I’ve mentioned “Raccoon” John Smith before. Smith was one of the most effective missionaries of the early Restoration Movement. He was not a prolific writer, preferring to spend his time on horseback, traveling from town to town preaching the gospel. Alexander Campbell said of him, “John Smith is the only man that I ever knew who would have been spoiled by a college education.”It was once said that, thanks to Smith, there wasn’t a Baptist left in Kentucky!
Smith was a frontiersman, often wearing buckskins and charming entire communities with his wit. Once, he rode into a river town and came across the local Presbyterian preacher in the town square. Being a tall, wiry man, Smith placed the preacher in a hammerlock and proceeded to drag him toward the river, announcing that he was going to give that preacher a proper baptism!
As the preacher struggled to stay dry, a huge crowd approached. Eventually, the preacher said, “If you baptize me against my will, you know it won’t take!” With that, Smith released the man. He asked, “Then why do you baptize babies? Don’t they scream to stay out of the water just like you?” He then announced that he’d be preaching a gospel meeting that night, and it was very well attended.
Smith was an organizer of the New Year’s Day, 1832 union of Stone’s Disciples and Campbell’s Christians in Lexington, Kentucky. He preached the first unity sermon, saying, “Let us, then my brethren, be no longer Campbellites or Stoneites, New Lights or Old Lights, or any other kind of lights, but let us come to the Bible, and to the Bible alone, as the only book in the world that can give us all the light we need.”
He shook the hand of Barton W. Stone, beginning the unification of the two movements. Smith traveled with John Rogers to tell the brotherhood of the union of the two movements. He baptized thousands into Christ.
The importance of this meeting cannot be understated, even though some histories of the Restoration Movement written from the Church of Christ nearly omit it entirely from their accounts. Initially, Campbell was cold to the idea, but the preachers and evangelists in the field discovered that increasingly frontier towns had a congregation from each movement, with very little difference in practice or teaching–at least as they saw it. Smith was unwilling to wait for Campbell’s blessing to initiate the union. After all, this was supposed to be a unity movement!
Campbell quickly came to endorse the union, despite a number of disagreements. As Leroy Garrett has written,
Both groups were immersionists, but [Stone’s] “Christians” did not see baptism as being for the remission of sins, as did [Campbell’s] “Reformers.” With Stone religion was more “experimental” than it was with Campbell, and something akin to the mourner’s bench continued to be common among them. Nor had Stone yet accepted a weekly serving of the Supper, as the Campbells had from the very first Lord’s Day at old Brush Run (even before they accepted immersion), influenced as they were by the Scottish reformers in the world from which they had come.
But only two differences were monumental enough to threaten the proposed union. The Stone people feared the Campbellites had too much head religion and not enough heart, and they were strongly suspicious of their views on the work of the Holy Spirit. The Campbellites in return had serious misgivings about Stone’s speculations about “the Trinity,” especially in reference to the old Arian controversy on the pre-existence of Christ. They accused Stone of believing that the Christ was a created being and therefore not eternal with the Father. But it was his speculative and metaphysical turn of mind that most alarmed them, and they feared he would infiltrate the ranks with such opinions, the very thing they were seeking to escape.
Stone agreed to desist from his theological speculation and get back to just preaching the word. “He went on record as agreeing that there is but one thing necessary insofar as faith is concerned, for union in Christ, and that is believing that Jesus is the Son of God. And there is but one act that is required for entrance into the fellowship of the church, and that is immersion.” However, many in Stone’s movement refused to join with Campbell due to his views on baptism.
Stone accepted John T. Johnson, a prominent follower of Campbell, as assistant editor of his periodical The Christian Messenger, to demonstrate his commitment to unity. He and Campbell agreed to not publish competing hymnals. The two great leaders realized that unity requires united leadership. They took practical steps to keep their periodicals from becoming competing centers of influence. And it worked.
