Our Wild Democracy — Class Drafts

Chapter 1 — Cane Ridge Communion (August 1801)

The Story: Thousands came together in a wild experience of unity, centered on open communion. This changed the participants — and left a profound impression of the Spirit calling the church to come together, even if it meant defying human-imposed authority structures.

The Idea: Our movement began with open communion. A wild and deep expression of the true identity of the church, that challenged existing authority structures, and emphasized the need for Christian freedom.

In August of 1801, if you were standing on a road in Bourbon County, Kentucky, you would see something no one in America had ever seen before. Wagons, carriages, horsemen, people on foot — the roads clogged for miles, everyone converging on a tiny log meetinghouse at a place called Cane Ridge. Someone described it simply: “The roads were literally crowded with wagons, carriages, horsemen, and footmen, moving to the solemn camp.” One participant counted a hundred and thirty-five wagons encamped on the grounds. Another said, “The noise was like the roar of Niagara.”

Military men on the ground guessed there were twenty to thirty thousand people. Even the most cautious modern estimates say ten thousand at once — and in this time period, that may have been a tenth of Kentucky. The largest gathering anyone in America had ever seen.

What were they all converging on?

For nearly a week, the preaching never stopped. Four or five preachers spoke at the same time in different parts of the encampment — “without confusion,” Stone said. And they were not preachers of one church: Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists, folks both black and white, preachers who were formally at odds, forbidden by their own hierarchies from sharing communion with each other — and here they were, in Stone’s words, “cordially united… of one mind and one soul… all engaged in singing the same songs of praise — all united in prayer — all preached the same things — free salvation urged upon all.”

And something stranger — People having ecstatic experiences. People began to fall.

Barton W. Stone was twenty-eight years old, newly ordained, five weeks married, and standing at the epicenter of it all, watching everything, documenting everything. Stone described it: “Many, very many fell down, as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state” — then revived with a groan, or a shriek, or a prayer, and rose proclaiming deliverance. The fallen were carried out of the crowd, and little circles gathered around them to pray and sing. One of the oldest ministers in the state tried to keep a count, and gave up somewhere around three thousand. Nobody fully understood what was happening.

Stone was no fanatic: he freely granted there was “much fanaticism in this excitement,” and he personally debunked some of the wilder legends. But he refused to mock what he had seen. Stone observed, not just that week, but for years to come, and what he insisted on was the fruit: genuine repentance, genuine transformation, lives changed from then on. And something Barton Stone noted particularly: the retreat of what they called the “party spirit,” and the rise of a sense of unity in Christ.

To the end of his life he said: “I am always hurt to hear people speak lightly of this work. I always think they speak of what they know nothing about.”

So — what was all this? What had tens of thousands of people clogged the roads of Kentucky to attend?

This was a communion service. Cane Ridge was a scheduled sacramental occasion in the old Scottish tradition — four days: preparation on Friday and Saturday, the Lord’s Supper on Sunday, thanksgiving on Monday. This was the event that fixed the camp meeting in America’s memory — and at the center of it, the thing all those wagons were driving toward, was a table. Tens of thousands of people came through the mud of frontier Kentucky to get to the Lord’s Supper.

Sunday, the day of the Supper, it poured rain. Inside the log meetinghouse — a building made to hold four hundred — long tables were set up in the aisles, and communicants filed in around a hundred at a time, sitting after sitting, on into the late afternoon. Eight hundred to eleven hundred people took the Lord’s Supper that day, including perhaps two hundred Methodists — at a Presbyterian table, in an age when that was simply not done.

And it almost didn’t happen. Stone had called for a united communion. But on Sunday morning, some of the Presbyterians balked at communing with Methodists. Under their pressure, Barton Stone asked the Methodist preacher, William Burke, to publicly explain Methodist doctrine before the sacrament could go forward — a doctrinal test at the door of the table. Burke took it as an insult, and challenged him to make the Presbyterians do the same. Stone withdrew the request. The table opened. Burke climbed a fallen tree a hundred feet east of the meetinghouse and preached anyway, a friend holding an umbrella lashed to a pole over his head; the crowd fell around him, and the communion service continued.

Barton Stone never got over that week. He spent the next forty years trying to build a church that felt like it.

What were they converging on? The divided church united at one table. That’s the seed of everything this class will explore.

Ideas

If you come from another tradition — in a sense, we do too. In a very real way, our tradition arose when people of many other traditions came together, following scripture and the Spirit, in pursuit of a greater realization of unity. And as they came together, they brought the riches of their traditions with them, and sought to hold onto whatever was good from wherever it came. So wherever you come from — if you grew up Church of Christ, or came to it later, if you married into it, or if you are Catholic or Baptist or Methodist or anything else — then in a real way, all of us together are doing what our spiritual predecessors were doing: bringing the riches of our traditions together and placing them at Jesus’ feet. That is the tradition behind Otter Creek itself.
The central practice of unity was a shared table — a table opened beyond the limits authority had placed on it. The demand withdrawn at Cane Ridge is the very demand a presbytery would enforce six years later — the next chapter’s story. And it lands at home: If you’ve heard Josh or one of the other ministers saying that all are welcome to participate—that didn’t begin here. That is Cane Ridge carried forward. That is a practice embraced on the frontier, and continued every Sunday.
Why a table was worth all this. Ten thousand people do not cross a frontier in the mud for a symbol. They came because of what they believed was on that table. Alexander Campbell would later put it in his very first sermon: communion is a taste of the Millennial Church — the age to come, arriving early. That is the engine under everything else in this class. Hospitality alone does not explain a heresy trial; nobody is put on trial for being welcoming. But if this meal is God’s future breaking into the present, then a gate in front of it is an attempt to hold back the kingdom — and it has to come down, whatever it costs. Every radical thing this movement ever did is downstream of that conviction.
The table asks two questions, and this movement answered both the same way. Who may come? — that is hospitality, and it is the question Cane Ridge answers when the doctrinal test at the door is withdrawn. Who may preside? — that is priesthood, and it is the question the rest of this class answers. In the Catholic tradition the priest is defined precisely by his power at the altar; to say every believer is a priest and then reserve the table to a class of men is to say it without meaning it. Our movement meant it. The same fence gets removed twice: once from the door of the table, once from the head of it. Watch for the second removal — it is the whole second half of the class. And notice it is already in this story: the moment the test at the door is dropped, William Burke climbs a fallen tree with an umbrella lashed over his head and preaches without anyone’s authorization, and the thing works.
Wildness and rationality. The ecstatic experiences open a thread we’ll return to. Stone models the stance — neither credulity nor mockery. He was an empiricist: he granted “much fanaticism,” yet found himself convinced by the evidence of changed lives. He said, “I am always hurt to hear people speak lightly of this work.”
Bigger than us. Participants carried the work to Ohio and as far as North Carolina; the camp meeting became the signature institution of the era’s revivalism. The wildness escaped in every direction, for good and ill — Cane Ridge belongs to American Christianity, not just to us.

Future

What is beautiful here? What do we carry forward?