The Table Welcomes All

A storytelling performance with Sheila Arnold, told inside the historic Cane Ridge Meeting House.

Two performances

  • Friday, May 7, 2027 — time to be announced
  • Sunday, May 9, 2027 — time to be announced
  • Cane Ridge Meeting House, Bourbon County, Kentucky
  • Free and open to all. No registration required. Seating inside the meeting house is limited.

The story

In August 1801, thousands camped at Cane Ridge for six days of preaching and communion. Inside the meeting house, a minister preached on who was invited to the Table. About 150 yards away, an African American preacher — whose name no one wrote down — preached to a gathering of his own.

Storyteller Sheila Arnold tells the story of that week — asking who was counted “acceptable,” what fellowship truly looked like, and what it meant to be welcome at the Table.

She tells it in the building where it happened. The Cane Ridge Meeting House, built of blue ash logs in 1791, still stands — the same walls, the same room.

What happened at Cane Ridge

An artist’s depiction of the Cane Ridge Revival: a preacher standing on a stump beside the log meeting house, addressing an enormous crowd gathered under trees.
An artist’s conception of the Cane Ridge Revival. Courtesy of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society.

The Cane Ridge Revival of August 6–12, 1801 is the most famous camp meeting of the Great Revival in the West. It was hosted by the Presbyterian church at Cane Ridge and its pastor, Barton W. Stone, as a traditional four-day sacramental meeting — and it became something no one had planned for.

Estimates of attendance run from 10,000 to 20,000 people. Wagons camped across an area the size of four city blocks. The log meeting house held no more than 400, so preaching went on simultaneously from a covered platform called “the tent,” from wagons and stumps, and from the trunk of a fallen tree. One participant counted seven ministers preaching at once. Another said the noise was like the roar of Niagara.

Between 800 and 1,100 people received communion, seated at long tables set up in the aisles, in at least eight sittings that ran late into a rainy Sunday afternoon. Hundreds fell — a phenomenon Stone described as men and women dropping “as men slain in battle,” lying still for hours before rising to speak. Hundreds more exhorted the crowds, including women and children who had never spoken in public in their lives.

And that Sunday, while Presbyterian ministers administered the Supper inside, an unidentified African American preacher preached to a largely African American gathering roughly 150 yards southeast of the meeting house. Inside the building, enslaved worshippers sat in a gallery reached by an outside ladder. Both things were true at once. That tension is where this story lives.

The revival led, within a few years, to the movement that became the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the broader Stone-Campbell Movement.

About Sheila Arnold

Storyteller Sheila Arnold telling a story at the Paris Storytelling Festival.
Sheila Arnold at the 2025 Paris Storytelling Festival, photo by Peter Cook.

Sheila Arnold is a nationally touring professional storyteller, a passion for history, and compassion for people. She storytells and dresses as historic characters, provides Christian monologues, and has done professional development for schools, festivals, churches, and organizations nationally and internationally. She is co-founder and Artistic Director of Artists Standing Strong Together (ASST), a source of inspiration, strength and action in the storytelling and artists’ world. She lives in Hampton, Virginia.

Her work draws deeply on historical research. She has portrayed Ol’ Bess, an enslaved woman at the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg; Oney Judge, who escaped the household of George and Martha Washington; Madam C.J. Walker; Zora Neale Hurston; and Fannie Lou Hamer. A former Colonial Williamsburg employee, she has been featured on Mount Vernon’s digital history podcast discussing Ona Judge.

Learn more at mssheila.org.

Plan your visit

The Cane Ridge Meeting House, a one-room log building with a shingled roof, photographed before the protective stone superstructure was built around it.
The Cane Ridge Meeting House photographed before the limestone superstructure was built around it. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress (public domain).

The Cane Ridge Meeting House sits several miles outside Paris on Cane Ridge Road, in rural Bourbon County. It is not in town — allow driving time, and don’t count on cell service for last-minute directions.

The 1791 log building is enclosed within a limestone superstructure built to protect it, so what you see from the road is the stone shelter; the meeting house itself is inside.

1655 Cane Ridge Rd, Paris, KY 40361

This performance is part of the Paris Storytelling Festival, held each Mother’s Day weekend in Paris and Carlisle, Kentucky. See the full festival schedule and plan your visit.

Presented by the Paris Storytelling Festival in partnership with the Cane Ridge Meeting House. The 225th anniversary of the Cane Ridge Revival was observed in August 2026. The stories continue.

Historical detail drawn from the entry on the Cane Ridge Revival by D. Newell Williams in The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement (Eerdmans, 2004), republished by the Disciples of Christ Historical Society.

Hero image is a digital illustration, based on a photograph of the meeting house interior by Chris Light used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.