Barton Warren Stone (December 24, 1772 – November 9, 1844) was an American evangelist during the early 19th-century Second Great Awakening in the United States.

This was in 1803, after Stone had helped lead the mammoth Cane Ridge Revival, a several-day communion season attended by nearly 20,000 persons.

Stone and the others briefly founded the Springfield Presbytery, which they dissolved the following year, resigning from the Presbyterian Church altogether.

They formed what they called the Christian Church, based on scripture rather than a creed representing the opinion of man.

[3]: 702 Mary Stone was a member of the Church of England and Barton had been christened by a priest named Thomas Thornton.

[4]: 52  After Barton's father died in 1775, his mother moved the family to Pittsylvania County, Virginia in 1779, then on the frontier.

[4]: 52  Barton was not himself notably religious as a young man; he found the competing claims of the Episcopalians, Baptists, and Methodists confusing, and was much more interested in politics.

[8] Attracting an estimated 20,000 people, Stone was one of eighteen Presbyterian ministers, along with a number of Baptist and Methodist preachers who attended the participants.

In 1834 the Stones moved to Jacksonville, Illinois, in part to be able to free slaves whom his wife had inherited.

[15] His mother-in-law's will bequeathed the slaves to his wife and her children in perpetuity in a way that placed them under the control of trustees.

[3]: 717  Stone was a proponent of abolition and an active supporter of the American Colonization Society, which promoted sending free blacks to a colony in Africa (this was the basis of Liberia).

[15] By 1833 Stone had become disillusioned by the lack of success of the colonization efforts and began to support the immediate abolition of slavery.

[16]: 28 [17]: 116–120 [18]: 212 [19]: xxi [20]: xxxvii  This was formalized at the High Street Meeting House in Lexington, Kentucky with a handshake between Barton W. Stone and "Raccoon" John Smith.

[13]: 190  The eastern members had several key differences from the Stone and Campbell group: an emphasis on conversion experience, quarterly observance of communion, and nontrinitarianism.

When the farm was sold, descendants had his remains reinterred at Antioch Christian Church east of Jacksonville.

[23] A marble obelisk there is inscribed: The church of Christ at Cane Ridge and other generous friends in Kentucky have caused this monument to be erected as a tribute of affection and gratitude to Barton W. Stone, minister of the gospel of Christ and the distinguished reformer of the nineteenth century.

He did not believe that Jesus died in man's place as substitutionary sacrifice; his views are more in line with the "moral influence theory" of Charles Finney.

[24]: 163–164 Stone outlined his views on the Trinity in a publication called An Address to the Christian Churches in Kentucky, Tennessee & Ohio on Several Important Doctrines of Religion.

I have thought the contest a war of words, while the combatants believed the same thing; seeing they all maintain the divine unity.

To me it is evident that they, who maintain this proposition, do not—cannot believe, that these three persons are three distinct spirits, beings or Gods, each possessed of the personal properties of intelligence, will and power; for this would not only contradict the scriptures, but also those sections of their creeds just quoted, which declare that there is but one only living and true God, without parts.

... That the scriptures speak of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is believed and admitted by christians of every name; and that these three are one in some sense, I think, none will deny.

[25]Stone's grandson, Charles Chilton Moore, initially became a preacher in the tradition of his father and grandfather, but he later became one of America's most famous atheists and founded the Blue Grass Blade, a newspaper which he used to promote atheism and criticise religion.