In Indiana, several local movements, some beginning as early as 1810, contributed to the stream of the Reform. Some Free Will Baptists, regular Baptists, Dunkers, and “Christians” had arrived independently at similar ideas, and presently the _Christian Baptist_ helped to unify them, and the merging of the Disciples and Christians completed the process. Their first cooperation for a specific purpose was when five churches joined in supporting John O’Kane as an evangelist, and his first work was to organize the First Church in Indianapolis in 1833. Indiana’s first state convention was held in 1839, with fifty preachers present and reports of 115 churches with over 7,000 members. The state missionary society was formed ten years later. But the growth in numbers and churches—and it was rapid and substantial—was due to the work of individuals, local churches, and county cooperation more than to the state organization. The first Disciples in Illinois came from Kentucky and Indiana in 1830. Stone visited Jacksonville in 1832, preparatory to moving there two years later. He found a Christian church and a Disciple church, and persuaded them to unite. In 1834 a group of churches in that vicinity voted to employ an evangelist and issued an invitation to a state meeting. But the first state meeting was not held until 1842. To Missouri came the Christian preacher, Thomas McBride, from Kentucky in 1816, followed soon by Joel Haden, T. M. Allen, and others. By 1820 there were eight churches. State meetings began, irregularly, in 1837. In that year a church was formed in St. Louis, but it did not persist and was started again in 1842. Missouri was, from the start, a “strong state” for the Disciples. Texas was still a part of Mexico when Collin McKinney, a devout “Christian” layman from Kentucky, came to the vicinity of Texarkana in 1824 and then moved on to what became Bowie County, where he spent the rest of a long and active life. He did not have a church there until a preacher came in 1842; but when there was a church, McKinney was a pillar of it, as he was of the republic, and then the state, of Texas. The first church in Texas was one that came in a body from Tennessee, with reinforcements from Alabama and Mississippi, in 1836, and settled at Clarksville. Lynn D’Spain and Mansil W. Matthews were the preachers who came with this church. David Crockett accompanied this caravan on part of its journey. At that time the Mexican constitution prohibited the exercise of any religion except the Roman Catholic, but the agencies of enforcement were weak, the seat of government was far away, and the revolution which made Texas an independent republic was imminent.