ROUND ROBIN PREACHING

An insertion in our readers’ exchange column is a letter from Harold Thomas, minister to the College Church of Christ in Conway, Arkansas, telling of “a Round-Robin pulpit exchange involving six churches in Conway.” The letter reveals that the Church of Christ joined with the Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Disciples in this exchange of pulpits. Harold reports that he found the experience most wholesome.

That word round robin caught my eye, for I do not recall hearing it used in reference to church life. The derivation of the term is most interesting, the robin being taken from a personal name, and the round having to do with the circular character of the activity. Having spent some of my time as a boy on golf courses, one of my older brothers being a professional golfer, I first heard the term round robin in reference to golf tournaments. Unlike other tournaments, in a round robin a contestant is never eliminated just because he loses, and everybody plays everybody else.

So I take it that in a truly round robin preaching match that a preacher would “make the rounds,” preaching at every other church in the circle, and all the other preachers would visit his church. It may not have been exactly that way at Conway, but it was something like that. Round robin preaching! I am impressed.

The term round robin seems to have antedated sports and referred first of all to an official document where the signatures appeared in a circle, so that no one could tell who signed first. The Declaration of Independence is something like that, for there appears to be no order to the signatures. There are also round robin letters that circulate in a circle, with various ones joining in the letter, each adding a few lines.

We can be encouraged by what happened at Conway, for it shows that our people are not bound by fate to be forever exclusivistic, having nothing to do with other Christians. When this kind of association becomes more common, it will mean that Church of Christ folk will hear a Methodist minister on one occasion, then an Episcopalian, then a Baptist, a Presbyterian, etc., while their minister will be visiting with these same churches, all sharing together out of the great repository of Scripture. Our traditions and emphases being different, there is so much that we have to learn from each other.

It is odd that this kind of fellowship came to be suspect among Churches of Christ, for it is completely consistent to the practice of our forebears from the outset of our history. The earliest Churches of Christ in this country, under the leadership of Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell, were not only open to visiting ministers of various denominations, but some of the churches belonged to an association of churches. The Brush Run church, for example, which was the very first Campbell church, belonged to a Baptist association. It never occurred to them that this implied an endorsement of all that the member churches believed and practiced.

That is indeed a strange logic that nurtures our exclusivism, that if we enjoy fellowship with the Methodists on anything at all, such as exchanging pulpits, it means we approve of all the things that can be conjured up about Methodism. That being the case how can we justify reading Adam Clarke’s commentaries, written by and published by the Methodists? If you read Clarke that means you endorse everything he stands for! That is silly enough, true. It is equally foolish to say that if we permit ourselves to enjoy (hear me, really enjoy) people in other churches, that we are somehow partakers in any errors they may have. On that basis no Church of Christ can even have fellowship with itself, for no church anywhere agrees on everything. And our preachers could not even fellowship their own elders, not even their own wives. This myth that fellowship must be predicated upon complete agreement on all points of doctrine has been our undoing. It has kept us from treating other Christians as equals, assuming a superiority for ourselves. It is no way to live, not in our kind of world where believers, all believers, badly need each other.

Well, I am not saying I told you so, but many of you out there who have about given up hope for the Church of Christ thought that what happened at Conway could not happen to a Church of Christ. And they are not the first. It is happening more and more, and one day, when the Lord has opened our eyes to how we have treated other Christians, it will be an accepted practice. We will have joined the Christian world, and never once will we have to compromise any truth we hold. Did Harold Thomas and the Conway church surrender any truth by reaching out like they did? Rather they gained truth by learning to share with other believers. It is always right to treat a brother as a brother and a sister as a sister. It is in treating other of God’s children as enemies that we make our most serious compromise of truth.

When I write this I think of a Disciples of Christ minister who confided in me that he had always wanted to preach in a Church of Christ. It was a fellowship he longed for. It struck me as sad and tragic that he was unable to fulfill such a modest desire. But it is more than sad and tragic. It is grossly sinful. That of course has been a large part of our problem: we have not come to realize, as did our pioneers, the sinfulness of division.

As the seriousness of this sin is brought home to us, we will move more vigorously in being the true Body of Christ and will be intolerant of division and all the lame excuses that we have used to perpetuate it.—the Editor