Such was the emphasis upon the independence of local churches and of preachers, and so firm the determination to avoid anything like the Presbyterian or Methodist systems of centralized control, that organization was slow and weak. That meeting in 1810, at which it was agreed to “unite formally,” did not in fact lead to any formal organization. District conferences were arranged. There was a Deer Creek (Ohio) Conference as early as 1808, and in the following years there were many such. But as late as 1826, Stone felt it necessary to defend the practice of holding even district conferences for worship, to exchange news of the churches, to arrange appointments so as to supply destitute churches, and (a tentative suggestion) “for ordination, if thought proper,” but emphatically with no authority over local churches. In the same year the Wabash (Indiana) Conference agreed that it would be well “to have a general conference established in some convenient place in the western states,” but this was not done. The Christian Church in the West had nothing corresponding to what is now called “cooperative work,” and no agencies or structures through which such work could be carried on. The churches of the Northeast had their so-called United States Conference, but sometimes they had qualms about so much ecclesiasticism. The (New England) general conference of 1832 voted to dissolve forever, but revived the next year. Though there was no inclusive organization, the three main divisions of the Christian Church had some acquaintance with one another’s work and a sense of being parts of one enterprise. The _Herald of Gospel Liberty_ circulated widely. Stone had an agent in New York for his _Christian Messenger_. When he reported, in 1828, that “the sect called Christians have, in little more than a quarter of a century, risen from nothing to 1,500 congregations with a membership of 150,000,” his estimate—doubtless much too large in any case—evidently includes all three, and his reference to “more than a quarter of a century” shows that he was thinking of beginnings earlier than the dissolution of the Springfield Presbytery. CHAPTER V THE COMING OF THE CAMPBELLS