David Purviance

[1] He was also an early trustee (1819–1836) of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and often served as its president pro tempore.

In Kentucky, David Purviance, at first a farmer, engaged in significant debates with John C. Breckinridge over the proper relationship between church and state.

The Last Will and Testament marked the birth of the Christian Church of the West and became a founding document of the Restoration Movement.

David Purviance's great-grandparents lived in Castlefinn, County Donegal in the north of Ireland, the family having previously been Scottish Protestant (Presbyterian which of course, like the Huguenot faith, is Calvinism) merchants and shopkeepers living and trading in Royan, Charente-Maritime, Poitou-Charentes, France for three generations, from 1598 until 1685, during which time they likely intermarried with French Calvinists (Huguenots).

Although the son, church elder David Purviance, would aid in the formation of the new Restoration Movement and, unintentionally, development of the new Christian Church-Disciples of Christ-Church of Christ denomination, neither of his parents abjured Presbyterianism, although the father ("Colonel" John Purviance II) did join the new Cumberland Presbyterian denomination founded in 1810 in Dickson County, Middle Tennessee, but the mother (Mary Jane Wasson Purviance) died in the year 1810, and so remained a strict Presbyterian.