Springfield Presbytery

The Springfield Presbytery was an independent presbytery that became one of the earliest expressions of the Stone-Campbell Movement. It was composed of Presbyterian ministers who withdrew from the jurisdiction of the Kentucky Synod of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America on September 10, 1803. It dissolved itself on June 28, 1804, with the publication of a document titled the Last Will and Testament of The Springfield Presbytery, marking the birth of the Christian Church of the West.

The immediate cause of withdrawal by the ministers was that the Synod of Kentucky had censured the Washington Presbytery for the following:

They gave the following reasons for withdrawing from the jurisdiction of the Synod:

Based on those reasons, the ministers said that they chose to withdraw from the jurisdiction of the Kentucky Synod rather than be prosecuted under the authority of the Confession of Faith, which they could not acknowledge. But, they said they did not desire to break from communion with the members of the Synod.

They formed the Springfield Presbytery two days later. The Springfield Presbytery was a loose association of the dissenting ministers and their congregations. The Presbytery ordained a sixth minister, David Purviance, who joined it after the West Lexington Presbytery of Kentucky had refused to ordain him.

On January 31, 1804, the several ministers published a 141-page defense of their actions, in which they opposed the use of creeds to determine who is a Christian. The defense was entitled An Apology for Renouncing the Jurisdiction of the Synod of Kentucky. To Which Is Added a Compendious View of the Gospel and a Few Remarks on the Confession of Faith. The Apology was written by Robert Marshall. It argued that the examination of McNemar in 1802 had been conducted without due process, which would have justified an appeal of the decision to the General Assembly. It went on to argue that they had no reasonable hope of redress within the Presbyterian church as long as "human opinions", rather than scripture, were the standard of orthodoxy.

Stone wrote the Compendious View of the Scripture. Systematically laying out the doctrines which the Washington Presbytry had condemned, he wrote the first theological statement of the Restoration Movement.

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