The stained-glass Bible glowing in a pink-and-blue sunburst window at College Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas, emphasizes the basic unifying factor among all Churches of Christ—reliance on the authority of the Scripture. Beyond that, the 10,000 members of the rapidly growing movement who crowded into Abilene last month for the annual Abilene Christian College Lectureship exhibited a spectrum of religious viewpoints.
“When you talk about the Churches of Christ, what you describe depends on where you are,” said Dr. Abraham Malherbe, an ACC Bible professor educated at Harvard Divinity School. “It is a pluralistic group, really.” Emphasis on the normative character of the New Testament, on “the once for allness” of the New Testament, is what ties the churches together, he said.
The 2.5-million-member group traces its roots to the Restoration Movement led by the dynamic Irishman Thomas Campbell and his son Alexander in the early nineteenth century. Unity of all believers in Christ was their plea, and they believed that acceptance of the Bible as the absolute authority in religion was the only possible basis for unity. Although the movement has not unified Christendom, it spawned two of the largest religious bodies indigenous to America—the Churches of Christ and the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ).
The Churches of Christ represent more than 20,000 independent congregations located in all fifty states but concentrated in the South and West. They are the only major religious community in America that has no organization beyond the elders of the local church. Each congregation selects its own minister and missionaries.
Boundaries of fellowship are not clear cut, and divergent interpretation of Scripture is tolerated, though churches commonly believe immersion is essential for salvation. Neither instrumental music nor the title “Reverend” is regarded as biblical.
Partly because there is no hierarchy whatever and no denominational conventions, the annual lectureships at the churches’ twenty colleges have gained considerable significance. The Abilene lectureship, the most famous, draws together members as diverse as conservative Reuel Lemmons and arch-conservative-turned-liberal Carl Ketcherside. Lemmons is editor of Firm Foundation in Austin, Texas, and Ketcherside is editor of Mission Messenger in St. Louis. They wield great power, since the churches’ journals, though themselves independent, are the only tangible factors holding the movement together.
Lemmons, who states his convictions in nineteenth-century language and distributes them throughout the “brotherhood” in his monthly journal, fears that “a small number of well-educated men have imbibed the liberal ideas of Protestantism” and that “they are in some positions of influence among us.… Especially are they attracting the young mind of the church.”
Ketcherside dropped a campaign against “located preachers” about six years ago in favor of a new mission to tear down “walls between churches … man built of hate.” Now an advocate of reuniting the Restoration Movement, which split into the Churches of Christ and the Christian Churches around the turn of the century, he concluded that the movement divided “when we ceased to love one another … not over the issues.”
The white-haired preacher, whose mother was Lutheran and whose agnostic father later espoused the Churches of Christ, predicts, “We stand on the threshold of one of the greatest breakthroughs of love in the history of the movements.”
Another editor, Leroy Garrett, professor of philosophy at Texas Womans’ University, holds similar views. His journal, Restoration Review, has become an organ of expression for “a brighter-minded younger set, with Ph.D.’s more often than not,” he claims.
One speaker at Abilene last month contended that “as long as we have dedicated men who can give book, chapter, and verse, instead of paraphrase, who will use the language of the Scriptures rather than that of psychology and philosophy, and who will quote Paul and Peter instead of Barth and Bultmann, the church will be safe.”
Dr. John C. Stevens, assistant president of Abilene Christian College, said, however, that more and more preachers have “discovered that the job is not only to quote Scripture but also to get their neighbors to listen to it.”
The complexion of the church is changing, he declared. “So many people in the congregation are well educated and efficient in business, they are requiring the same of the church.” He sees the church becoming more concerned with problems of community welfare—breaking down racial barriers; establishing community centers, homes for unwed mothers, and orphan-care centers; and placing greater emphasis on mission methods.
One of the churches’ most successful community-welfare projects is a community center called “The House of the Carpenter” in Boston’s South End. Supported by the Brookline Church of Christ, the workers are primarily graduate students at Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and Boston College. This inner-city project has drawn several hundred poverty-stricken children into annual summer camps, craft classes, remedial school classes, Bible studies, and a generally expanded world.
Currently, the most popular method of sending new people to an area lightly populated with Church of Christ members is what is known as an Exodus movement. An entire community of believers moves to an area rather than relying on an individual missionary.
The first modern-day Exodus began in 1963 when a young minister, Dwain Evans, led eighty-five families to West Islip, Long Island. The West Islip congregation has won 100 converts and built its own $300,000 building. Other Exodus movements are being planned for Newark, Delaware; Finland; Toronto, Canada; Rochester, New York; Burlington, Massachusetts; and Sao Paulo, Brazil.
The next area of innovation, predicts a young missionary from Perth, Australia, will be in learning how to apply the old doctrines to a rapidly changing world. “Our fathers learned how to apply these Scriptures, and it worked,” said Ron Durham. “We’ve grown fast. But the world is changing, and old methods and approaches to applying those Scriptures don’t work.”
“The nature of the restoration plea—divorce from tradition, makes it essential for every generation to examine the Bible and see if it is the authority, then learn how to apply it,” declared Durham. “The world is changing so fast, trying to apply old doctrines to each new situation—that’s the rub.”
Protestant Panorama
Methodists reported a loss in membership last month, the first such decline since the present Methodist Church came into being in 1939—except for a 1953 drop attributed to a wholesale dropping of inactive members. At the end of the 1965–66 fiscal year, U. S. Methodists numbered 10,318,910, a decrease of 12,664 from the previous year. Church-school enrollment fell off by 196,711 to 6,705,727.
Total membership in Southern Baptist churches reached a record high of 10,952,463 during 1966, according to official statistics. The figure is an increase of 179,751 over the 1965 total.
A revised 1967 budget for the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod is $26.2 million, some $600,000 below last year’s figure. Receipts are so sluggish that the denomination will spend at 5 per cent below the budget.
Death
LESLIE E. COOKE, 58, associate general secretary of the World Council of Churches in charge of refugee and interchurch aid; in New York.
Miscellany
Our Sunday Visitor, national Roman Catholic weekly, reported last month that Pope Paul has been invited to visit the World Council of Churches’ assembly in Sweden next year. But Eugene Carson Blake, top WCC executive, later denied such an invitation had been sent.
Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie spoke to members from the U. S. Senate and House prayer-breakfast groups during his state visit to Washington last month.
The National Council of Churches General Board urged last month that the principle of conscientious objection to military service to extended to provide for those who merely object to particular wars or to the use of certain weapons or forms of warfare. A board policy statement also recommended elimination of a statutory requirement that conscientious objection be based on “religious training and belief.”
Two clergymen of the International Council of Christian Churches were reported expelled from the Cameroun, where they had come to confer with local Presbyterian pastors. Some days earlier a group of the pastors had walked out of their General Assembly, vowing to continue their denomination in defiance of a merger vote. The Christian Beacon blamed a pro-union Presbyterian police chief for the expulsion.
