HOW TO BE A MEMBER OF THE CHURCH OF CHRIST
 WITHOUT BEING RELIGIOUS

Holding the form of religion but denying the power of it.—2 Tim. 3:5

It is true in most every modern church that if anyone in its membership is really spiritual, he is an exception, if not something of a problem. It is like having an exceptionally bright child in the home or classroom. It seems better for all concerned if he just settles down and be normal. I recall James Bryant Conant, when he was campaigning for better education in our schools, recount the story of a mother who made her way to him after a speech, complaining, “I don’t want my child to be exceptional, for I don’t want him to be a problem!”

Churches and their leadership are often like that about “super spiritual” people, to use Frances Shaeffer’s term. But this refers to more than tongue-speakers or healers or miracle workers who appear now and again in many of our congregations. It is the deeply spiritual man, the serious Bible student, the intellectually curious, the man of prayer, and the committed soul that is also abnormal, causing those about him to be a bit uneasy. Without really saying so, they would rather that he be ordinary (Jesus calls it lukewarm) like they are. The modern church is no place to be religious. Maybe in a prayer group or a house church, but not at Fifth and Izzard, whether it be Baptist, Methodist or Church of Christ.

In my meanderings about the country, primarily amongst Church of Christ - Christian Church folk, I hear tales that lead me to but one conclusion: before one goes very far among us he must learn how to make it without being religious. I have ministers to tell me, for instance, that elders’ meetings can go on and on, time after time, without a single prayer to the Father. And where there is prayer it so often appears to be perfunctory. For elders and preachers to meet “with all prayer and supplication” must be a rarity.

One young minister was telling me recently that in the congregation where he labors in campus work that he has never been invited to any kind of study or prayer with the senior minister. “We conduct business with each other,” he said, “but we have never yet prayed together about our common tasks.” Others who work with busy preachers will tell you that in personal conversations they seldom talk about Jesus or the scriptures. The truth is that one is likely to get along quite well in the Church of Christ without ever mentioning the Lord! Listen in on the conversations that take place in a congregation those few minutes before “the worship” starts. You will probably hear about a lot of things and people before you hear anything of Jesus and the scriptures. Even to see folk these days with a Bible, refreshing their minds by reading some here and there before the service begins, is all too rare.

I venture to say that our folk can hold more business meetings, debates, lectureships, revivals, seminars, and forums and do less praying than any church on earth. Our people, whether laity or elders or preachers, hardly know what it means to meet together to pray. One is left to wonder if elders pray with their wives, if preachers pray with their families. One of our older preachers used to contend that the average church does not have as many as five families that study and pray together.

I cut my teeth on this kind of non-religious church life. Though brought up in a Church of Christ home, I never witnessed any representative of the church ever praying in our home. My old Dad learned to read by pouring over the Dallas News, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, and the Bible, which he often read, and I can remember how he would pray with his face buried in his old cane-bottomed rocking chair, unaware of anyone around him. He often talked about the Word, but he never attempted to teach his family to pray.

When I went away to Freed-Hardeman I found almost no devotional life. The president of the college, a good and dear man to me, would poke fun at the boys around who made it a point to kneel in prayer. They looked like the south end of a northbound jackass, he would tell us. I don’t recall any prayers in class, either there or later at Abilene, with but very few exceptions. It was at Princeton that I first heard teachers begin their classes with prayer, serious prayers that were so different from what I had heard. The then young and brilliant Bruce Metzger, now one of the outstanding New Testament scholars of the world, would begin his class by intoning: “We are people of unclean lips, and we dwell among people of unclean lips. . .” Old Dr. Gehman, editor of the Westminster Dictionary of the Bible and now retired, prayed in his German accent and it was really something else. Being so scholarly, he would pray often: “ . . . and free us from unfounded inferences and immature conclusions.” What really impressed me was their occasional “Day of Prayer,” for which classes were dismissed. Ralph Graham, my fellow Church of Christ student, and I would get behind in our studies and would facetiously tell each other that we surely needed another prayer day so we could catch up on our Hebrew. We hadn’t yet learned to pray, but we were studying!

I did not find the kind of piety at Harvard that was apparent at Princeton, but while at Harvard I would occasionally make my way to the Episcopal Seminary to look in on the training of rectors for the Episcopal Church, both high and low. One time I caught them in a “Day of Meditation.” They could” be seen in small gatherings here and there over the campus in quietude—reading, meditating, praying, and some times sharing. I listened in on one gathering and heard the leader saying: “Holiness (he spelled it) is like wholeness (he spelled it). We are holy when God makes us whole, which is really what salvation means.”

You would have to be “at home” at places like Freed-Hardeman or even Abilene to be able to realize the complete unlikelihood of anything like that ever occurring on campus, or in the congregational life of our people. In fact, our few men of piety have had sort of a hard time among us. I think of J. N. Armstrong, R. H. Boll, T. B. Larimore, R. H. Bell, L. L. Brigance, E. L. Jorgenson, old S. P. Pittman at Lipscomb, and the like. They were sort of misfits in away, for they were pious in an impious church. The brother Neal that debated Foy Wallace on the millennium could be included. Brother Wallace criticized brother Neal for beginning his presentations with prayer. At Freed-Hardeman I heard Armstrong and Boll criticized. They were “softies”, and brother Boll was depicted as a man who somehow managed to let himself get caught in his room praying. And T. B. Larimore was always talking about love when every sound preacher knew he ought to be taking a stand on instrumental music. Once in class at Freed-Hardeman old brother Brigance broke down and wept as he talked about the sacrifices of the apostles. It was the strangest thing I’d ever seen in all my born days, a grown preacher man crying. But that moment nestled itself in my heart and today it lives on as one of the few tender moments in all my Church of Christ education. For the most part I was taught by men 30 or 40 years my senior to poke fun at godly men who are “pious” (derogatory) and who talk about love “like sick calves crying for their mother.” And I was all too long getting over that kind of education. God forgive me!

It just wouldn’t do for me to make another list—and it could be a rather long one—of leading preachers in the Church of Christ who have had less than good reputations in their association with women, some being my own teachers and associates. We could well do with some days of prayer, meditation, and soul-searching.

Add to all this some of the “behind the scenes” firing of preachers, competition between preachers, dismissals of college professors, shenanigans in administrative offices of our colleges, deceit in getting federal funds for colleges, breach of promises at high levels, churches forsaking missionaries in the field for some doctrinal irregularity, withdrawals of fellowship of some of our loveliest and most spiritual people, dirty church politics at several levels, and downright rudeness to those who dare to be different, and such like, and you have a sad and sordid commentary on how one can be impious and do just all right for himself in the Church of Christ. Our folk do not have to await a Watergate to be appalled!

In fact, one faces two serious hazards if he grows up in our ranks. Getting an education and start thinking is one. The other is becoming a spiritual person. Take Pat and Shirley Boone. And Pat’s father Archie and his mother Margaret. And his sister Margie. All of them treated as if they were malefactors. To say they were treated rudely is to understate what happened. And many Churches of Christ were in on the massacre of a sweet and spiritual family, God help us! And the Boones are but the beginning of a long list of noble and free spirits, the very ones that could do the most for us, that we have bruised and battered for being a little different from ourselves.

While we are making lists, a long one could be made of those brilliant young minds who have left us in hopeless desperation. The editor of the Firm Foundation recently lamented the loss of so many like this, due mainly to our failure to provide a meaningful direction for our people.

Yet I must insist that we have many dedicated, knowledgeable, Spirit-filled people in Churches of Christ. We have elders with the heart of a shepherd, good and godly men, who would like to see their congregations be spiritually dynamic. And we have as many preachers as the next church, maybe more, who are really involved in lifting people from the despair of sectism and legalism by pointing them to Jesus as sin-bearer. We have an increasing number of concerned teachers, especially among the younger set, who are saying just those things that need to be said, not only in Bible classes and on campus, but in our main-line papers as well. And the gracious spirit of love and forbearance is a growing reality, especially in the fringe areas of mission fields, prayer groups, and mini-meetings, not to mention the miracle of unity forums. To be sure, there is good reason for optimism, and this article is not saying that our folk can’t be or that none is really religious in the Churches of Christ. I am only saying that it is difficult! That is probably true of other religious communions as well, but I am a homebody, and I believe that house cleaning is part of that charity that begins at home.

So I am speaking of a general condition that prevails among us—and thank God for all those noble exceptions! There is a tone or setting that we create, something like what the Germans call the Sitz im leben, that is unspiritual. This is the case, I believe, due to our neglect of those truths that root the soul deeply in the soil of love and truth. We have neglected the Cross, failing to point to it with the assurance of that’s how God loves! We have given our people a stipulated gospel rather than “the gospel of the grace of God.” We have taught as if the church itself is the end rather than the family of God on earth being the means of cultivating Christlikeness. And we have well nigh proved that a people can be right without bearing the image of Jesus.

In short, our problem is unveiled in that line of scripture that heads this essay. We have the form, a rather consistent form in name, doctrine and practice, but how about the power? Religion is to be powerful! The apostle says the kingdom of God is not just talk, but power (1 Cor. 4:20), and in Eph. 1:19 he refers to those resources of power that are available to us all in the Spirit. Let’s face it, we cannot have had a leadership all these years that has either ignored or poked fun at the idea of a Spirit-filled church and still be a people “strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might.” And that is what 2 Tim. 3:5 is talking about, people who have a form of religion but deny the power of it.

The answer to such a problem is always Jesus, who is to be both Lord and Christ to us, which is to say that the answer is both simple and profound. To believe in him as the Son of God, the Christ, is of course, the basis of our religion. But that religion does not take hold deeply within us until that belief grows into trust, in which we “reverence Christ in our hearts as Lord.” To enthrone him as Lord of our hearts is when religion is no longer mere form, bur power. The indwelling Holy Spirit is our helper in cultivating Jesus’ lordship within us and in providing us with those resources of power that make all the difference. It is then a different world and a different church, for one is a different person. And it can be that way in your life and, through you, in your family and congregation. So, you can be really religious even among our own folk, and then when enough of us seek that kind of power in our lives, well, that’s why we send out this journal like we do.—the Editor