One thing that would help prove repentance in my view would be for you to publicly not only condemn Kip's practices, but to condemn the false doctrines in the First Principles study series and remove discipling. In addition you must reteach a much more simplified gospel to your membership and explicitly state that some (if not many) of them put their faith into the wrong Jesus and are still lost and dead in their sins.

Both true forgiveness and reconciliation come through Christ. Unfortunately the latter can only come if both parties have Jesus and in the majority of the cases the offending party trusts in the weak Jesus of discipling.

It sounds like you've found a place where you can grow in Christ. That's great. I hope you can reach a point where you are fully reconciled with the people in your past.
Alan

I don't need to know the status of every ICOC congregation to know that they're not healthy. I just need to know that just one that has completely crossed back over to health. Henry Kriete's letter provides a baseline for repentance. (http://www.reveal.org/library/stories/people/hkriete.htm) And congregations that have done this will be demonized or at least marginalized by the core ICOC. There are only a few I can think of that are heading in this direction (Rhode Island, a small group in Detroit, and Riverside, California).

I guess it's time to drop a bombshell. I tell you the truth, when I walked out of the ICOC baptistery in 1998, I had placed my faith in a powerless Jesus whose gospel required me to follow the rules of people over me – my disciplers and leaders. My salvation was fundamentally based on obedience through discipling, not grace and faith in the authentic, sovereign, divine Jesus Christ who bore my sins on the cross because He loved me first. The Jesus who saves was displaced by the Crossroads Movement and eventually replaced in the Boston Movement in 1987 by Kip McKean when he introduced his "disciple's baptism" doctrine. (Did you have to get rebaptized or were you already a disciple before you were baptized in your Crossroads-based campus ministry? Everyone had to be brought on board with Kip's additional prerequisite of baptism to be part of the church and saved.) This excluded the Church on earth to only ICOC members since no other denomination or fellowship taught their strict path of salvation.

I maintain that the Jesus of the ICOC is just as much as a false Jesus as the Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons. This helps explain why there are 400,000-500,000 former members worldwide to approximately 100,000 current members and why many abandon Christianity after leaving. It also explains why the movement as a whole isn't repenting. The Holy Spirit can't guide and empower the individual members. I don't believe that everyone in an ICOC church is lost, but you have many more lost people in your churches than you think. This is why I take a strong stand against the McKeanist (both the ICOC and Kip's "sold-out" churches) because people can be deceived into following an antichrist. This is why discipling must be utterly abandoned and have the Holy Spirit take his proper role – once the believer believes in the fully human and fully divine Jesus Christ that doesn't require them to prove their repentance by by their deeds and submit to discipling before they can be baptized for the forgiveness of sins.

Six months after I left, enough fog cleared up for me to realize I was following the wrong Jesus and needed the real one. I've been an authentic, Spirit-filled Christian for a few years now. (No, I'm not charismatic, but in an Independent Christian Church. The minister who baptized me didn't know why I was so full of joy until later.)

You speak as though you have personal knowledge about all the ICOC congregations. How many of them have you attended personally in the past five years? Do you really have a basis for those comments, or are you making unfounded accusations?

Even though on the surface, ICOC churches may appear to be autonomous and vary in some outward practices, none of them to my or other ex-members' knowledge have conclusively proved their repentance. Most notably, the key area involves the doctrines of discipling and discipleship. The formation of a new hierarchy over the churches shows to me that repentance isn't occurring, especially if more and more churches are slowly being pulled in. (http://christianunityblog.net/2009/09/icoc-cooperation-agreement-sequel.html)

I want repentance too. However, the problem with being a change agent in a discipling hierarchy is that things can't change if you don't have power and things only change if you do. I learned that the hard way by standing up for what was right (specifically the subjection and ignoring the needs of the singles), but ending up having the leadership pull me into a breaking session (in 2006, years after reforms had started). The ball's in your court since you're a leader and have the power. However, the only way I've seen to escape the grasp of discipling into the arms of the Jesus Christ of grace is to flee!