One In Jesus

Here’s the critical point that so many miss. When an institution begins to decline, it will continue to decline unless something changes. Even if you believe the 20th Century Churches of Christ had perfect doctrine, something still has to change.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.

— Rita Mae Brown, Sudden Death (Bantam Books, New York, 1983), p. 68. Continue reading →

You won’t be surprised to learn that I have a theory as to why our rapid growth in the first part of the 20th Century came to an end. I think two events corresponded to upset the methods that had worked so well for decades.

First, the 1960s and early 1970s happened — the Civil Rights Movement, Watergate, assassinations, Viet Nam — and the new generation learned to distrust human authority. President Johnson bungled Viet Nam. Nixon was a crook. Carter ruined the economy. Young people saw older people fight against racial and sex equality — with riots across the country (not just in the South). The generation born in the 1950s (my generation) grew up unwilling to believe something is true just because the government or some other authority figure said it was true. We decided that we’d find our own answers.

Second, the New International Version was published. When I was growing up, we studied out of the KJV, and most of my classmates in Sunday school could not understand it. I couldn’t understand it. We couldn’t even pronounce it. I mean, what’s a “sepulchre” and how do you say it? Continue reading →

Gregory Alan Tidwell (my favorite conservative preacher), who participated with me in the GraceConversation dialogue, wrote in a comment,

I would recommend you consider the points raised in “The Empty Church: The Suicide of Liberal Christianity.” Thomas C. Reeves, a member of a major Protestant denomination, chronicles the demise of his and other liberal groups.

Except for a vague ecumenical aspiration, and a shared disdain for traditional Church of Christism, I find very little around which my Progressive friends can coalesce. You message almost seems to be, “You don’t believe very much, and we don’t believe very much, so why don’t we all get together and share our lack of convictions together.”

I love comments that disagree with me, because they force me to clarify either my thinking or my explanation of my thinking. Both are good. I need to take a couple of steps back and explain more carefully where I’m coming from — and writing this post has forced me to think through some things I really hadn’t thought through as well as I should have. I really do love critical comments (the thoughtful ones, that is, like this one).

“You[r] message almost seems to be, ‘You don’t believe very much, and we don’t believe very much …'”

First, my views are very similar to those of Stone, the Campbells, Walter Scott, and Robert Richardson. They are not the same, but they are similar in that I agree with the founders of the Restoration Movement that Christian fellowship is based on faith in Jesus as Messiah and Lord and obedience to him (not perfect obedience, of course). Continue reading →

During the decades between 1889 and 1906, additional division occurred, largely over instrumental music and missionary societies. By 1906, the division was so well established that David Lipscomb advised the US Census Bureau that the a cappella Churches of Christ had become a fellowship separate from the rest of the Restoration Movement. At this time, the a cappella Churches had only about 160,000 members.

Although Lipscomb had rejected the 1889 division led by Sommer, by 1906, the Southern Churches, influenced by Lipscomb’s Gospel Advocate, were in common fellowship with Sommer’s churches, influenced by his Octographic Review.

The a cappella Churches of Christ (hereafter “Churches of Christ” or “Churches,” although many congregations named “Church of Christ” were instrumental or otherwise not part of the Gospel Advocate/Octographic Review group) grew rapidly, the 1,600,000 by 1980, a rate of growth of about 3.1% per year, well above the rate of growth of the general population. Historians aren’t agreed on the reasons. I have my own theories — Continue reading →