Slides: Chapter 2 deck · as taught 2026-09-20
The Story: Thomas Campbell was a Presbyterian minister seeking unity in a violent and divided Ireland. In America, he found sectarianism leaving Christians without communion, and opened the table to include them. For this, he was given a heresy trial and condemned. But the unity movement kept growing.
The Idea: Our movement began with open communion, and a desire to overcome division. When human hierarchy wrongly divided the body of Christ, we determined we must be free.
Companion chapter to Chapter 1: both chapters are about a communion table someone tried to fence. At Cane Ridge the gatekeepers backed down and the table opened; here the fence fights back.
In 1807 in the rural regions of Appalachia, 70 miles outside of Pittsburgh, immigrant families are scattered among the nooks and crannies of the Appalachian frontier. Many of them are faithful Presbyterians, who have not received communion in years. Not because of the lack of a minister, but because of the lack of a minister from their specific sub-sect of the Presbyterians. According to the rules of these Presbyterian sects, no one could give or receive communion from a member of a different Presbyterian sub-sect. And so, many of these faithful Christians had gone years without being invited to the communion table.
Into this remote region is sent Thomas Campbell, a newly arrived immigrant himself; a respected Presbyterian minister from Ireland.
He was from the Associate Synod of North America, of the Anti-Burgher Seceder Presbyterians…each of those terms designating a division from another group of Christians.
In Ireland, he had been immersed in an incredibly divided and violent culture—where the tensions between Catholics and Protestants had led to violent gangs roaming the countryside, killing and plundering—and just as violent crackdowns. At one point, Thomas Campbell was leading a Sunday church service when a mounted force broke in, threatening violence, thinking they had surprised a secret rebellion; Campbell immediately began praying from the Psalms, and the leader stopped in his tracks, bowed his head, and then turned around and left.
In Ireland, Thomas Campbell had fought to bridge the sectarian divides, trying to broker a unity between the Burgher and the anti-Burgher Presbyterians, seeing as their point of dispute was not even about something in Ireland, but about disagreement on a political matter involving a few towns in Scotland, a whole country away. This unity effort had gained a lot of traction, before ultimately being shut down by the higher levels of the Presbyterian church hierarchy.
Now in America, Campbell found a country mercifully free of sectarian violence, and seemingly open to new bridges of unity. And so as he ventured into the Appalachian hills to minister to scattered immigrant families, he was moved to offer communion not just to those of his own branch of Presbyterians, but to other Presbyterians who had been rejected from the table.
In these gatherings, he preached on the need to set sectarianism aside, and to come together in Christian unity with other Christian brothers and sisters.
This was well-received, and Campbell was heartened about the possibilities for the growth of Christian brotherhood. But back in Pittsburgh, things did not go so well. One of Campbell’s travel companions had privately looked on at this process with disapproval, and once they had returned, he reported to the church hierarchy, and Thomas Campbell was brought up on a heresy trial.
The charges that held against him were that he had taught:
But the greatest charge of all was the second: Thomas Campbell refused to let the doctrines of a particular Presbyterian sect determine who could and could not receive Communion.
And so Campbell was brought to trial, and judged guilty.
Campbell appealed, and in 1808, Campbell stood before the assembled Associate Synod and read:
“Honored Brethren: Before you come to a final issue… let me entreat you to pause a moment…”
“To refuse any one his just privilege, is it not to oppress and injure? In proportion to the magnitude and importance of the privilege withheld, is not the injustice done in withholding it to be estimated? If so, how great the injustice, how highly aggravated the injury will appear, to thrust out from communion a Christian brother…for saying and doing none other things than those which our Divine Lord and his holy apostles have taught and enjoined to be spoken and done…”?
“It is…because I have no confidence, either in my own infallibility or in that of others, that I absolutely refuse…to acknowledge as obligatory…or to impose upon others, anything as of Divine obligation for which I cannot produce a ‘Thus saith the Lord’”
If Christ had not imposed it as a test of fellowship between Christian brothers, then Campbell believed he had no right to impose such a division himself.
Campbell went on to assure his judges that just as he could not submit in good conscience to the divisions they wanted to impose, he would not in turn impose his own conscience upon them. Instead, he called all to continue to engage in the work of the gospel according to their best understanding, as there was much work to be done.
Campbell had hoped his statement would lead to reconciliation, and a new birth of unity. It did not. And so Campbell eventually realized he would never be allowed to proceed with his ministry. He resigned from the Association, and they stripped from him everything they had the authority to remove.
And then Campbell discovered that this meant very little.
He began preaching under a maple tree in a grove, and Presbyterians sick and tired of sectarianism flocked to him. Soon this grew into an association, and then a church, and then a movement. And this movement took as one of its rallying cries a line from Thomas Campbell’s Declaration and Address, written shortly after:
“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…”
We’ll return to that in the next chapter.
What is beautiful here? What do we carry forward?