Richard McNemar (1770–1839) was, with Barton W. Stone and three other Presbyterian ministers, a founder of the Springfield Presbytery in September 1803 — and, nine months later, the author of the document that dissolved it, the Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery.
It was proceedings against McNemar's "Arminian" preaching that precipitated the withdrawal in the first place. The Synod of Kentucky moved against him for teaching that the gospel offer was genuinely open to all; rather than let him be tried alone, five ministers withdrew together and constituted their own presbytery. Within a year they had concluded that constituting a presbytery was itself the error, and McNemar drafted the instrument that willed their body's existence away — dissolving it into "the Body of Christ at large." His atonement principles were adopted and published by Stone.
In 1805 McNemar became the most prominent of the Christians to join the Shakers, whose expansion through the Ohio Valley he then led. His defection is part of the honest telling of this story: the same conviction that authority belongs to the gathered body, and not to any court above it, carried some of the movement's first leaders out of it entirely.
Relationships
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Withdrew and later joined the Shakers with: John Dunlavy
Both were founders of the Springfield Presbytery in 1803 and both united with the Shakers in 1805. -
Co-founded the Springfield Presbytery with: Barton W. Stone
One of the five ministers who withdrew from the Synod of Kentucky in 1803; McNemar drafted the Last Will that dissolved their presbytery in 1804.