Resources/Articles
Lessons from a Lost Cause
A Restoration Movement began in New England at the dawn of the nineteenth century. Led by Elias Smith and Dr. Abner Jones, a host of pious souls broke with denominationalism and determined to go back to the Bible. Smith wrote, “…that we might be prepared to form ourselves into a church according to the New Testament and to be called Christians without any sectarian names added” (The Life, Conversion, Preaching, Travels, and Suffering of Elias Smith, 1816, p. 98).
Their movement came to be known as the Christian Connection. Crowds of up to 3,000 flocked to hear the old gospel proclaimed. Daniel His reported 662 additions to the cause in 1808. Flourishing congregations sprung up all over New England. Their success, however, was short lived. In his book The Christian of New England, James Gardner identifies a number of serious mistakes in judgment, faith, and practice that brought an early and shameful demise to their great movement. We list these without comment, asking the reader to look around him in our brotherhood. Think about the preachers, programs, and paper; the sermons, attitudes, and practices en vogue today and see if any of those deadly symptoms are evident among us.
- “The most serious problem facing the Christians by the 1830s was not a particular false doctrine, but rather the absence of doctrine at all” (p. 82).
- “The Christians grew increasingly reluctant to hold themselves or each other to the Biblical standard” (p. 82).
- Their preaching soon “gave way to vague appeals to every man to do that which was right in his own eyes” (p. 82).
- “Jones’ preaching gradually lost its challenge to the world. He gave up the demanding intensity of a prophet for the emotionalism of a revivalist” (p. 56).
- They came “to accept a large number of converts as proof that God approves of a particular church” (p. 56). They “regarded bigger as necessarily better” (p. 82).
- “One of the worse effects of the mania for numerical growth was the prestige it gave some of the most unstable and unprincipled ministers among the Christians” (p. 83).
- “As their first generation of great leaders grew old and died, the Christians began to listen to a class of preachers who were more showmen than saints, more publicity agents than Biblical scholars” (p. 83).
- “Closely associated with their passion for outward success was the fundamental problem of emotionalism” (p. 83).
- “Preachers found it easier to frighten or excite people into the church than to convince them” (p. 84).
- “The Christians…generally followed the denominational practice of preaching on short passages of scripture, usually no more than a verse or two, without any detailed study of the Bible” (p. 102).
- “Where Jones and Smith had pled for no creed but the Bible, many among the second generation of Christian wants no creed at all, not even the word of God” (p. 101).
- “The Christians gradually changed their teaching concerning the organization of the local church” (p. 78).
- “Beginning about 1825, the Christians began to refer unashamedly to themselves as a denomination among denominations, still pleading for unity among all the followers of Christ” (p. 78).
- In December of 1831, Mark Fernold, a leading Christian preacher, wrote, “…that while we had enlarged our borders, we had lost sight of some of the landmarks” (p. 85).
In 1831, William Miller, father of the modern Adventist denomination, began his work in New England. “He found a particularly receptive audience in the Christian Connection Churches” (p. 114). “Perhaps as many as half of all the New England Christians came to believe in…Miller’s prophecy of doom…” (p. 115). In 1844, “The Christian Connection lost approximately half its total membership in a single year” (p. 122). Although Miller’s predictions of Christ’s return failed, his adherents could not go back. They flowed into the newly formed Advent Christian Church. “Many small congregations were wiped out, and larger ones were severely crippled” (p. 122). “Finally, in 1929, the remnant that was left joined with the Congregational Church, now known as the United Church of Christ, thus officially ending the history of the Christian Connection” (p. 122).
A wise man has said, “He that does not remember the lessons of history is doomed to repeat the mistakes of history.” The mistakes that destroyed the New England Restoration will destroy us today. It is alarming that all of those fallacies are found in our midst today. If they are allowed to flourish, they will produce a bitter harvest. May all of God’s people renew their commitment to restoring the church of the Bible by conforming in every detail to the New Testament of Jesus her Lord.
Notice #1 again: “The most serious problem facing the Christians by the 1830s was the absence of doctrine.” Mistakes in judgment, faith, and practice…how do they arise? It is clear that these mistakes arise when doctrine is absent. It is hard to convince people of this reality. Preaching and teaching can be void of scripture. Not in the sense that passages are not cited, but that contexts are neither taught nor honored. It is what Paul called “rightly dividing” scripture (2 Timothy 2.15). Scripture can be perverted (Galatians 1.7; 2 Peter 3.16). One way to pervert scripture is to set it aside and replace it with man’s wisdom. Man’s wisdom, apart from scripture, is uninspired and will not profit the man of God for salvation (2 Peter 1.21; 2 Timothy 3.16-17).
