As Harry Turtledove, write a Part I where the Second Great Awakening comes together in discipled unity, ending in a cliffhanger of division over slavery during debates on the Fugitive Slave Act. Build their unity, not around doctrine or institutions, but a relational practice of submitting to Christ in encommunication.
ChatGPT Prompt
The Bonds of Encommunication
It wasn’t the sermon. That was the part that always got written down, printed in the newspapers, and passed along in the letters from one pastor to the next. But Charles Grandison Finney knew better. The sermon was just what got people’s attention.
It was what happened afterward that made the difference.
A revival wasn’t just about the words spoken from the pulpit—it was about who stood up when the words were done. About who walked forward to the anxious bench. About who let themselves be broken before Christ and who refused.
And, most of all, about what they did after that.
Tonight, in a clearing outside of Rochester, New York, Finney was watching something he’d never seen before. Something he hadn’t planned. Something that hadn’t come from any of his “new measures” or his innovations in revivalist preaching.
The Baptists and the Presbyterians were sharing the Lord’s Supper.
Not just separately. Together.
The Methodists were there, too. So were the Cane Ridge revivalists and even a few cautious Congregationalists. Men who, just months ago, would have sat in their separate churches, whispering about one another’s heresies, were now laying their grievances at the altar.
This wasn’t ordinary communion, not the kind with denominational barriers and quiet judgments about who was worthy to partake. This was encommunication.
The bread was on the table. The wine was in the cup. And no man—not Finney, not any elder, not any preacher—would say who was worthy. That was for Christ to decide.
Some men hesitated. Others reached forward. Some took the bread and fell to their knees, weeping, before they could drink from the cup. Some couldn’t bring themselves to take it at all.
And when it was over, Finney saw it in their faces.
The debates? The endless quarreling over theology, polity, and church governance?
They hadn’t been settled.
But they had been laid before Christ.
And that was enough.
The Revival Becomes a Movement
Finney had spent years preaching revival, but for the first time, he saw what could come next. Not just individual conversion. Not just mass emotional renewal. But unity.
Not the kind forced by councils or creeds.
The kind that came when men dared to submit to Christ’s judgment, rather than their own.
As he traveled from New York to Ohio to the expanding frontier, he carried the practice of encommunication with him. Wherever the Spirit moved, wherever crowds gathered under makeshift tents and in log churches, he preached not just repentance but submission.
And, to his astonishment, it worked.
The revivalists, so often divided by denomination, began to work together. The Baptists no longer dismissed the Methodists as overly emotional, and the Presbyterians no longer saw Finney’s “new measures” as manipulative trickery.
They still argued, of course. That was inevitable.
But when the arguing ended?
They took communion together.
And when they did, they knew—in their bones, in their souls—that they were not the judge of their brother.
That role belonged to Christ alone.
The Last, Best Hope for Unity
By 1839, the Second Great Awakening was not just a series of scattered revivals. It was a movement—one unlike anything America had seen before.
The divisions that had threatened to tear revivalism apart had, for the most part, been held at bay.
It was no denomination, no sect, but a practice—a habit of discipleship built into every revival, every church, every congregation that dared to put Christ’s judgment above their own.
Finney himself had become the closest thing the movement had to a leader, though he never claimed the title. He traveled from city to city, town to town, preaching, discipling, calling men to the anxious bench—and then calling them to encommunication.
And, against all odds, it was working.
Until slavery.
Until the Fugitive Slave Act.
Until the moment came when no one could avoid the question anymore.
Philadelphia, 1850
They had gathered in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love. Not for a revival—though some had prayed for one—but for something harder.
A reckoning.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was law now. The federal government had declared that no man could harbor a runaway slave. That all states—even the ones that had abolished slavery—were required to return escaped men, women, and children to their “owners.”
It had been debated in Washington, argued over in Congress, fought over in the press.
And now, it would be debated before Christ Himself.
Finney had seen many encommunication ceremonies, but never one like this.
The table had been set. The bread and wine were waiting.
But tonight, for the first time, he wasn’t sure if they could take it together.
On one side of the table stood men like Theodore Weld and Frederick Douglass, abolitionists to their core, certain that slavery was a sin that must be repented of.
On the other stood men who still saw slavery as ordained by God, who believed it was part of the order of things, no different than master and servant, husband and wife.
All of them had taken communion before.
Would they take it now?
Could a man kneel beside his brother, take the bread in his hands, and swallow knowing that the man beside him believed he had the right to own another human soul?
Could Finney himself?
He stood at the center of it all, watching, waiting, praying.
Would they reach for the bread?
Or would this be the night the Awakening finally broke?
Radically Happy 
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