Barton W. Stone

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Disciples History Moment for March 16, 2025

In February 1791, Barton W. Stone, one of our denominational founders, went to the the region of Sandy River in Virginia to hear a Presbyterian preacher named James McGready who stirred great religious excitement. He preached from Daniel 5:27 – TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting. He went through all the hiding places of the hypocrite and deception ... “he thundered divine anathemas” against the sinner. “Before he closed,” Stone wrote, “I had lost all hope — all feeling, and had sunk into an indescribable apathy ...he left me in a gloomy state, without one encouraging word.”

In March of that same year, Barton attended another meeting. “A strange, young preacher, William Hodge, addressed the people.” His text, Stone wrote, he would never forget, “God is love. With much animation, and with many tears, he spoke of the Love of God to sinners, and of what that love had done for sinners ... The truth I had just heard, ‘God is love,’ prevailed. Jesus came to seek and save the lost  – ‘Him that cometh unto me, I will in no wise cast out.’ ... “I yielded and sunk at his feet a willing subject. I loved him – I adored him . . . I lived devoted to God.”

It was not in fearing God that Barton W. Stone came to love God, but in the knowing and feeling that God, who is love, first loved him.

What do you think? Does God want us to come to him in fear, condemnation, and threats? Or, does God want us to come because of love? History proves the flawed design of a religion that forces submission through fear and threats. We, like Stone and Campbell, believe that “We love God because God first loved us.” (1 John 4.19)

Rev. Kevin K. Adams

Quotes from: “The Biography Elder Barton Warren Stone” in the Cane Ridge Reader, Hoke S. Dickinson, editor.