The Kingdom, The Kids, & The Cowboys

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And When You Go To Church

April 20, 2012 / / 0 Comments

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children.” ~Deuteronomy 6:5-7

This Sunday is the fourth Sunday of the month. Here at Central, that means we will not be dismissing the youngest of our children from our main assembly for their own worship time in their own room. It means it will be a little louder in our worship center. It means our younger parents and those sitting around them will be a little more distracted. It means a little more crying, a little more fidgeting, a little more talking and giggling.

It means an opportunity to rejoice in the fact that our God has blessed us with five full generations of people within our church family. It means another chance to interact with the most precious and innocent among us. It means another moment to pass on to our children the faith that has been handed to us. It means another reminder that we are not running this race alone.

“Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. And when you go to church.” ~Deuteronomy 6:7

OK, I cheated. I added that last part myself: “…and when you go to church.”

Here at Central we believe very strongly that if our people are always with their own age group, always with their own peers and demographics every single time we come together, it does more harm than good. It’s vital — it’s critical! — to this holy task of passing on the faith that our children regularly worship and read, sing and study, listen and pray, commune and laugh and cry and learn with the entire corporate Body of Christ.

Don’t tell me the children don’t get anything out of it. Of course, they get plenty out of it. If they didn’t, or couldn’t, then why in the world do you read them bedtime stories every night? Why were you singing Jesus Loves Me to them before they could crawl? Why bother kissing them as infants or telling them you love them before they even know what love is? Because it matters. It’s important. They do get something out of it.

And don’t tell me you can’t get anything out of church when you’re wrestling with your kids in the pew. First, it’s not about you and your personal worship experience. It’s about all of God’s people coming together in one place at the same time as a family and the mutual responsibilities with which we’ve been graced by our Father. You get plenty out of it. You’re blessed to be able to view the magnificence of the Christian assembly through the eyes of a child. You’re privileged to partner with God as he draws your child to him and his Kingdom. You’re being shaped and transformed as you actively pursue what God has ordained you as a parent to do.

This coming Sunday I urge you to pay attention to your young children during our assembly. Don’t simply pacify them with an iPad or a plastic tub of Cheerios. Engage them. Interact with them. Sing with them. Read the Bible with them. Explain to them something you hear in a prayer. Talk with them about the bread and the cup. Be as fully present with them as you are at the park and at the dinner table. Don’t abandon your parenting during this most critical time. If anything, step it up!

And if you’re sitting around some of these younger parents with their small children, this goes for you, too. For all of us. Engage. Interact. Teach and encourage. We are all under a tremendous obligation by our God to teach our children and lead them toward him. Let’s approach these fourth Sundays with anticipation and excitement. Let’s also come to these fourth Sundays in reverent fear of our Creator that we would not neglect this great responsibility.

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Carrie-Anne and I were so blessed to participate in the CareNet Pregnancy Center’s annual banquet last night at the Amarillo Civic Center. More than 1,200 wonderful people gathered to praise God and to raise money for this most important of Christian ministries in our town.

I was impressed by author Gary Thomas’ speech. I was inspired by Amy Spears’ song. I was moved by the videos. But I was completely blown away by Candy Gibbs, CareNet’s Executive Director. She speaks like Eugene Peterson writes. Her speech was amazing. She’s careful, very deliberate, with her words. She preached to us, she preached with us last night. And. It. Was. Powerful. (You can read the transcript of Candy’s speech on her blog by clicking here.)

I’m impressed with CareNet because last year 103 pregnant young ladies went there to talk about their planned abortions and 100 of them were moved by prayer and counseling to decide against it. I’m impressed because CareNet counselors in Amarillo made 9,868 client visits last year to encourage and equip, to strengthen and heal. I’m impressed because in 2011, through the efforts of CareNet and by the grace and power of our God, 187 young women and men submitted to the Lordship of our risen King.

But here’s what’s most important about CareNet: they have rejected the ways of the world and embraced the ways of our Lord. This is not an organization that’s out there waving flags and signing petitions and lobbying congress and pressuring law makers and threatening litigation and marching in the streets. No. They’re not pushing for legislation to outlaw abortion. They’re actually telling dozens and dozens of young ladies every month why abortion is against the plans of our Heavenly Father, and making promises to these young ladies to walk with them through their difficult journeys. They mentor these young ladies and their new babies. They counsel with them. They provide education for them. They meet with them and pray with them. They become friends and family with them. They love them with the compassion and grace and mercy of Jesus. They walk with them for years after they’ve made the decision to have these babies. It’s really quite beautiful. And very counter cultural. Very Scriptural. Very like our Christ. They’re doing it differently. And it’s working. Just like Jesus promised us it would.

I can really get behind a deal like this. I’d suggest you look a little more into it, too.

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Valerie and I are gearing up for the Warrior Dash tomorrow down in Roanoke. It’s a 5K run with thousands of crazy people through an obstacle course in the mud. Of course, events like this are targeted to people half my age who drink a lot more than just Dr Pepper. But we ran it last year with several of our great friends from Legacy and just had an absolute blast. We’ll hook up in the morning with most of the same crowd: John & Suzanne, the Cliftons and Engers, Josh Penn. Tracy and Samantha are running it with us this year and I think Steve & Sandy will also be there.

It’ll be crazy. It looks like a lot of the obstacles are different from last year. There seems to be a couple more water obstacles and the climbing obstacles look to be a little more difficult. But Valerie and I are committed. We’ve signed the waivers that promise we won’t sue anybody even if we suffer horrible injury, we’ve packed our grubby shorts and T-shirts and shoes we don’t mind losing, and our warrior attitudes are primed.

I hope you’re doing something really cool this weekend, too.

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

Repent of Sectarianism

April 13, 2012 / / 2 Comments

Chapter two of Leroy Garrett’s “What Must the Churches of Christ Do to Be Saved?” seems to be a more focused treatise of one of the main issues in his chapter one call to confess that we have been wrong about a few things. In order to “save” our group of churches, in order to preserve our witness as disciples of Jesus in a troubled world that needs us so badly, in order to maintain our effectiveness as a people of God, Garrett says we must:

Repent of our petty, narrow sectarianism.

We claim to be Christians only, but not the only Christians. That’s our heritage and one of our clarion calls for Christian unity. But my personal experience in the Churches of Christ tells me that’s not always the way we behave.

I want our people to think big — ecumenically — when they think of “the church,” for this is the biblical view. I want them to envision the Church of Christ as consisting of all those everywhere, all around the world, who sincerely follow Jesus Christ.

We can never be saved for a meaningful and viable ministry to the world and to the Church at large so long as we think of “the Church of Christ” in terms of those listed under that name in the Yellow Pages. It is typical for our folk to think of “the church” in a city like Denton, Texas to be only those that have “Church of Christ” on the sign out front. Nobody else. And we limit “the Lord’s people” to our own “Church of Christ” folk. The tragedy of this is compounded by the fact that many of our people really believe this. We are the only Christians!

There are a couple of things to consider here. One, we must re-imagine and re-cast the vision of God’s Church as a universal, eternal, catholic Kingdom of the Lord that knows no boundaries of nation or state. Christ has abolished by his death and resurrection all the barriers that separate his people. In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female. Likewise, there are no Americans, no Mexicans, no Canadians, no Iranians or Africans or Iraqis or Chinese. The table of Jesus includes every nation, every language, every tribe, every tongue. The Kingdom of God never recognizes these earthly distinctions. And it’s high time we, too, abolish them in our ways of thinking and speaking about our Lord’s Church. To say Jesus is Lord is to say Caesar is not; to say I’m a citizen of heaven is to say I’m no longer a citizen of the Empire.

God’s Church is not an American institution! But we can sure talk like and act like it is.

Here at Central our worship center is adorned with an American flag. To our credit, there are eleven other national flags in there, too, representing the countries in which our Continent of Great Cities missionaries are located. We added the flag for Kenya in there less than six months ago to reflect our involvement in mission trips to that African nation. And that’s fine, I suppose. But wouldn’t the statement be stronger and much more effective if our worship center were decorated with the flags of all 196 countries around the globe? What if we had all 196 flags draped from our ceilings and balconies in our worship center? What if we intentionally communicated to our people and to all who would wander in to our building that when we come together as the people of God, we are part of something bigger than us, something greater than our own man-made borders, something huge and eternal and world-wide? There are disciples of our King in every country of the world. We should recognize that and be proud to be a part of that universal family of God.

I’m not sure Garrett had all that in mind with this second chapter. This is just something I think about all the time.

The other thing to consider, and this is more along the lines of Garrett’s particular call, is that we must actively embrace and partner with Christians of other flavors.

We have been sold a bill of goods by well-meaning but misguided leaders of the past who have bamboozled us into believing that if we have any fellowship with a Methodist or a Presbyterian then we endorse or approve of all errors in those religions. If we call on a Baptist minister to address us or lead a prayer in our assembly, then we compromise the truth and approve of all Baptist doctrine!

We don’t ask ourselves, “Then how can we sing ‘Lead, Kindly Light’  in church since it was written by John Henry Newman, a Roman Catholic bishop? In singing that hymn, do we have to approve of all that we associate with Roman Catholicism?” If we can’t have fellowship with folk with whom we differ, then we can’t be in fellowship with anyone, not even our own spouses, for we all differ on some things.

Again, I believe our problems here lie in our misunderstanding and misapplication of God’s grace. I hear quite often that we shouldn’t fellowship or “accept” as brothers and sisters in Christ those in other denominations because they are teaching error; they are wrong about some things. Who among us is right about everything?!? Who among us has every single thing perfectly figured out?!?

If I were to ask people in a Bible class or a congregation to raise their hands if they had every single bit of God’s will completely figured out, with no error, no mis-interpretation, how many would raise their hands? None. Not one person would ever say out loud that they had all the answers and were doing everything exactly right. Nobody. It would be the height of arrogance to suggest even for a minute that I had it all perfect right. We know we don’t. So what covers our shortcomings? How is it that we are still saved? How am I going to get to heaven if I admit I don’t have everything completely together? What saves me if I am guilty of mis-interpretations of Scripture or of misunderstanding a portion of God’s will?

The answer, of course, is God’s grace. We would all readily acknowledge that and be grateful for it. God’s grace covers me, it covers us, it covers the Churches of Christ in our shortcomings and sins (both of comission and omission; sorry, I couldn’t resist).

What kind of arrogance does it take to say that God’s grace covers me in my theological and church practice mistakes but not those in the other denominations? God’s grace covers me, but not the Baptists or the Presbyterians?

Yeah, right. God have mercy on us.

I also hear quite often that we cannot fellowship or accept other denominations because we have to maintain our distinctive identity as Churches of Christ. One, our Lord prayed to his Father that we would all be united as one; maybe we should at least consider his way for once. However, two, I believe there is tremendous value in our God-ordained diversity in Christ’s Body, his Church. There is a need for different and varied expressions of Christianity. It’s Scriptural. I believe Churches of Christ have plenty to offer to God’s people everywhere. We are right on many important things. But the world will not listen to us on those matters if we so offend them with our un-Christ-like exclusivism and sectarianism and mis-application of God’s grace. As my great friend Russ Garrison texted me this morning, “We need to work on the contents of the bottle more than the ‘brand’ on the label.”

We are going to have to be up front, come clean, and proclaim to the world that we have been wrong and we are sorry, and that we don’t believe that way anymore. We are going to have to say it from our pulpits, We have been wrong! and publish it in our journals far and wide. The schools of preaching and the Christian colleges must explain to our youth how we went wrong and that we are making (or have made) a mid-course correction.

It is not enough to do or say nothing, or simply to preach more on grace and about Christ. We must repent. We have a serious sin to confess.

Peace,

Allan

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