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Accept That We Are a Denomination

May 3, 2012 / / 3 Comments

As we continue our chapter-by-chapter review of Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?” we’ve reached now a funny little essay about our status as a denomination. It’s not funny “ha-ha;” it’s funny like “I agree with 100-percent of what Garrett is saying but I’m not sure how important it is in the big picture.” Writing about it in this space will help me think through it. Maybe we can do this together.

Garrett claims that, in order for the Churches of Christ to have any kind of a legitimate voice for Christianity in the future, we must:

Come to terms with our status as a denomination.

The main reason for accepting this term for ourselves and even applying it to ourselves, Garrett says, is for sheer honesty. Self-authenticity. Being honest with ourselves, being honest with one another, and with the world. We must be an honest people. Calling all other faith traditions “denominations,” but loudly and indignantly throwing our hands up in outrage and disgust when the term is used of us just isn’t logical.

To illustrate his point, Garrett asks the simple question, “What would we have to have to be a denomination that we don’t already have?”

By definition a denomination is a church with a particular name. The Church of Christ has a particular name. The Church of Christ has its own agencies such as schools, colleges, publishing houses, journals, conventions, missionary programs, and retirement plans. It has its own distinctive clergy, separate from those in other groups. It has its own definable doctrines. It has its own history and traditions that set it apart. It has its own list of churches in yearbooks and directories. The Church of Christ clearly qualifies on each of these points. So, I ask again of our leaders who keep on insisting that we are not a denomination: What would we have to have to be a denomination that we don’t already have?

Of course, this is just one result of our distorted view that we are the only true Christians and the only true Church. Thankfully, not as many of us think or talk that way as used to. But the D-Word is a strange phenomenon among our people. We won’t touch it. It’s taboo. Even the most open-minded and big-picture thinking among us won’t use it when referring to our movement.

Ah, there it is: “Our movement.” See, I do this all the time, too. The true word, the one that communicates to the world, the English word that really defines what we are is “denomination.” But I won’t use it, either. I’ll say and write words like “our movement” and “our faith tradition” and “our tribe” or “our stream of the faith.” But I won’t say “denomination.” Because I know what will happen to me if I do. I’m a gutless chicken.

It would surprise most people in our “tribe” to read this line from Alexander Campbell taken from his writings in the Millennial Harbinger in 1840:

We, as a denomination, are as desirous as ever to unite and cooperate with all Christians on the broad and vital principles of the New and everlasting Covenant.

Our founding fathers recognized early on that, in the strict sense of the term, we are certainly a denomination. To say otherwise is to be less than forthright. It’s dishonest. And people within our church families and those in the world are all equally turned off by dishonesty. It’s a stumbling block to the Good News of salvation from Christ. And we must relax a little on this.

Some would say — and, yes, I’ve heard it more times than I can count — that we cannot be lumped in with all the other denominations. We must be different. Ian Fair once told a group of us at an ACU Summit that if we were so fired up about being so different, why don’t we just bar all the doors to our church buildings and come and go through the windows?

Now, I’m not as concerned with our use or non-use of the D-Word as I am with the attitudes that determine that use or non-use. See the previous reflections on the earlier chapters that speak about our understandings of God’s grace and his will for unity among his children. We don’t have to call ourselves a “denomination” in order to be honest or spiritually mature. What we must do is stop saying with all of our words and language that we’re one thing and everybody else is not. That’s the point. It’s not so much about the word as it is about our hearts.

At the same time, Garrett offers some very helpful guidance on how to see ourselves and even speak of ourselves as a denomination in a way that acknowledges reality but still points to and prays for and works toward our God’s ultimate purpose.

A people can be a denomination as a temporary measure, looking for the time when the ideal will obtain and there will no longer be denominations but only the one Body of Jesus Christ.

A “denomination in protest” is a defensible position. We can even say that we are a denomination because we can’t help being one, and that we don’t believe in denominations as the ideal or the final end for the Church, and that we will work for that unity that will one day cause denominations “to die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the Body of Christ at large,” to quote another of our founding documents.

A denomination in protest. I can live with that. Can you?

Peace,

Allan

Abandon Our Claim To Exclusive Truth

May 2, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Thanks so much to Jim Sundberg for the fabulous work he did for us at the Great Cities Missions dinner and fundraiser Friday night at the Ballpark in Arlington. The Rangers great showed up with a whole bunch of autographed baseballs and then auctioned them off with great energy and flair. Baseballs signed by perennial All-Stars like Josh Hamilton, Michael Young, and Nelson Cruz each went for between $500 – $750. But the big money item was a ball autographed by both Nolan Ryan and Greg Maddux that brought a whopping $1,600! A night at a Rangers game beats a boring old fundraising banquet any time. But throw in Jim Sundberg auctioning off autographed baseballs and it becomes a spectacular event to never forget. As a kid in Dallas, Sunny was always my all-time favorite Texas Ranger. That spot has now been solidified forever. Thanks, Jim.

~~~~~~~~~~

I hesitated to review Leroy Garrett’s book “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?” chapter by chapter in this space for several reasons. Chief among them is the fact that Garrett is a bit of a lightning rod in our faith heritage. His books and articles challenging us, pushing us, chastising us, have traditionally had polarizing effects. And he can come across to some as overly critical, overly cynical, and too harsh. But, ultimately, I believe the issues he raises in this compilation of essays and the conversations they provoke are way too important. It’s critical. We need to have these conversations.

Garrett’s next suggestion for saving the Churches of Christ for vital Kingdom work in the future is another angle on what is by now a familiar refrain:

We can believe we are right without having to believe everyone else is wrong.

Again, this idea that we in the Churches of Christ believe we are the only ones going to heaven dies hard. I understand not everybody was brought up to believe this. I know not every Church of Christ preacher and elder has always made this claim. But it is the way I was raised. In fact, recent conversations in my own extended family have confirmed that this position is still held quite firmly in many of our churches. I’m regularly asked by sincere and well-meaning Church of Christ brothers and sisters, “If we’re no better than the other churches, then why should we even exist?”

The thinking goes that if we surrender our claim to exclusive truth we forfeit our right to exist. If we are right — and we do believe we are — then everyone else must be wrong. If we are true and faithful Christians, then those who are different from us are not.

It is one thing for us to believe in absolute truth, which we all do since we believe in God, but it is something much different for us to presume that we have an absolute understanding of that truth. Truth is absolute; our grasp of truth is relative. One sobering truth speaks to that: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known (1 Corinthians 13:12). So, we can surrender our claim to exclusive truth (only we have all the truth) and still believe in absolute truth (which is a reality that is beyond our perfect understanding).

On the face of it, we are forced to conclude that we must abandon our claim to exclusive truth in order to be an authentic people. We have no right to exist believing that we and we only have the truth. We must admit that we are both fallible and finite, that we, like everyone else, are wrong about some things and ignorant about other things.

And yet we can believe, in common with all Christians, that we have found many precious truths that we live for and would die for.

I’m reminded of those powerful passages in 1 Corinthians 8-10 that speak to our so-called knowledge. These passages outline very clearly the mindset and attitude we are to have as we consider our own understandings of the Gospel as they relate to beliefs and practices:

“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know.” (8:1-2)

“We put up with anything rather than hinder the Gospel of Christ.” (9:12)

“I make myself a slave to everyone to win as many as possible.” (9:19)

“I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.” (9:22)

“Nobody should seek his own good, but the good of others.” (10:24)

A claim that we alone know everything there is to know about the will of God and that we alone have everything figured out and that we alone are doing everything right, or at least better and more faithfully than everyone else, goes completely counter to the above passages in 1 Corinthians and, honestly, against the whole of Scripture and the Spirit of Christ.

And, again, I’ll go back to our misunderstanding and misapplication of grace. If we ever actually comprehend that our righteous relationship with God is not a matter of our “rightness” or our worship practices or our baptism or communion theology, but a matter of surrendering to God’s merciful love and grace, we will quickly abandon our exclusive claim to salvation truth. Instead, we will praise God for his boundless mercy. We will then claim only to be a people who are continually seeking the truth as it’s revealed in Jesus. And we’ll eagerly join all those disciples of other traditions and different heritage as equals in seeking and understanding that truth together.

Peace,

Allan

Not the First Century Church

May 1, 2012 / / 1 Comment

In Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?”  the author makes twenty suggestions for our faith heritage if we are to remain a viable voice for the Kingdom in our increasingly post-modern, post-denominational, post-Christian world. The numbers don’t lie. We’re losing our people left and right. And some things need to change. As Churches of Christ, some things we have refused to change over the years are now coming to roost. It can no longer be ignored.

Garrett’s eleventh suggestion is that we shed ourselves of the tremendous and unnecessary burden of trying to become an exact replica of the Church of the New Testament. Not only does Garrett say it could never be accomplished; it should never be tried.

Recognize that we can’t be a first century church.

Garrett writes that a lot of our people have for decades understood the Churches of Christ to be a complete restoration of the New Testament Church in name, in belief and practice, in leadership structure and worship. Frankly, while being raised in and by the Church of Christ I, too, was taught this very idea.

It is a fiction grounded on false assumptions, such as the church of the apostles having a particular name, which it did not, and that it had a uniform organization and clearly-defined “acts” of worship, which it did not.

There is no ground for supposing that God ever intended for his Church in each succeeding century over the past 2,000 years to be a first century church, even if it were possible, which it isn’t. The evidence rather suggests that God calls us to do for our generation what the primitive church did for its generation. Nothing in Scripture indicates that the earliest congregations were intended to be models for all time to come or even in their own time for that matter. The facts of history, culture, and civilization demand that the Church of Christ of the second century would be a second century church and that the church of the sixteenth century would be a sixteenth century church. Each generation of Christians is to serve its own time, drawing upon both Holy Scripture and the experience of the Church (tradition) for its direction.

A lot of this, of course, is predicated upon the ways we view and interpret the Bible. Those who see the Scriptures as a rule book and a list of guidelines and commands to follow in order to be “right” with God will seek those patterns and regulations and strive to be “right.” Those who understand the Scriptures to be the Spirit-inspired accounts of real people being impacted by a real God and the very real ways it’s all worked out in real life will look for something else. In considering church beliefs and practices, structure and worship, those brothers and sisters look for whether those things are in tune with God’s Spirit, whether they genuinely reflect the Gospel, and whether they bring glory to God.

Instead of searching the Bible and asking the question, “Is this what the first church did?” we should be asking, “Is this consistent with the person of Jesus?” The “pattern” for the Church — and this “pattern” will never change — is the person of Christ Jesus, our risen Lord. It’s his image we see in the mirror. It’s his likeness into which we are being transformed by God’s Holy Spirit. It’s his death, burial, and resurrection that should be modeled and proclaimed and upheld in every one of our beliefs and practices. The Good News should be the lens through which we view our church beliefs and practices. Jesus’ sacrificial service should be the spirit with which we enter every elders meeting and committee hearing. Our faith is in a person, not a policy; the Church is built on a relationship, not regulations.

No one congregation in the New Testament therefore can be viewed as our pattern, nor all of them together, but out of their experiences, their strengths and weaknesses, we learn how to be his Church.

Peace,

Allan

Be Assured of Salvation

April 30, 2012 / / 0 Comments

The Mavericks played the absolutely best game they possibly could have Saturday night and still lost to the Thunder in OKC. Durant and his boys are going to take it in five games. Last night Derek Holland looked overmatched, Josh Hamilton pulled something in his back, Ron Washington got tossed out of the game on his 60th birthday, and the Rangers lost their first series since last fall. And the Cowboys used their top draft pick on a guy who just set the record for the lowest score on the Wonderlic intelligence exam in NFL draft history. Tough weekend.

~~~~~~~

Let’s resume our chapter-by-chapter look at Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?” The book is a compilation of suggestions Garrett makes for us if the Church of Christ is to have a redemptive role and an effective ministry in our rapidly changing world. We reach the halfway point of the book today with suggestion number ten:

Have an assurance of our own salvation.

Garrett claims that our members “do not know we are saved; we hope we are.” I know what he’s talking about. I hear it all the time. My own brothers and sisters in Christ talk about their eternal salvation in hesitant, halting, uncertain terms. “I hope I am.” “I pray that I am.” “If God will just give me a tiny back corner in the basement of heaven, I’ll be happy.” “I’m trying as hard as I can.”

The by-product of such uncertainty is a lack of joy. One thing Church of Christ people aren’t, in spite of many noble qualities, is a joyous people. We have little joy because we have little assurance. We don’t talk like people who are assured of their salvation. We don’t sing that way. We don’t pray that way. That is why our singing is unexciting, our prayers dull, and our services generally boring. Take a look at our Sunday morning service at most any of our churches. Is it a funeral? Where is the spontaneity? Where is the joyous excitement of being a Christian? Who would seek solace from a troubled world among folk who go at their religion with a yawn and a sigh?

Garrett says Church of Christ people are scared to live and afraid to die. We have no joy because we’re not really one hundred percent sure we’re good with God. Despite the clear teachings of Holy Scripture, our people have doubts and fears about their standing with God. They’re uncertain. They wonder if they’re doing enough. They wonder if they’re good enough. They wonder if they’ve loved enough or served enough or worked enough. (By the way, the answer to those questions is “No, no, no, no, and no.”)

Garrett’s dead-on analysis is that we really don’t believe in the grace of God. We would never say it, but the reality is that, for the most part, Church of Christ folks actually believe in salvation by works. We’re taught this at an early age. We think and talk this way. We practice this way. It’s been unambiguously modeled for us and by us for decades. Seriously.

We are saved by being baptized in exactly the correct way for exactly the right reasons. We stay saved by taking communion on exactly the correct day — and only on that correct day — in exactly the correct way. We keep ourselves saved and we save others by studying our Bibles and reaching the exact same correct conclusions about all the exact same doctrines. This is what makes us unique. This is what makes us distinctive. This is what sets us apart from all the others. We’ve got it down right. And since we know so much about God’s plan and God’s will, we’d better be about doing it exactly right.

No wonder we’re so uncertain and nervous! Who could possibly measure up to all that? If I’ve misunderstood a part of that doctrine or I’ve misinterpreted part of God’s will or I’ve done something in a worship service that’s not entirely in the proper order, then my salvation must be in jeopardy. I’d better figure things out and get right with God.

We must start believing in the Gospel of the grace of God, the basis of which is that salvation is his free gift to us. There is no work that we can perform to attain it. There is no way for us to buy it. We can’t be good enough to deserve it. There is no power that can wrest it. It is a gift, a free gift, that is ours only because of God’s philanthropy. In short, we must come to see what has been in holy Scripture all along: “By grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:8).

“[God] has saved us and called us to a holy life — not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given to us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time.” ~2 Timothy 1:9

“I know whom I have believed, and am convinced that he is able to guard what I have entrusted to him for that day.” ~2 Timothy 1:12

“He saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.” ~Titus 3:5

“To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy!” ~Jude 24

Look, I don’t believe in “once saved, always saved;” but I sure don’t believe either in “once saved, barely saved.” We are saved by God’s grace. We are redeemed by his mercy. It’s a free gift from our Father. And if we can ever all get our brains and our hearts and our souls around that, we’ll be freed from our own hangups to live and praise and worship and serve with great gladness and joy. Finally, we’ll be able to forgive people we haven’t been able to forgive before because we’ll be drawing on God’s goodness instead of our own. Finally, we’ll be able to accept those we’ve never been able to accept before because we’ll be depending on Jesus’ righteousness and not our own. We’ll be able to love every man, woman, and child on this planet in ways we’ve never been able to love before because we’ll be experiencing God’s unconditional love in our lives and not applying our own very conditional love to others.

It’ll be a huge shift for us. Huge. Radical. Dramatic. It’ll change us. It’ll mature us and grow us up. And it will have an eternal impact on those around us who just might see Christ in the Church of Christ for the very first time.

Peace,

Allan

Happy Birthday, Carrie-Anne!

April 27, 2012 / / 1 Comment

Darling,

I love you.

I love the caring and compassionate, sensitive and sympathetic mother that you are to our children. I love the over-the-top ways you tackle their projects and obsess over the details with them, from Whitney’s senior table to Valerie’s class presentations and Carley’s clothes. I love the ways you gently correct them. I love the ways you teach them. I love that you sing with them and rock out with them in the van. I love that you love to watch Little House on the Prarie with them. Every day.

I love the way you carefully and faithfully provide for all of us and take care of us. I love that you sweep the floors four times a day. I love that you never cook two foods of the same color for the same meal. I love that you keep up with all the details; I even love that you know exactly how much I spent at Whataburger before I can even get back to the office. I love that you use so much bleach. On everything.

I love your beautiful eyes that almost shut completely when you laugh. I love your laugh, which I’ve heard much more in the past eight months than I’ve heard in a long, long time. I love your inside-out socks and your blue jeans and your gray Marble Falls basketball sweat shirt. I love your huge sunglasses. And your hair. I love your hair.

I love that you love our Lord. I love that I’m a better disciple of Jesus, a better person, a better man because of your faith and commitment to our God. I love that you have taught me how to worship him. I love that you have shown me how to trust him. I love listening to you pray. I love that you have pushed me and encouraged me and joined me in ministering to our God’s people in his Church. I love that you’re my partner. In a billion wonderful ways, you are my partner. And I love that.

I love you, Carrie-Anne.

Happy Birthday, babe.

Allan

Cease Being Male-Dominated

April 26, 2012 / / 3 Comments

Leroy Garrett’s book, “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?” suggests twenty changes that congregations in our faith heritage must make if we are to remain a viable voice for Christianity in the future. In our increasingly post-denominational, post-Christian world, we’ve got to change some things, Garrett says, or we’re going to fade quickly into complete irrelevancy. Hard numbers and statistics would back up that bold claim. So we’re considering his book, chapter by chapter, and reflecting together on our future as a faithful branch of the Kingdom of God.

In Chapter Nine, Garrett addresses the sensitive issue of the woman’s role in our congregations:

Cease being male-dominated.

If the Church of Christ is to have an effective witness going into the [future], it must make some changes in reference to the place of women in the church. These changes need not be what most of its members would consider radical changes, such as having women as elders or pulpit ministers, but they must be substantial enough to reflect a change in attitude and practice. If there is a concise way to say it, it would be the Church of Christ must cease being male-dominated. Corporate worship is male-dominated, teaching is male-dominated, decision-making is male-dominated. The overall attitude is male-dominated.

It is not evident that we really believe, “In Christ there is neither male nor female,” as Galatians 3:28 urges upon us. If that truth means anything, it means that in the Body of Christ gender is not to be an issue. The Church of Christ must take steps to demonstrate that it really believes that oneness in Christ transcends gender. It means that when a member functions as part of the Body, it will not matter what sex that member is, just as it will not matter what race the member is.

Garrett goes on to suggest several things he says can be done immediately — he calls these “small steps.” He also claims that all of us can do these things at once because they “do not violate any Scripture, and they call only for an end to some of our traditions that have no validity.”

Hmmm……

That’s a huge oversimplification. Huge. However, in Garrett’s defense, he’s not interested in breaking down every single biblical passage on the matter. And, neither am I. Not today and not in this space. For the best exegesis and application of all those important passages, I’d suggest Jay Guin’s studies here.

To continue, Garrett calls for our congregations to equip and empower our women to make the announcements during our worship assemblies and to share in formally welcoming the visitors. Allow the ladies to participate in calling the church to worship. Allow the women to read the Scriptures and pray to our God out loud in our assemblies. Let our sisters serve the communion meal on Sunday mornings. Allow the younger girls to serve as greeters and pass out and collect attendance cards. Enable the women to teach. Allow them to share in the decision-making by serving and chairing church committees. And appoint women as deacons as is the example in Scripture.

Complicated. This is complicated. Not because the Bible is complicated or unclear on these matters, but because we have complicated it almost beyond hope.

Allow me to refer back to one of the things mentioned in yesterday’s post about instrumental music: This, too, is a “salvation issue” in that the ways we draw our lines and judge and accuse others reveal whether we are being Christ-like or not, whether we are acting in the spirit of the Law or the spirit of the Spirit, and whether we are considering the needs of others more important than our own.

As discussed yesterday, the ways we act and react to musical instruments and women’s roles has a lot to do with the issues themselves. But the music issue itself, the actual practice of a praise band versus a cappella, may or may not have as much to do with the truth of the Gospel as this women’s role issue might.

My understanding of the Gospel is that God came to earth as Jesus and suffered and died and was raised again to reverse the curse, to defeat sin and death and Satan and everything else that separates us from God. The barriers have all been obliterated. The things that divide are now gone. The things that separate man from God and the things that separate man from man are all destroyed forever in Christ Jesus. Reconciliation — peace, perfect peace — is the holy result: peace between man and God and peace among all mankind. No more distinctions, no more differences, no more barriers or walls. In Christ, all are one. In Christ, all are equal. That’s why the apostle Paul says what he says in Galatians 3: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

If this is a correct view of the Gospel, then our Church of Christ practices as they relate to the limitations placed on women communicates very clearly that while all are equal in Christ, some are more equal than others.

I’m not interested in pushing and arguing for women to be more visible in our worship assemblies for the sake of satisfying the people who may be complaining or leaving because the women are silenced. I would not push for Garrett’s suggestions in order to fall more in line with our prevailing culture or to simply shake things up just so we can shake things up. I am very interested, however, in practices that more faithfully proclaim the Gospel and in traditions that paint a  more accurate picture of our salvation in Christ. Our current practices of restricting women from reading or praying in our public assemblies not only rob the entire Body of passionate, heart-felt, urgent prayers and dramatic, emotional, intentional readings of the Word that we’ll never get otherwise; these practices also present a distorted portrait of the Good News. The picture that Scripture paints, from Genesis to Revelation and the maps in the back, is of a table. Every culture, every tribe, every language, every tongue all at the same table. All nations, all peoples, communing together with one another and with Christ. No social distinctions, no economic barriers, no differences between the races, and no gender issues. It’s a beautiful picture. It’s the Gospel. But it’s not the picture we’re painting when our women are not allowed to participate at that table in the same ways as our men.

The other thing I would observe is that, for the most part, that list of Garrett’s straightforward suggestions above would be rejected by the majority of our Church of Christ congregations. In the Sunday morning corporate worship assembly, most of us cannot imagine women praying or reading Scripture, making announcements or teaching or interpreting a biblical passage or serving the communion meal. Never. Not in the worship center on a Sunday morning. At the same time though — and please check me on this — the vast majority of us would agree that most, if not all, of those things are permissable and even desired in other church settings. It’s OK for a woman to read out loud a verse or two in the classroom upstairs at 9:30 in the morning, but not in the auditorium downstairs at 10:15. It’s perfectly fine for a woman to pray in our living rooms and around our kitchen tables on Sunday night in our small groups, but never in the worship center. At the youth retreat, around the campfire, at our marriage retreats and family encampments, our ladies are encouraged to lead songs and to share their views of Scripture, to pray and to tell their faith stories. But to do so in our official corporate Sunday morning venues would result in emergency elders meetings and piles of new policies to make sure it never happened again.

Now, honestly, what kind of message is that communicating to everybody? We’ve done this for so long, we’ve distinguished between worship settings for so long, we’ve drawn arbitrary lines around and through this thing for so long that a disturbing thing has happened. Most people my age and older believe that the Sunday morning corporate assembly is the “real” worship time and those other times, when the rules are relaxed, are something else. Definitely not official. Most people my age and younger believe just the opposite. They feel like the “real” times of genuine worship are in our living rooms and around our campfires, on the retreats and mission trips. Sunday morning in the auditorium, when the “rules” go into effect, isn’t real. They see it as us just trying to protect a doctrine that doesn’t exist with rules that are not in the Bible to keep everybody happy. Or from getting mad and leaving.

Just like with the music issue, we have horribly distorted the very idea of Christian worship and fed it to our people for decades. We’ve communicated that some of our worship time is more important than other worship times, some of our assemblies are more pleasing to God than others. Yuk.

I believe that most of our folks are aware of the contradictions and the inconsistencies in our practices. But I honestly believe we’ve spent so much energy and spilled so much ink in our Church of Christ history accusing and withdrawing from those who are different, most of our people are afraid to talk about these things out loud for fear of being labeled. It’s going to take strong leadership. It’s going to take shepherds and ministers who are committed to a more faithful proclamation of the Gospel and a more accurate picture of our salvation in Christ. It’s going to take a trust in God’s Holy Spirit. It’s going to take a strong faith in one another. And it’s going to take a serious and discerning eye on the future of the Churches of Christ. It’ll take all those things in order to have the conversations. But I believe that if the conversations are focused on the Gospel aspect of the issue, by the grace of God we’ll come much closer to believing and teaching and practicing the right things.

Peace,

Allan

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