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A couple of
weeks ago, I gave you a handout as we were
talking about the impact of the Civil War, and we were talking
about how rapidly the Restoration Movement had spread, the number
of churches, the number of members of the church, and so on [a copy
of that information appears below:]
The story of the Restoration
Movement in the decades between the Lexington unity meeting and the
Civil War is one of remarkable optimism, vitality and numerical
growth. The geographic center of the Movement was the Ohio
Valley—Bethany, Virginia (eventually West Virginia;
Lexington, Kentucky; Cincinnati, Ohio and westward—but
radiating from this center it spread rapidly in every direction,
into the South, through Indiana and Illinois, west of the
Mississippi into Missouri and Iowa.
But, be impressed with the fact
that there was considerable growth which took place in this period
of about 30 years, or so—a little less than 30
years—between the time of the two Movements coming together
[1832] and the beginning of the Civil War [1861 –
1865]. The united Movement probably had between 20,000 and
25,000 members in 1832, but less than 30 years later, the estimated
membership of the church was nearly 200,000. The geographic
spread of the Restoration Movement had been so rapid that by 1860
there were 17 states where at least a thousand Christians could be
counted. Two men, Garrison and DeGroot, were religious
historians of the day, so the following information is obtained
from some historical documents. According to Garrison and
DeGroot’s estimate, the 17 states and the number of
Christians counted in each in about 1860 are listed as
follows:
Kentucky
45,000
Indiana
25,000
Ohio
25,000
Missouri
20,000
Illinois
15,000
Tennessee
12,285
Iowa
10,000
Virginia
8,430
New
York
2,500
North Carolina
2,500
Texas
2,500
Alabama
2,458
Mississippi
2,450
Arkansas
2,257
California
1,223
Georgia
1,100
Michigan
1,000
You notice that
in 1860, there were 17 states that had at least 1,000 Christians
that could be counted, and this according to Garrison and
DeGroot’s estimate. Well, we see there these 17 states
that are listed, but notice some of these states—take
Kentucky for example—and notice that there was an estimated
45,000 members of the church in 1860, and now in 1906, according to
this census, there are about 12,500. Correspondingly, there
are about 124,000 of the Disciples, or the Christian Church.
You can see yourself in making that comparison, that in the listing
of the 10 states recorded in the 1906 Census that Tennessee had the
largest number of members of the church of Christ, followed by
Texas, and then Kentucky is a distant third, and so on. But
then, notice the paragraph below the listing of the 10
states. Ten years later, in 1916, the churches of Christ were
stronger than the Christian Churches in Texas, with 71,542 members
compared with 54,836 for the Disciples. Also, as it states
above, Texas had surpassed Tennessee as the state where the
churches of Christ had their largest membership.
Well, I thought
that those numbers might be of interest to you, and so I share them
with you.
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