At Cane Ridge, Barton W. Stone and other ministers put aside confessions and creeds. Instead, they simply preached Christ.
By Bobby Ross Jr. | The Christian Chronicle
BOURBON COUNTY, Ky. — By the thousands, the believers came — Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians among them.
In covered wagons and carriages, pioneer settlers traveled to the backwoods of Kentucky for a weeklong camp meeting orchestrated by a 28-year-old Presbyterian clergyman named Barton W. Stone.
The Cane Ridge Revival of 1801 — dubbed “America’s Pentecost” by the late historian Paul Conkin — emerged as a pivotal moment in the birth of the Restoration Movement.
Related: Why the Cane Ridge Revival still matters
In the second week of August, Stone and other ministers who spoke at Cane Ridge, about 20 miles east of Lexington, endeavored to put aside confessions and creeds and simply preach Christ.
To celebrate the revival’s 225th anniversary, a crowd of about 200 filled the Cane Ridge Meeting House, where the Stone Memorial Building now encases the restored one-room log church originally built in 1791. Attendees parked in the grass alongside State Highway 537, surrounded by tobacco, soybean and corn fields.
This story appears in the September print edition of The Christian Chronicle.
Photo by Audrey Jackson
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