AUTHOR’S PREFACE

(This preface to the forthcoming book, The Stone-Campbell Movement: An Anecdotal History of Three Churches, may further acquaint you with this volume.)

One of my old profs at Harvard warned that one should not expect to become a responsible scholar of more than 60 years of history. Inasmuch as this study embraces the better part of two centuries, I have sinned abundantly against that advice. My excuse (and we must make excuses for our sins!) is that I see my role more as that of a reporter or journalist than as a professional historian. For thirty years I have been an editor among Churches of Christ-Christian Churches, and it is from this perspective that this book had its origin and development.

While my academic studies were preparatory to teaching philosophy and religion and not “Restoration History,” I have nonetheless studied what I choose to call the Stone-Campbell Movement most of my life. This has resulted in numerous essays in the journals I have edited and many lectures to colleges and churches. Like the founders of the Movement, I choose to be a generalist and not a “specialist,” lest I be myopic, if not a bore. Nonetheless I offer specialized studies in this area, such as the “Analyses of the Literature of the Disciples” which I have taught several times during “Intersession” at Emmanuel School of Religion. I have attempted in this volume to analyze the great documents of the Movement so that the reader may understand their meaning as well as their historical significance.

The most fun thing that I have done in these historical studies is a “Hal Holbrook” on Raccoon John Smith. Donning a raccoon cap and longtail coat, and with cane in hand, I walk in on the unsuspecting audience as if I were the old pioneer preacher himself. When I did this to a thousand kids in Gatlinburg, Tn., they first thought I was something that had walked in off the street. But they went for it, seeing that history can be fun. So I may be a “specialist” of sorts after all. My dear Ouida says I am becoming a clown in my old age! This anecdotal approach to history is another characteristic of this study, for I see a difference between telling a story and a recitation of facts.

If I have any unique qualification as a student of the Movement, it would be my rather intimate acquaintance with all three churches, including the sub-groups of Churches of Christ. I know many of the leaders in all the segments, and I have been with the people of all these churches at the grass roots level all across the country as well as abroad. Jesus I know and Paul I know, but I especially know the Campbellites! And I love and accept them all, even when I do not agree. This has been my partial undoing, for since I am “a Disciple (or Christian) at large,” accepting all who are my sisters and brothers and rejecting none, I am not fully accepted by any group! But I am unequivocally and unapologetically a member of the “non-instrument” Church of Christ at Denton (Texas), where I serve as an elder, fully accepted and fully loved, sort of.

I am grateful to the three men, one from each church, who have written introductions for this volume. Each is an educator-minister that. is as well known and as highly appreciated in his particular fellowship as most anyone that could be named, and they all three bear witness to the fact that there are those in responsible positions who are eager that our people recover their lost unity. I notice that President Thompson refers to “We Disciples.” Indeed we all are, our heritage being what it is, just as we are all Christians and all members of the Church of Christ.

“I am debtor,” as the apostle put it, to more than could ever be named: to those in all three churches who sent materials and provided information; to libraries across the land, especially the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, David I. McWhirter, director, and the Brite Divinity School Library (TCU), Bob Olson, librarian; to Dr. James B. North, professor of church history, Cincinnati Christian Seminary, for reading the entire manuscript and making remarkably helpful suggestions.

Since the questions and projects are intended as part of the study, I urge all who read the book to try their hand at them, and not only those in a class situation. The annotated bibliographies are usually in addition to the sources referred to in the footnotes, providing the reader with extensive resources for further study.

My publisher, Don DeWelt of College Press, to whom I am indebted beyond measure, offered a dedication page. But I will only in this low-key, prefatory manner dedicate this labor of love to all the women of the Stone-Campbell heritage, both those whose labors helped to create it and those whose hopes help to keep it alive. This of course includes Ouida, especially Ouida, who has both labored and hoped alongside me all these years. Who else could and would prepare an index for a book this size?

Mortimer J. Adler used to tell his students at the University of Chicago that any book worth reading is worth reading three times. Well, I hope you don’t have to read this one three times in order to understand it, as I have to when I read Alexander Campbell!

Go, little book, God send thee good passage, and specially let this be thy prayer, unto them all that thee will read or hear, where thou art wrong, after their help to call, thee to correct in any part, or all. --- Chaucer