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Category: Fellowship (Page 8 of 17)

Reexamine Our Positions on Instruments

April 25, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We’re continuing our chapter-by-chapter reflection of Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?” with a move toward some very specific issues. I would remind as we get into these issues together that most people who discuss them speak in terms of “salvation issues.” Generally, those arguing for more freedom and more grace and bigger-picture thinking in these areas argue that they are not “salvation issues.” Those who argue for more rules and strict adherence to those rules claim to do so because these are “salvation issues.” Allow me to suggest that they are all “salvation issues.” My understanding of “salvation” has led me to conclude that everything is a “salvation issue.”

We get into discussions about “salvation issues” and we start ranking things in order of importance to God, in terms of what’s going to save us or condemn us. And we’ll talk about baptism and church and the authority of Scripture — sometimes we’ll even talk about worship styles — but we never talk about helping the poor or being kind to our enemies. Scripture maintains that those are actually the weightier matters. God has already spoken and made it very clear that he doesn’t give one rip about what we do in our worship to him if our lives are not consistent with his glory. If our lives are not about grace and forgiveness and acceptance and love and service, then whatever else we do with these so-called “salvation issues” simply doesn’t matter. In God’s book, salvation lies in the attitude of the heart. In God’s book, the motivations are what matter. Therefore, in my book, everything’s a salvation issue.

Where’s your heart? Are you motivated more by the Law or by the Spirit? Are your actions and thoughts Christ-like in that you’re considering the needs of others more important than your own? Do you tend to judge and condemn more than you love and accept? See? Salvation issues.

With that foundation in place, let’s consider Garrett’s eighth suggestion for saving our branch of the Christian faith:

Reexamine our position on instrumental worship.

Instead of writing this chapter of the book himself, Garrett gives us an article by Bob Shaw, a Church of Christ preacher in Alberta, Canada. Shaw preaches at an a cappella church and for 25 years fought bitterly against the use of musical instruments in corporate worship. But now he’s changed his stance. Today he sees the question of organs and guitars and drums as a matter of personal preference and congregational choice. Garrett and Shaw both claim we must all come to the same conclusion if the Churches of Christ are to be saved as a viable voice in the Kingdom.

Shaw lists eight reasons why he changed his position on instrumental music during Christian worship, some of them much better than others:

1. All biblical references to singing are addressed to the individual Christian and not to the assembled church. To be consistent, we’d have to say instrumental worship is as wrong at home and in our cars as it is in the auditorium on a Sunday morning. That’s a position we don’t normally take.

2. God is a just God. He’s not going to condemn millions of people for violating a law that’s not even found in the Bible.

3. If this were an important matter, God could have easily made it clear in the Bible. It would have only taken one line!

4. The psalms would not call on God’s people to do something that is sinful.

5. Good, honest, knowledgeable Christians do not see this issue the way we do. They respect the authority of Scripture just as much as us, yet they come to different conclusions.

6. The Bible does not clearly teach that instrumental music in worship is sinful.

7. God would not command the use of musical instruments in the Old Testament, condemn them in the New Testament, and then approve of them again in heaven (Revelation 15:1-3). A merciful and loving God would not give out instruments in heaven after condemning millions of others for using them.

8. The basic problem in all this is distinguishing between matters of faith and matters of opinion. The same argument that condemns instrumental music condemns Sunday Schools, Vacation Bible Schools, multiple cups for the Lord’s Supper, four-part harmony, and on and on. Until we realize that these are opinions over which we can agree to differ, we will continue to divide.

Again, some of these reasons are decent, some are better than others, and some of them, honestly, just don’t hold much water in a serious theological discussion. Shaw’s eighth reason there carries the most weight with me.

Here’s my personal angle on all this:

I favor the use of a cappella music in our corporate worship assemblies. I believe I will always push for a cappella , I will always teach a cappella, and I will always hold up a cappella as the best way for God’s people to sing praises to our Creator and Savior. I can definitely argue that from a historical position. That’s easy. During at least its first 700-900 years, Christ’s Church did not employ instruments of music in worship. I think I could also make a fairly decent argument theologically. There’s something about the many voices forming the one song; the many gifts, the many parts, becoming one, much like Jesus’ Church itself. Admittedly, however, I cannot make the argument from Scripture. It’s just not there.

In judging others and drawing lines of fellowship around the issue of musical instruments in worship, we have horribly distorted one of our fundamental Stone-Campbell maxims. We speak where the Bible speaks and, where the Bible is silent, we speak even more!

The “salvation issue” is in the way we label and accuse, divide and condemn, over musical instruments. The “salvation issue” is in the way we make up rules and draw inconsistent lines around our practices to protect a doctrine that doesn’t exist. It’s in the ways we interpret Scripture by one method when it suits us and by another method when it suits you. You know, the way we treat this issue communicates something to our people. It absolutely communicates. It communicates to our own people and it communicates to the outside world.

The ways we interpret the Bible and approve our policies sends the message to all who are still listening that Christianity is about following rules and drawing lines and adhering to boundaries. Never mind that the rules and boundaries make no sense. Following Jesus means following rules.

We must stop telling our people that it’s OK to worship in that way over there but not this way in here. We must stop telling our teens that it pleases God to sing that song in that room but singing this song in this room is a sin. We must stop telling one another that there’s nothing wrong with worshiping God in that style on this day but not in this style on that day. We’ve lived so long with and in our vain practices of protecting  our own comfort zones and comfort rules that many of us will insist that weddings and funerals are not worship services. When you tell me that an assembly of Christians in the worship center in which the gathered men, women, and children sing songs of praise and thanksgiving to God, prayers are offered to God in the name of Jesus, Holy Scripture is read, and a sermon is preached from the Bible is not a worship assembly because the family of the deceased brought in a violist to play “Amazing Grace,” it makes no sense! Our kids are not stupid. Neither are the people we claim to be trying to win for Christ. They see right through this stuff. And I don’t blame them.

I agree wholeheartedly with Shaw’s final plea in this eighth chapter:

I would not favor going headlong in adopting instrumental music in a Church of Christ… It is right for us to sing a cappella as a matter of personal conviction. It also preserves unity among us. It is our attitude that we must change. Our neighbors resent our unloving, unaccepting, and condemnatory attitude toward those who differ with us, even when they envy our ability to sing. We must come to see a cappella singing as our tradition, the method that is better for us, and not a matter of faith and salvation for everyone else. Unless we do, honest, truth-seeking, unity-minded brothers and sisters will continue to leave us.

I’m blessed to belong to a church family and to serve with church leaders here in Amarillo who are completely committed to our a cappella heritage. We view it as something of which to be very proud. We love it. And we’re dedicated to it. And not one of us can ever imagine that changing. At the same time, we understand that musical instruments in a sermon video, in an announcement, during a wedding or a funeral or a youth campout, or as accompaniment to some special music even in a Sunday assembly in no way compromises that commitment. In no way. We refuse to condemn those who worship with a band. We accept as brothers and sisters all those who submit to the Lordship of Jesus and are striving to live their lives in ways that bring glory to God.

Afterall, it is a salvation issue, right?

Peace,

Allan

Resurrect the Spirit of McGarvey

April 24, 2012 / / 1 Comment

See?!? Pudge did throw out the first pitch from behind home plate!

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Today, we jump back into the middle of our chapter-by-chapter review of Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?” I appreciate so much the encouragement you’re giving me via phone, email, text, and quick hits in the church foyer. I really do appreciate it. Again, the ideas and ideals presented in this book are important. The conversations they provoke are critical and must be had if we are to remain a viable voice in the greater Christian community.

Garrett’s seventh suggestion takes us back to the beliefs and practices of one of our early Church of Christ pioneers:

Resurrect the spirit of J. W. McGarvey.

McGarvey (1829-1911) studied at the feet of Alexander Campbell at Bethany College and became one of the best known and most highly regarded preachers in the Stone-Campbell movement. Throughout Kentucky and Tennessee, and beyond, McGarvey’s scholarly credentials were unmatched and unquestioned. He wrote a popular and highly influential commentary on Acts that still impacts a lot of our heritage today. And he vigorously, adamantly, unflinchingly opposed instrumental music in worship.

He fought against organs in our churches for decades. He fought hard. He was the first to argue that instruments in the church was a sin. McGarvey is the one credited with forming our arguments against instruments, including the “argument from silence” (which I once used passionately, even though I knew it didn’t make sense). Yet, while he argued and debated against the instruments in corporate worship, he absolutely refused to divide over the issue. That mindset — we can disagree without dividing; disagreeing is fine, dividing is a sin — is what Garrett says must be resurrected among our people.

[McGarvey] lived in the eye of the storm of the controversy that led to the separation of Churches of Christ, formerly recognized in 1906. It is noteworthy that in spite of his opposition to the organ, he refused to make it a test of fellowship, and when the Churches of Christ finally separated over the organ question, he refused to go along. He believed that the Movement did not have to divide over such differences, that there could be “organ” churches and “non-organ” churches and still maintain fellowship.

Even though he left his old home church when it brought in the organ, he did not break fellowship with that church. He still visited and occasionally preach for them, and that is where his funeral was conducted. In short, McGarvey was not a sectarian or an exclusivist. If the Churches of Christ are to be saved, they must resurrect the spirit of McGarvey. Like him, they can be strong in their convictions, including being non-instrumental, without consigning to hell all those who believe and practice differently. Like McGarvey, the Churches of Christ must not make a cappella singing a test of fellowship. Again, like McGarvey, we can even say that for us instrumental music would be a sin in that it would violate our conscience to use it in worship, but we must not make it a sin for others. We must allow for honest differences on such issues.

Garrett also points out in this chapter that David Lipscomb couldn’t understand that McGarvey was opposed to instruments in worship but also supported missionary societies. He didn’t see how McGarvey could be opposed to multiple cups for communion and, at the same time, teach and preach in favor of cooperative efforts among different denominations.

McGarvey couldn’t be labeled. He couldn’t be pegged. That’s the beauty of his outlook, his theology, his practices. He sounds so “Church of Christ,” but he was actually of the “Disciples of Christ” stream. How he believed and behaved, how he lived his faith, didn’t make sense to those who were looking to accuse and judge. And we should be the same way.

We ought to be able to study and reflect on the Scriptures and church history and our own faith and reach our own conclusions, as individuals and as congregations, without binding them on anybody else. When we believe and practice based on our own understandings of truth and grace (both!), we will inevitably reach conclusions that don’t fit comfortably on anybody’s A-B Line of reasoning. You can at once be for trashing all the computers and PowerPoints and yanking the screens down from the worship center in order to use song books and, at the same time, push for women to be involved in the serving of communion. You can wear a suit and tie and refer to your church family as “brethren” and, at the same time, sing on the praise team and read from The Message. You can sing When I Survey the Wondrous Cross with the band and still schedule Sunday night church and insist on an invitation at the end of every sermon. It won’t make sense to those who want to label and divide. But it’s what’s best for all of us. It’s a proactive way of doing things, not reactive. It’s not a compromised position, it’s the responsible position. Disagree without dividing.

It disturbed Lipscomb that McGarvey would fellowship “brothers in error,” a bromide we have hung on ourselves all these years. McGarvey realized that those were the only ones he had to fellowship, for we are all in error about some things. That is precisely the point of Christian fellowship — that we accept each other as Christ has accepted us (Romans 15:7), and that includes all hang-ups, warts, and errors of all sorts. As Christ accepted us! Were we all free of error and right about everything when Christ in his love and mercy accepted us? How compelling!

[McGarvey] preached for “organ” churches during most of his long ministry, and he insisted that they not defer to his scruples during his visit. This he did because he understood what the fellowship of the Spirit is about. It transcends differences over secondary matters.

Peace,

Allan

Identify the True Enemy

April 19, 2012 / / 0 Comments

It was disclosed last night that Pudge Rodriguez, arguably the greatest catcher in the history of baseball, is going to sign a one day contract with the Texas Rangers and then officially retire as a Ranger in a ceremony Monday at the Ballpark in Arlington. A 14-time All Star and winner of a record 13 Gold Gloves as a catcher, Pudge was a highly respected and even feared defensive catcher. But he also won six Silver Slugger awards for his offensive prowess. During his twelve full seasons in Arlington, Pudge hit .305 with 215 HRs and 829 RBIs. And from behind the plate he could nail would-be base stealers at second and pick off straying opponents at first and third as effortlessly as you and I sneeze.

Whitney and I were at the Ballpark on a June night in 2009 when Pudge, then playing for the Astros, tied Carlton Fisk for the most starts by a catcher in MLB history. We gave Pudge a standing ovation when he hit a solo shot to cut Texas’ lead to 6-1. I doubt he would have received the same level of love from the crowd if his blast would have meant something for Houston that night. But we always loved Pudge Rodriguez. Anybody who ever watched him play loved Pudge.

He went to the World Series with the Tigers and Marlins, winning his only ring with the Fish in 2003. But he’ll always be a Texas Ranger. That’s where he won his MVP. That’s where he guided the franchise to its first ever division title (three of them to be exact). And that’s where he became the greatest catcher in history. He’s a first ballot Hall of Famer. And he’s a Ranger. The best ever at his position. And he’s a Ranger.

One question: shouldn’t he be catching the ceremonial first pitch before the Yankees game Monday instead of throwing it?

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We’re reviewing together in this space Leroy Garrett’s book “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?” Again, it’s a collection of essays Garrett penned almost twenty years ago to address our future relevance within the broader scope of Christianity. Our kids are leaving. Our members are checking out. Our congregations are shrinking. We live in an increasingly post-denominational, post-Christian world in which the disciples of Jesus who remain exhibit little if any “brand loyalty.” What are the Churches of Christ to do?

In chapter six Garrett suggests:

Find out who the real enemy is.

One only needs to read our church papers to see that for the most part we are fighting each other. Or if one listens to a lot of our sermons and reads our tracts he may conclude that “the denominations” are the enemy. Of if our argumentative spirit is not satisfied in any other way it is some “straw man” that is the enemy. Then there is the long history of our debates. We started out debating “the sects.” When they would no longer debate us we started debating one another.

I remember reading about the debates and studying the debates as a young boy. I remember the books containing transcripts of the debates and detailed analysis of the debates on the bookshelves in my grandparents’ house. Unfortunately, those are not just awful memories from the past. Debate and accusation and name-calling still take place today within large segments of our Church of Christ heritage. I’ve seen the videos of these Church of Christ conferences that blast away at the authors of recent Christian books and call them heretics and godless rebels. I’ve read the articles. I’ve seen the websites. I’ve heard the speakers at certain lectureships rail with much fanfare against their own brothers and sisters in Christ, denouncing their own as arrogant and adulterous apostates who’ve sold their souls for public attention and worldly status. Within our own stream of the faith we can get so riled up and so passionate and so energetic about ripping those who don’t see everything the same way we see everything to absolute shreds. It’s sick. It’s sinful.

The good news is that it’s not like that everywhere. I pray those kinds of events and websites and articles and publications and conferences are fading. Quickly. Please, Lord, quickly.

The apostle Paul claims that the real enemy is Satan. “Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil (Ephesians 6:12). Other people are not the enemy. Especially fellow Christians! Why is it that we cannot get as worked up, we can’t get as passionate or spend as much energy fighting the devil who is destroying us?

I believe these fights among ourselves is really a genius destraction sent by the devil to keep us from effectively spreading the Good News of the Kingdom of God. While we’re focused on destroying one another over corporate worship practices and communion details, Satan himself runs roughshod through our families and cities and churches. He’s going unchecked because we’re wasting all our time and energies on checking one another.

Granted, Jesus’ own apostles struggled with the same thing. They ran across some guy casting out demons in Christ’s name and told him to cut it out because he wasn’t doing it exactly like they were taught to do it. Jesus rebuked his disciples for that move. He said, in essence, “Just because they’re not with you doesn’t mean they’re not with me. Whoever is not against us is with us. Leave him alone!” (Mark 9:38-41)

That other guy was doing it differently, he hadn’t been properly vetted by the apostles; he hadn’t filled out the hundred-question survey, his orthodoxy hadn’t been firmly established. But he was fighting Satan. He was driving out demons. He was actively pursuing the mission of Jesus in fixing in the world all the things that were wrong. And Jesus commended him for it and chastised his apostles for bothering him.

There’s a lesson in there for us, right? Can you imagine if we all recognized Satan as our one and only enemy? What would happen, really, if every single member of every single Church of Christ vowed to never say or speak or think one more negative word or thought or deed against another Christian, no matter his stripe or flavor or practice or belief? What would happen if we all instead — every one of us — spent every ounce of energy and creativity and passion and thought on defeating Satan? What would happen? What would happen, seriously, if we identified the enemy as Satan and not other Christians?

Peace,

Allan

Have Our Own Vatican II

April 18, 2012 / / 0 Comments

In the 1960s, a number of influential leaders in the Roman Catholic Church decided that if they were going to relate to a rapidly changing world they were going to have to make some significant changes. Those changes, outlined in Vatican II in 1965, were sweeping. They were monumental. Dramatic. Shocking, even.

In the fifth chapter of Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Churches of Christ Do to Be Saved?” he makes the assertion that if the Roman Catholic Church can change its way of thinking and practicing, then certainly the Churches of Christ can, too. “While change comes painfully and with difficulty,” Garrett writes, “people can and will change when they see that they must do so to be saved.”

As we consider together Garrett’s challenging book chapter by chapter, we focus today on his fifth suggestion:

Have our own Vatican II.

Garrett proposes four ideas from one of Vatican II’s primary documents, The Declaration of Religious Liberty. Let’s consider each one in turn.

1. Doctrine does develop; dogma does change.

We may have as much difficulty admitting this as did the fathers of Vatican II who were as steeped in their tradition as ourselves. [It] does not mean, of course, that basic and essential doctrines of the Christian faith change, but that in the general teachings of the church on how to live in a changing world dogma may have to be revised. That the apostles would impose an order or procedure upon the ancient church does not necessarily mean that they would say the same thing to the 21st century church.

The renewal leaders at Vatican II may have first thought it hopeless that the Roman Church would ever conduct mass in English instead of the old Latin. But it was done, to the consternation of many. Could we make some meaningful changes in the way we celebrate the Lord’s supper…? The point is that we must become open to that sort of thing. There is nothing wrong in a church saying, “We once believed that way but we don’t believe that way anymore; we once practiced that but we do so no longer.”

One thing I’ve run into when talking with people about our communion time at the table or about the role of the Law of Moses in our salvation or God’s grace or any number of important doctrinal matters that I see differently now than I did just ten or twelve years ago is the refusal to admit that we might possibly have been wrong about something. About anything. Great godly men have told me to my face on several occasions that if I’m right about the particular topic being discussed, “then that means I’ve been teaching error for the past 45 years!” Why can’t any of us ever admit we were wrong?

We don’t even have to admit to being wrong. Can’t we just admit to growth? I would hope very much that you feel differently about some things now than you did 45 years ago. I would hope you could look back at some of your notes from 20 years ago and cringe at some of the things you taught. Why do we have such a difficult time with admitting that we haven’t always had every single thing figured out?

2. Coercion in matters of conscience is utterly inappropriate.

It may surprise you that Roman Catholic authorities at Vatican II suported this resolution: “Truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.”

If you adjudge this as a welcome change for a church that has often through the centuries dominated by coercive means, you must also grant that we in Churches of Christ have also been coercive. If others have been papacy-dominated and church-dominated, we have been elder-dominated, dogma-dominated, tradition-dominated, editor-dominated. If the Roman Church has its written creeds we have our unwritten creeds, and unwritten ones can be even more coercive and domineering than written ones.

We do have a CofC tendency to limit the freedoms of our members. Some of the more open-minded and progressive thinkers among us won’t speak out for fear of being labeled or not being allowed to teach. We identify little buzz words and catch phrases that, as soon as they’re uttered in conversation or debate, completly shut down the dialogue. We claim to be autonomous churches, but the ways we label and attack those who are different from us denies that claim outright. Our freedoms and diversities are God-ordained. But we seem to be threatened by them.

3. We have at times acted “hardly in accord with the spirit of the Gospel and even opposed it.”

If any church on earth needs to declare to the world that it has often been “hardly in accord with the spirit of the Gospel” and has violated the principles of the very Book it claims to honor, it is the Churches of Christ. While the Roman Church has pilloried the schismatics we have skinned the sects. While we claim to believe in unity, we are the one church in the community that is known to have nothing to do with any other Christians. We are widely known as the only ones going to heaven and the only true Christians. The Roman Catholics in 1965 looked at themselves and said they had been wrong.

(Allright, time for some full disclosure here: I hesitated for several months to consider this book in this way on the blog. Garrett is a lightning rod among our Churches of Christ, no doubt. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have wonderful and prophetic things to say, things that must be said, things that must be heeded. It’s his overly critical and cynical tone in a few particular places in this book that caused the pause. He writes in broad brush strokes that cover a whole lot of our past but not every single part of it, a whole lot of our congregations but not all of them. Yes, I was raised this way; but not everybody was. Your church may be like this today; but mine’s not. I know some of you have purchased Garrett’s book and are following along at home. Please know, I do cringe at some of this. But, overall, the ideas in the book and the dialogue it should provoke are important. Very important.)

4. We extend our hand to all other Christians.

For centuries the Roman Church labeled other Christians as “erring schismatics,” but at Vatican II it went on record as acknowledging all other Christians as true brothers and sisters in Christ… We must regard all other Christians as our equals, beginning right now. We must join with them and with each other in a new spirit of dialogue and mutual respect, a new freshness in perspective and interpretation. We must summons the courage to confront the problems of our own history. We must modernize the Churches of Christ, liberating ourselves from the mentality of the 1940s, and make our religion relevant to our day and time.

OK, we don’t have a Vatican. We don’t have a governing convention or a denominational headquarters. I’m not sure how sweeping changes in thought and practice and philosophy could work across all our Church of Christ congregations. It probably can’t. It happens very slowly with us. Small group by small group. Congregation by congregation. Generation by generation. Region by region. The only thing that could speed it up is if you yourself picked up a torch and passed it on.

Peace,

Allan

Recover Our Unity Movement Heritage

April 17, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Let me give you a couple of quick links here before we jump into today’s conversation.

Whitney’s old youth minister, Lance Parrish, sent me this link to a recent study that shows one-fifth of all third graders own cell phones. According to this report, 83-percent of all middle schoolers have mobile phones. And more than 90-percent of them have internet access. Most adults I know can’t handle unlimited mobile access to the internet. What makes us think a ten-year-old is ready? You can access Lance’s reactions to the report, especially as to how cell phones might negatively impact a teen’s dating habits and sexual development, by clicking here.

Greg Dowell has found an interesting study that claims couples who live together before marriage are much more likely to get a divorce than couples who don’t cohabit first. Seven-and-a-half-million unmarried couples are living together now in the United States, a massive 1,500-percent increase in just the past fifty years. And the National Marriage Project says, once these couples get married, these prior living arrangements are the major contributing factor in their divorces. Get the full story from the New York Times by clicking here.

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Chapter Four of Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?” broadens his call for unity to include now all Christians of every stripe. In order to preserve our voice in the larger Christian world, in order to remain relevant, Garrett proposes that we openly acknowledge that we are one with all those who confess and have submitted to Jesus as Lord and are faithfully living their lives according to the Spirit of God. It’s who we are as Churches of Christ, as part of the rich Restoration Movement history. We are all about the unity of all Christians, breaking down the barriers that separate denominations, being united in our common Savior. It’s in our DNA. And if we’re going to have any kind of a serious impact in God’s Kingdom in the future, we’ve got to get back to those roots.

Recover our heritage as a unity movement.

Garrett uses some of the powerful mottos (not creeds! never creeds!) of the Stone-Campbell Movement to illustrate the urgency of his call for Christian unity. I especially appreciate his use of one of Thomas Campbell’s most beautiful lines in his 1809 Declaration and Address: “The Church of Christ upon earth is essentially, intentionally, and constitutionally one.”

[The Declaration and Address] is a call for unity of all God’s people. Campbell wrote those words in 1809, two years before he started his first congregation known as a “Church of Christ.” And yet he wrote of “the Church of Christ upon earth” as if it had already existed. This shows that he had no such mentality that Christ’s Church did not even exist and that he was about to “restore” it according to some recognizable New Testament pattern.

Campbell believed that the Church of Jesus Christ not only then existed but that “the gates of Hades” had not prevailed against it since the day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit breathed it into existence. It was nonetheless in need of renewal or reformation, and that was his mission, especially in terms of restoring love, unity, and fellowship to the Church now tragically torn asunder by partyism.

In this insightful statement, capsuled in a single line, Thomas Campbell bequeaths to us the one important truth about the Church that we must recapture in our time if we are to find our roots: the Body of Christ upon earth has existed all through the centuries and it has always by its very nature been one.

Being raised in and by the Church of Christ, I myself was taught that these Restoration Movement fathers who began the Churches of Christ were restoring the first Church, the Church of Christ that was established in Jerusalem at Pentecost in AD 33. To avoid the “gates of hell prevailing” problem, I was taught that at all times throughout history, from the first century, through the middle ages, right up to the revival at Cane Ridge, there were pockets of Christians hiding out in the hills or living in small villages who were worshiping God and expressing the faith in exactly the same ways all Churches of Christ do today. I was told many, many times that the way we were worshiping, the church leadership structures we recognized, the form of baptism we employed, the communion service we observed — all of it had always been done by tiny faithful remnants exactly like we were doing it in Dallas, Texas in the 1970s and 1980s. Ludicrous! It didn’t make sense to me then. It is certainly ridiculous to me today.

Again, we’ve bought into this patternistic way of thinking that communicates to our people and to the rest of the world that we believe we’re doing it right and everybody else is doing it wrong. Therefore, we can’t fellowship the denominations. We definitely can’t acknowledge them as brothers and sisters in Christ. If they’re not doing things in exactly the same ways we’re doing things, they must not care. They must have other agendas. They must be arrogant and full of pride, more interested in themselves and their traditions than in being the true Church of Christ.

In their writings and sermons, Campbell and Stone both pointed over and over again to Romans 15:7. “Receive one another, even as Christ has received you, to the glory of God.” I didn’t have everything perfectly right when Christ received me. Neither did you. In fact, Scripture makes it clear that we were actually enemies of God when Christ received us. Shouldn’t we attempt the same acts of grace and forgiveness and mercy in receiving others who are sincerely trying to live for and with Jesus?

Garrett also points in this chapter to a well known slogan coined by Barton Stone: “Let the unity of Christians be our polar star!”

[This slogan] is a remarkable take of the Lord’s prayer in John 17. Stone understood Jesus to say that only a united church could win a lost world, so unity is essential to the church’s mission. The polar star (unity) guides the old ship (the church) on its mission (evangelization of the world). When we keep our eye on the polar star by being a loving and united people we will really be God’s redeeming community in the world.

Campbell wrote in his Millennial Harbinger that “this movement was born with a passion for unity, and unity has been its engrossing theme!”

If we were to make a top ten list of our current Church of Christ passions, the unity of all believers wouldn’t fit into the top twenty. Or thirty. What happened?

Peace,

Allan

Repent of Our Sin of Division

April 16, 2012 / / 0 Comments

We’re working our way chapter by chapter through Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Church of Christ Do to Be Saved?” The book is a compilation of essays he wrote almost twenty years ago, but they remain just as timely and provocative and important today as they were then. The Churches of Christ are declining in numbers of members and congregations at an alarming rate. And Garrett’s essays are concerned with saving our voice, saving our influence, saving our relevance in this increasingly post-modern, post-denominational world. We’ll consider today Garrett’s plea from the third chapter of his book:

Repent of and confess our sin of division.

If we’re going to have any kind of influence for good, if Churches of Christ are going to be taken seriously when it comes to meaningful conversations about eternal matters, we must stop dividing among ourselves. We do violence to the Scriptures and we trample the holy blood of our Lord when we split and divide, bicker and fight, and accuse one another within our own Church of Christ tradition. We’ve made it so that one is not only required to be a “faithful member” of a Church of Christ, it must be the “right” Church of Christ or the “doctrinally sound” Church of Christ. Those are my words. In Garrett’s words we must “repent of and confess our sin of internal bickering, debating, and dividing into sects and sub sects.”

To be saved as a people who can be taken seriously we must show a disdain and an intolerance for our ugly divisions. While it helps, we must do more than preach peace, love, and unity. We must repent of our sins of division and confess that we have been wrong. We would do well to call a convention for the express purpose of confessing our sin of being one of the most divided, sectarian churches in America.

OK, we all know how this works. Just look at any of our “brotherhood” church directories. Most Churches of Christ in our own directories are labeled with little acronymns and funny symbols that stand for our different positions on instruments in worship, Bible classes, premillennialism, non-institutional, and located preachers. There are at least five different symbols that represent the five different ways we observe the communion meal! And we’ll use these symbols as tests of fellowship. You know it and I know it.

I’ve had friends who’ve been asked to appear on Church of Christ TV shows and then been handed a one hundred item questionaire to next judge their “faithfulness” to the Scriptures. (“Do you believe that God created the universe and all that is in it in six literal 24 hour days?” “Do you believe that the church, out of its treasury, can support a home for widows or fatherless children?” “Do you believe it is scriptural to have several house churches under the oversight of one central eldership?” “Must our worship be decent and orderly to be pleasing to God?” “Do you believe that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead?”) I’ve had long, tense, tedious conversations with people in my Church of Christ about what’s wrong with people in other Churches of Christ in which the name of our Lord Jesus was never mentioned. After preaching on unity within our fellowship, I’ve been told to stop preaching unity and start preaching the Gospel.

You know the results of this patternistic type of thinking. This idea that Scripture gives us a concrete blueprint for how a Sunday morning Christian assembly is to be conducted makes it absolutely impossible for us to be unified. It makes it impossible for us to enjoy fellowship with one another. It leads us to believe that we can’t worship together unless we see every single thing exactly alike.

Phooey!

This makes us act like crazy people.

The “mainstream” Oak Grove Church of Christ is within ten miles geographically of the “liberal” Westside Church of Christ and the “conservative” East Side Church of Christ. Oak Grove wants East Side to come to their Fifth Sunday Singing, but East Side can’t fellowship Oak Grove because Oak Grove has a praise team. Westside invites Oak Grove to their weekend seminar, but Oak Grove can’t fellowship Westside because Westside has women deacons. Everybody looks to their right for fellowship, but nobody will look to their left. Nobody wants to be labeled. Nobody wants to be “wrong.” Nobody wants to “compromise the truth.” So, there’s no fellowship. Worse, Westside is forced to find fellowship outside the fellowship, Eastside is then forced to write articles condemning Westside for leaving her “first true love,” and Oak Grove is paralyzed with fear of doing anything that might possibly cause a slippery slide down that great slope toward either of the two “extremes.”

We need to write out a “Proclamation of Repentance” that would say something like, “Whereas, we have sinned against our Lord’s prayer for the unity of all his followers by becoming a factious and divided people; and whereas we have sinned against the mandate of the holy Scriptures and the holy apostles in their plea for unity; and whereas we have sinned against our own heritage as a unity people; we do hereby confess our sin and ask for each other’s forgiveness, the forgiveness of the larger Christian community, and the forgiveness of Almighty God; and we hereby declare that we repudiate our divisive ways, and are resolved to take the following steps to correct the erroneous course taken by our fathers and by ourselves…”

Nothing has to change in regards to our differences. We can have churches that are premillennial and those that are amillennial, along with many that don’t even know what millennialism is about. We can have brethren who support the cooperative radio-TV Herald of Truth program and never watch it and those who are opposed to it but never miss it. We can have Sunday School churches and non-Sunday School churches, as well as those who serve the Supper in ways that differ. We don’t have to be of one mind on all such issues in order to be one in Christ. In fact, we are already one in Christ. That happened when we were baptized into Christ and received the gift of the Holy Spirit which is what makes us one.

It is therefore a matter of realizing our oneness and repudiating our factionalism. It is a matter of loving and accepting each other even as Christ loves and accepts us.

They will know we are disciples of Jesus by our love. They will not know we are disciples of Jesus by our division.

Peace,

Allan

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