OUR CHANGING WORLD

 

Several people from the Church of Christ have become involved in Wycliffe Bible translation work, an organization that seeks to provide the scriptures to 200,000,000 people speaking 3,500 languages that do not yet have the Bible in their own vernacular. Danny and Suzanne New and Ralph and Judy Reed are two such families. The Wycliffe officials have been known to be uneasy with the position usually taken by Churches of Christ on baptism, a point that has to be worked out by our people who wish to work with this organization, who are expected to work with believers of diverse backgrounds.

John S. May, 248 W. Vincennes, Linton, IN 47441, and other believers have started a new congregation with a new look. The group does not plan to have either a church building or a hired preacher. No regular collections will be taken, but only for specific needs as they arise. All believers are accepted as members if they accept the seven unities of Eph. 4. Sunday morning services center around the Lord’s table and is for Christians only and not for evangelism, which will be done elsewhere. Elders will eventually be selected who will be in complete. charge of the decision-making process.

Everett R. Anderson, a Dallas preacher working in Church of Christ missions in India, revealed in a recent report how “cost conscious” those are who support his work. He figures from the number he baptized in India during one campaign that the cost ran 1.00 per soul, and for the entire year he baptized one person for each 6.00 received.

Dick Marcear, minister to the Central Church of Christ in Amarillo, Texas, reports in his bulletin that he occasionally reads something that really grabs him, and this gem was one: If you don’t love, you’ll find an excuse. If you do love, you’ll find a way.

Someone sent me a copy of a sermon by a minister in a fast growing Church of Christ in Kentucky, in which some long-cherished presuppositions were lovingly questioned. The minister is concerned that we presume to have “arrived” as far as truth is concerned, and that “We are a finished product.” He wonders why we should view the past two thousand years of church history as of little consequence, except for the past century and a half of the Restoration Movement. This exalts the first century as a golden age, he notes, and presumes that the first-century church was “the true church,” which after the first century went into apostasy, and was then restored by the Restoration pioneers. He told his church that this mininterprets both history and the Restoration Movement. In reference to our attitude toward other Christians, he calls for more openness. Observing that a college choir came to sing at their church, he asked who it was that composed the hymns they sung, and then says: “We need to be careful how we refer to others, past and present, upon whom we have depended so heavily in our own proclamation of the gospel and in our own worship. Ingratitude is not a virtue.”

In view of the above, a point made in a recent mail-out by Herald of Truth, might be emphasized: “Many have never heard that there are New Testament Christians like you nearby who can help them. They don’t realize that the church as it was originally established is still here—today.” To affirm that Christ’s church does indeed exist today, however hidden in the morass of sectarianism, is a thesis with which all Christians would agree. But to say that we, and we alone, are that church could justly be viewed as a monumental absurdity.