) – Mark Toulouse
2016: Journey Toward Wholeness – Cardwell & Fox
https://www.nationalconvocation.org/journeytowardwholeness
2017: A region in spite of ourselves – Jeff Gill (a quick take on Ohio in transition)
https://knapsack.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-region-in-spite-of-ourselves.html
2019: Hope’s Design – DCHS video about the National Convocation & Restructure
2019: The Design at 50 – Brite Divinity School
https://brite.edu/programs/lifelong-learning/The_Design_at_50/
2019: Union in Truth: An Interpretive History of the Restoration Movement – James B. North
[Note: this is a history from the Churches of Christ perspective, which can be mindbending for a lifelong Disciple, let alone someone new to the movement but who only knows the Co-operative/Disciples side of the story . . . which can be helpful in looking at things in new ways. Not an endorsement of every interpretation here, but a book worth the time of a Disciple reader.]
https://www.amazon.com/Union-Truth-Interpretive-Restoration-Movement/dp/1532679181
Apologies: I tried to use spacing on the list of links, but Substack takes out doubles, apparently, which is very irritating. Sorry it looks so jammed together!