At twenty, Alexander Campbell was in charge of his mother and six siblings when their ship smashed onto a rock off Scotland. That night he promised God he would preach. Stranded in Glasgow for most of a year, the former farm boy studied at the university and sat at Greville Ewing's table, hearing about weekly communion and churches led by their own elders. Then, at his church's twice-yearly Lord's Supper, he quietly dropped his token in the plate and let the bread pass him by.

Barton Stone and four friends walked out of their synod before it could suspend them. They formed a new presbytery, and within months they realized they had become one more team. In the spring of 1804, Rice Haggard came to Kentucky and urged them to take the name Christian. That summer they wrote a last will and testament for their own organization: "We will, that this body die." Then the story turns candid. Within seven years, all four of Stone's partners had left, and Stone was the only one of the original five still standing.

In 1792, James O'Kelly walked out of a Methodist conference in Baltimore rather than bow to a bishop's control. Two years later, his friend Rice Haggard moved that Jesus' followers be known "as Christians simply." Hundreds of miles north, Elias Smith, a boy who once ran from his own sprinkling, and Abner Jones, a Vermont doctor, came to the same conclusion. At first, most of them had never heard of each other. They were brave and sometimes unsteady, but together they showed that the Bible is enough, and so is the name Christian.

In the summer of 1801, as many as twenty thousand people poured into the woods around a little log church in Kentucky. Barton Stone was once a would-be lawyer who nearly quit preaching. He had come to believe that anyone could hear the gospel and believe it right now. At Cane Ridge, Presbyterian and Methodist preachers shouted from stumps and a fallen tree, and Christians from different churches took the Lord's Supper together while arguing over who belonged at the table. Stone left Cane Ridge believing Christians could be one, and the rest of his life followed from that.