1. Origin and Aims

1.1 The beginnings of the Disciples of Christ movement lay peculiarly in the time and space of America’s 19th-century frontier. There the nation provided the liberty, the frontier the opportunity, and the century the dream of apostolic purity. The first generation of the new nation seized religious liberty ¶ as though it were a challenge to be met with all the energy and creativity of which human imagination was capable. The 1820s and 1830s saw a host of experiments—millennial, utopian,…