Otter Creek · Fall 2026

Our Wild
Democracy

The Story, Promise, and Future
of the Churches of Christ

Our Wild Democracy · Chapter 2, continued · Chapter 3

Alexander and the Declaration

Glasgow 1808 — Washington, Pennsylvania 1809

Where we left him

Censured. Out of the synod. Preaching in a grove.

And his family was still in Ireland.

Alexander and the Sea

October 1808 — His family sailed

Sep 20The family sets out for Londonderry. The Hibernia is not ready; they wait eight days.

Oct 1The Hibernia sails, firing her ten cannon in farewell.

Oct 2Out into the Atlantic — then anchored again off Inishowen.

Oct 3Contrary winds off Malin Head. They run before the gale all night.

Oct 4The coast of Scotland. They anchor in Loch Indaal, on Islay, and wait for wind.

Oct 7Evening. Alexander wakes from a dream.

Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, A Shipwreck off a Rocky Coast
Not the Hibernia, and not Islay

That night, a gale blew in.

The shipwreck · on the broken mast

“He thought of his father’s noble life… and resolved that, if saved from the present peril, he would certainly spend his entire life in the ministry of the gospel.”

Everyone survived. Stranded ten months, Alexander spent the winter at the University of Glasgow.

Richardson, Memoirs 1:101–02

1 · Article 4 · Glasgow, winter 1808–09

He went to hear other preachers.

Above all Greville Ewing — fifteen hundred people in a converted circus.

The very thing his father was convicted for: “occasional hearing.”

2 · Articles 2 & 3 · at Ewing’s house

Ewing told him the story of the Haldanes.

Two Scottish laymen who began preaching the gospel without ordination.

James Haldane was arrested at the instigation of the clergy.

• Alexander was often at Ewing’s house. Ewing told him about the Haldanes — Robert and James, wealthy ex-navy laymen. James preached for years before he was ordained; Robert funded the movement.
• Ewing himself: left the Church of Scotland in 1798 to join them; ran their Glasgow Tabernacle and seminary; started weekly communion there. Their 1799 church was founded to avoid “that contracted spirit which would exclude from the pulpit, or from occasional communion, any faithful preacher of the gospel or sincere lover of Christ” (1:166) — Conemaugh, eight years early.
• Article 3 echo: his father was condemned for letting elders — non-ministers — pray and exhort.
• Foreign missions. Robert Haldane sold his estate, Airthrey, to fund a mission to Bengal; the East India Company “positively and unexpectedly refused” permission, and he had already sold it (1797). When the General Assembly debated “That it is the duty of Christians to send the gospel to the heathen world,” it voted it down “by a large majority” — plenty of unbelief at home, they said. James was in the room and took them at their word: he went and preached at home (1:152–54).
• What the church tolerated. In 1786 Dr. McGill, a minister at Ayr, published a book teaching that Christ “was not God, equal with the Father” and explaining away the atonement. It circulated for years with no action by presbytery, synod or General Assembly; when a complaint came in 1789 it was “hushed up” on “vague explanations,” and he kept his pulpit (1:153, note).
• → A minister could deny Christ’s divinity and keep his pulpit. Laymen preaching Christ in the open air were the danger.
• What the church fought. The 1798 preaching tours met “much opposition on the part of the clergy and the magistrates” (1:161). Ewing’s 1797 sermon defending field-preaching “served still more to alarm the Moderates” (1:162).
• The arrest. June 1800, Kintyre: James Haldane and his companion John Campbell (no relation to our Campbells), preaching every day in the open air, were “held for some time under arrest by the Highland chiefs, at the instigation of the clergy” (1:168–69).
• What struck Alexander (1:188–89): the clergy’s “persistent opposition… to every overture for reformation,” their “unscrupulous methods,” and power used “in an arbitrary manner.”
• Richardson says this story, more than anything, is what changed Alexander’s mind.
• Source: Richardson 1:152–69, 188–89.

What Alexander came to want

“…an entire emancipation from the control of domineering Synods and General Assemblies.”

Richardson, Memoirs 1:189

3 · The table · Glasgow, spring 1809

The communion season came. He was examined, and given the token.

Eight hundred communicants. Eight or nine tables. He waited for the last one.

Why he hesitated

“His conscientious misgivings as to the propriety of sanctioning any longer, by participation, a religious system which he disapproved, and, on the other hand, his sincere desire to comply with all his religious obligations, created a serious conflict in his mind, from which he found it impossible to escape.”

Richardson, Memoirs 1:189

“…the ring of the token, falling upon the plate, announced the instant at which he renounced Presbyterianism for ever — the leaden voucher becoming thus a token not of communion but of separation.”

Richardson, Memoirs 1:190

Family Reunion

19 October 1809 · the road into Washington, Pennsylvania

Thomas rode out to meet them.

On the ride back he told his son everything: the trial, the rebuke — and that he had left the Seceders.

On the road

“…instead of fearing opposition from him to the views to which he had himself been definitely brought while in Glasgow, he found him already, though by a somewhat different method, led practically to the very same conclusions.”

Richardson, Memoirs 1:220

The father opened the table to people who had no token.

The son held a valid token, and would not use it.

Neither knew.

Washington, Pennsylvania · autumn 1809

Three weeks off the ship, Alexander read the proof-sheets.

His father’s Declaration and Address, as it came from the press.

Why would a man write this?

Because of what he had seen.

Every Line Drew Another Line

325 · Nicaea

A creed, to settle who Christ is.

The quarrel went on for most of the century.

451 · Chalcedon

A definition: one Christ, two natures.

The Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Ethiopian churches could not accept it.

They are still separate today.

1054 · East and West

Rome and Constantinople excommunicated each other.

Over who holds authority, and one phrase in the creed.

1529 · Marburg

Luther and Zwingli agreed on fourteen articles out of fifteen.

The fifteenth was the Lord’s Supper.

The Reformation divided at the table.

1530 · 1563 · 1646

Augsburg. Heidelberg. Westminster.

Each a careful statement of the faith.

Each one a border.

Scotland · 1733 → 1747 → 1806

Seceder. Anti-Burgher. Old Light.

His own name tag, from Chapter 2.

And us

The unity movement divided too.

In 1906 the census first counted Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ separately.

There have been more lines since.

Every fence built to keep the church together became a wall that divided it.

Campbell saw it

…if, for instance, Arians, Socinians, Arminians, Calvinists, Antinomians, etc., might not all subscribe the Westminster Confession, the Athanasian Creed, or the doctrinal articles of the Church of England.

Signing the same paper had never made them one.

Declaration and Address, 1809 · Appendix

What It Says

“…tired and sick of the bitter jarrings and janglings of a party spirit, we would desire to be at rest…”

Declaration and Address, 1809 · the Declaration

“This desirable rest, however, we utterly despair either to find for ourselves… amid the diversity and rancor of party contentions, the veering uncertainty and clashings of human opinions…”

“…nor, indeed, can we reasonably expect to find it anywhere but in Christ and his simple word.”

Declaration and Address, 1809 · the Declaration

The first proposition, whole

“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…”

Declaration and Address, 1809 · Proposition 1

The claim

Unity is given, not constructed.

The church is already one. The divisions are the innovation.

Proposition 10

“Division among the Christians is a horrid evil…”

antichristian

it destroys the visible unity of the body of Christ

antiscriptural

a direct violation of his express command

antinatural

it excites Christians to contemn, to hate, and oppose one another

“With you all we desire to unite in the bonds of an entire Christian unity — Christ alone being the head, the center, his word the rule…”

“More than this, you will not require of us; and less we can not require of you.”

Declaration and Address, 1809 · the Address

“‘Union in Truth’ is our motto.”