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Part 2
Part 3

I write the following as one who has done the very things I’m lamenting. I speak from regrettable experience on this one. During my senior year in High School, I was a self-proclaimed missionary to the Baptists and enjoyed a fair amount of “success.”

“They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” Hosea 8:7 (NIV)

To engage our emerging culture, we’re going to have to make some changes. What kind of changes? At this point it doesn’t really matter. There is an anti-change bias in Churches of Christ that’s not going away any time soon.

One of the big reasons for this, but not the only one, is that there are a number of people in our churches who were not converted to Christ. They were converted to a particular theology of baptism, style of worship, or church polity. They’re not a part of our fellowship because we helped them fall in love with Jesus, but because we convinced them that our way of doing church was more right than theirs. If anything, they were converted to our tribe because they already loved Jesus and we were able to persuade them that if they didn’t make the switch, then their love for him might be in vain.

So they took the plunge all over again. They left behind parents, spouses, life-long friends, and years of memories in order to be a part of “The Church.” We told them the truth as we saw it. We looked them in the eye and professed concerned for their everlasting souls. We overwhelmed them with syllogisms and proof texts. Many of them believed us, so much so that they were willing to make a painful choice.

These are the same people who are now bristling at the suggestion that we’re not the only ones–that we’re no smarter, no better, no more righteous than the very churches they bailed out of years ago. They severed the ties. They endured the pain. Now they’re being told it wasn’t necessary. At least that’s the implication they’re drawing from our attempts to be more open to dialogue and fellowship with other tribes.

My experience is that it’s those whom we have converted to Churches of Christ, rather than C of C lifers, who are the most resistant to change. And I can’t say that I blame them. They joined us and now we’re changing the rules of the game. Though they may not say it, their resistance to change is a scream of desperate protest, “If we’re not the only ones, then why did I go through all I went through years ago?”

Of course, the rules need to be changed. We were wrong. We judged them. We condemned them. We manipulated them (at least I did). Now we’re trying to take it back.

We’re trying to recover the message of the gospel. We’re searching for ways to share the good news of Jesus with actual sinners. We’re begging our churches to open themselves up to new ideas and experiences. We’re pleading for flexibility in thought and action. We’re looking for a few risk-takers who will join us on the adventure of faith.

In so many of our congregations, it’s not happening. They’re not budging. They’ve experienced all the faith-induced, change-based pain they intend to.

Before we castigate them for being narrow-minded or accuse them of being hard-hearted, we must take responsibility for the message we preached. We must acknowledge that we are facing the sad consequences of good news gone not so slightly askew.

This fierce wind we find ourselves staggering against, she’s strong for a reason.

Read Part 5

Part 1
Part 2

Here’s the flip side of the coin: Church of Christ Pride

Our rigorous “back to the Bible” efforts turned Christianity into more of a head-trip than a journey with Jesus. Christianity as head-trip focuses on reading the Bible in such a way as to get everything just right: the who, what, when, where, why and how of baptism; the frequency of communion; the style of worship; the structure of our leadership; the administration of charity to orphans and widows; you know the drill.

Somewhere along the way we got the idea that God’s ultimate desire for his people was to get all of these things right. Modernity just happened to supply us with an epistemology that told us we could. Armed with a constitutional view of Scripture, a “command/example/inference” hermeneutic, and a salvation-as-scientific-equation view of the gospel, we confidently set out to restore New Testament Christianity. At some point, we came to believe we had done that very thing. I remember being told in High School that we had come as close to restoring NT Christianity as any group not possessing a time machine could.

Head-trip Christianity makes believing the right things the key to salvation. Take baptism for instance. We haven’t just taught that baptism is essential for salvation. We have taught that believing that baptism is essential for salvation is essential for salvation. It’s not enough be immersed in the name of Father, Son, and Spirit. We also have to believe certain things about baptism while we’re being immersed. Seems to me this puts the real power of salvation not in the hands of a gracious God but in the folds of our clever brains. We’re not saved by grace. We’re saved by our ability to figure out what God wants us to figure out about baptism.

(If eternal salvation depends upon our adherence to the hear-believe-repent-confess-be baptized sequence, don’t you think God would have prominently featured “the plan of salvation” somewhere in the New Testament? Would he really leave it up to a group of sincere restorationists to cut and paste verses together from all over the New Testament until they finally got it right?)

This is not so much a salvation by works version of the gospel as it is a salvation by right belief (which is not to be confused with trusting faith). Believing that we have been able to figure out all the important stuff (we call them salvation issues) has contributed to an ingrained arrogance that at times seems insurmountable.

This is what I mean by “Church of Christ Pride.”

We may no longer think we are the only ones going to heaven, but there is still an air about us that says we think we are the ones most likely to go to heaven. We’ve made our reservations. Everyone else is flying standby.

I find a residue of this kind of thinking in even our most “progressive” of congregations. We congratulate ourselves for being more open to those outside our tribe, and yet there still seems to be an attitude of superiority seeping through the cracks of our inclusive rhetoric. We are humble enough to admit that we haven’t always been right about everything, but in our heart of hearts we still believe that pound for pound, verse for verse, we’re more right about most things than all the other churches out there. We still think we are “The Lord’s Church” because we’ve figured out some things that other groups haven/t. And maybe we have. It’s ok to be right about important things. It’s not ok to be arrogant about it.

Church of Christ pride is not going to play well in a post-Christian Peoria.

Read Part 4

Part One

One side of the coin says:

Churches of Christ are positioned to do well in the emerging culture. We never really jumped on the seeker-service bandwagon so we don’t have to unlearn worship as production rather than participation. Acapella worship invites participation. It is simple and portable. It works with groups of all sizes. It can be ethereal. In a culture plagued with non-stop noise, our worship style offers the ultimate “unplugged” experience.

We are big on baptism and communion. We are able to invite our neighbors into the mysterious world of the sacraments. We immerse them into the life of God and feast with them at the Lord’s Table. Our congregations offer tangible experiences of spiritual realities.

Because our roots are in a “back to the Bible” movement, we are always ready to re-examine the Scriptures. We know from experience that traditions can’t be trusted. The message of the gospel is easily encrusted. So we willingly go back to the headwaters of our faith to look for ways that the good news has been polluted somewhere along the way. It comes as no surprise to us that our modern version of the gospel is just as distorted as the medieval version we moved beyond so many years ago. We are quite comfortable subjecting even the most orthodox of orthodoxies to the scrutiny of a fresh reading of Scripture.

When an incongruity between what Scripture teaches and what we practice is identified, our autonomy allows each congregation to conform itself to the will of the Lord post-haste. We do not have to negotiate the politics of conventions or synods. Under the guidance of Spirit-led Shepherds, every congregation is free to be the kind of church God is calling it to be. This allows each and every congregation to be a Christ-flavored version of itself, free to respond creatively and appropriately to the needs of its surrounding culture.

In a post-denominational culture, where the name on the sign outside the building is less important than it used to be, our message of a simple, Bible-based, non-denominational practice of Christianity ought to resonate with those looking for more than empty religion.

Perhaps we are who we are, where we are, when we are, for just such a time as this?

Read Part Three