The books on how to teach adult Bible classes all say you need to end with an application: how do we apply these lessons to our lives? It’s good to gain a perspective from history because it helps us separate culture from command and accident from design. That doesn’t tell us what to do with the conclusions.
We’ve seen that the 20th Century Churches of Christ were the very opposite of the movement that Stone and the Campbells worked to establish, with the original teachings misrepresented, suppressed, and ultimately forgotten. For a time, we pretended to have no history at all — as though somehow the church founded by Peter in AD 33 lept across the pages of history to the present with no intervening events at all — other than a series of digressions by “the denominations.” It’s just not true.
More recently, many have sought to wrap themselves in the cloak of Restorationism, as though being in the Restoration Movement had always been about restoring First Century practices, rather than First Century unity built on faith in Jesus.
It’s easy to become a bit arrogant and look down on our spiritual fathers of the last century as though they accomplished nothing of merit. But here we are in a Church of Christ Bible class — not a Baptist or Methodist Bible class — and we should ask ourselves why we’re here? What did the 20th Century Churches of Christ get right? Continue reading
Common grace
Kuyper was a TULIP Calvinist. And he wrestled with the same problem we see in modern evangelical and fundamentalist churches — the tendency to define our Christianity exclusively in terms of “going to heaven when we die.” Thus, we argue salvation issues endlessly and we focus on evangelism, but we don’t see our Christianity as deeply influencing other areas of life. 
I get emails —
