was the first national meeting in more than 200 years, since the 1648 synod that produced the Cambridge Platform, a confession of faith similar to the Presbyterians' Westminster Confession. It was not until 1870, though, that a sufficient number of Congregationalists responded to a related call to organize nationally. This was not the first time American Congregationalism had been shaken to its foundations by theological change; the Great Awakenings of the decades surrounding the turn of the 19th century had also left indelible marks upon the churches. Some churches openly embraced revivalism at the time, while others, particularly in the Boston area, reacted negatively to the developments by adopting Arminian viewpoints in opposition to the intensified Calvinism espoused by such preachers as Edwards and George Whitefield. Following the Great Awakening, many of the liberalized congregations would eventually depart the Congregational fellowship in 1825 to form the American Unitarian Association; this body is now known as the Unitarian Universalist Association. Meanwhile, despite the cherished commitments to independence and freedom, Congregationalists increasingly began to espouse the main aims of the ecumenical movement within American (and world) Protestantism. This movement had gathered much energy from the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe during the first third of the 20th century, and a perceived decline in that period of religious life among Americans. Congregational leaders pursued close relations with numerous Protestant groups, but one group emerged as a prime candidate for actual organizational union: the Christian Churches. The Christian Churches ("Connection") While Puritans were consolidating their domination of religious, political and intellectual life in New England, elsewhere in America, during the period immediately before the American Revolution, many newly arrived settlers became dissatisfied with theology, preaching, liturgy, and ecclesiology inherited from Europe. Many of these people had turned to revivalist faiths such as the Methodists and the Baptists, and most found spiritual homes within those groups, or others deriving from the ferment started by the Great Awakenings. However, in different parts of the country, several preachers led dissenting movements against the leadership of some of those churches. In the 1790s, James O'Kelly, a Methodist pastor serving churches in central North Carolina and southeastern Virginia, took exception to the development of an episcopacy within his church. He believed that the rise of bishops, strongly advocated by the likes of Francis Asbury, would approximate the powers of the recently disestablished Anglican church and thus unduly control