The Hope of the Believer . . .

HAPPY 100TH ANNIVERSARY!  

It is with some trepidation that I remind my sisters and brothers in the Churches of Christ that we have allowed our 100th birthday anniversary to come and go with little notice. While a person usually feels put upon to be reminded of a birthday that makes him too old, the Churches of Christ are reluctant to accept their centennial anniversary because it makes them too young.  

So long as we nurture the mentality of "Founded 33 A.D.," which once graced the cornerstones of our buildings, it will not make sense for us to speak of a mere centennial. The Russian Orthodox Church recently celebrated its 1000th anniversary. It would surely be surprised to learn that there is a denomination in the Unites States that claims to be almost twice that old - especially since the United States itself is little more than 200 years old!

While some well-meaning souls among us still issue tracts to the effect that the "Church of Christ" dates back to Pentecost 33 A.D., there are more responsible voices that speak of our beginning in 1906, the year the U.S. Census Bureau first listed us as separate from the Christian Churches. The data indicates, however, that we were a separate people some two decades before 1906. In 1892 Daniel Sommer, one of our founding fathers, made this amazing assessment:

The Sand Creek Declaration is being adopted, and those who will not do right are purged out as old leaven. In course of a few years the Church of Christ will stand entirely separated from the Christian Church. Then there will be no more fellowship between them than there now is between the Church of Christ and any other branch of sectarianism. Hallelujah. (Octographic Review, Vol.35 (May24, 1889), p.1)

The Sand Creek "Address and Declaration" was read to several thousands of "conservative" Disciples of Christ who gathered near Windsor, Illinois as a statement of withdrawal of fellowship from the "liberal" Disciples of Christ. It was a bull of excommunication, which concluded with:

     In closing up this address and declaration, we state that we are impelled from a sense of duty to say, that all such innovations and corruptions to which we have referred, that after being admonished, and having had sufficient time for reflection, if they do not turn away from such abominations, that we cannot and will not regard them as brothers.

The "abominations" were such things as choirs, societies, the pastor system, and instrumental music. The document made it clear that fellowship was contingent upon seeing these "objectionable and unauthorized things" alike. It was this tragic fallacy that bequeathed to us a century of further divisions and factions. Each sect among us has its own list of objectionable and unauthorized things and makes them tests of fellowship.

But there is no segment among us that can trace itself farther back in history than 1889. By identifying ourselves with the larger Stone-Campbell Movement we can go back another century for our beginning. But there we have to stop. We are disinclined to follow the Landmark Baptists in "rattling a chain" all the way back to Pentecost, for they claim kin to such unlikely folk as the Manicheans, Novatians, and Anabaptists. If they are looking for Baptists as we know them today, the chain turns into a rope that won't rattle and threatens to hang them. Churches of Christ would do no better, nor would any other modern denomination. And to discard the chain and take in hand a pole and vault over all the centuries back to Pentecost and thus become the true "restored" church does not work any better. Both are false interpretations of history, the latter even ignoring history.

Where was what we call "the Church of Christ" in 1517 when Martin Luther tacked his theses to that cathedral door and launched the Protestant Reformation? Where were we when the preaching of Peter the Hermit fired the First Crusade in 1095? Where were we when the Council of Carthage met in 397 to fix the canon of the New Testament?

While we can believe that the community of Jesus Christ has been on this earth ever since the Spirit of God breathed it into existence on the day of Pentecost, however imperfect, we cannot properly believe that any modern religious group exclusively represents that church and has done so all through the centuries. Some of the Orthodox denominations would be the oldest, but even they cannot claim exclusive identity with the Body of Christ revealed in Scripture.

Since every denomination or religious movement has had its beginning, we can properly name August 18, 1889 as the beginning of Churches of Christ. And what can possibly be wrong with that admission? While it may question a naive view of history held by some, it makes us no less Christian and it might make us more honest Christians.  

Some of my readers did not let our centennial anniversary pass without notice, and one of them, Bob Keen of Hancock, Michigan, was especially prescient. He and his wife Karen made a trip to Sand Creek and walked about the grounds of the old meetinghouse, "part of a conscious and on-going effort to recover from a Sommeritic childhood," as he put it. While there he mailed me a "Happy Anniversary" card boldly cancelled and postmarked "Windsor, IL Aug 18 A.M. 1989," Windsor being the nearest post office, less than four miles away. An attending note read "From the postmark you'll understand." I do understand, and I appreciate Bob's sense of humor as well as his sense of history.

Then there was a letter, dated August 18, 1989, from a Disciples of Christ minister, Neal Buffaloe, in Conway, Arkansas, who has spent most of his years in the Church of Christ. He wrote:  

Not many days ago I was re-reading portions of your The Stone-Campbell Movement ('have read it twice in its entirety and have returned many times to certain passages) and took note of your emphasis (p. 592) on the date August 18, 1889, as "a suitable date for the beginning of the Church of Christ." Sommer's Sand Creek gathering and reading of ale Document constituted a landmark event. I thought it appropriate to write you on the anniversary of that date, and I wager that I am the only person in the entire world who is taking note of it.  

I wrote back to my dear friend of many years that he would have lost his bet, for he was not the only one who remembered. In fact there was a seminar conducted on the old Sand Creek site honoring the occasion, attended by some 100 people and sponsored by a Church of Christ in the area, with historian Earl West as one of the speakers. The seminar recalled what took place at Sand Creek as "The meeting was a prime event in the national division of the Church of Christ and the Disciples of Christ."

Neal Buffaloe said other things in his letter that deeply impressed me. "I cherish my background in the Church of Christ," he said, "and within my limited sphere, attempt to move as freely among them as you do all the branches of the movement." And he wrote sympathetically of Daniel Sommer: "He was obviously a man of great conviction, and while I may regret all that took place then, I think we do well to pause and take note of those who followed the courage of their convictions." He went on to express confidence that our people and the whole church will one day be one.

Even though circumstances were such that Neal decided to leave the Church of Christ and work with the Disciples, he no less cherishes his Church of Christ heritage. He has learned to be selective in drawing upon the lessons that history teaches. He can appreciate the noble intentions and the untiring efforts of a Daniel Sommer without agreeing with every thing he did. This would be true of the history of every religious body. We all have tares growing with the wheat.

The Churches of Christ of today can and should look back to Sand Creek with both a critical and an appreciative attitude, and certainly with more sympathy than censure for the old pioneers who blazed the trail the best they knew how. So let us come to terms with who and what we are and celebrate our Centennial without apology. — the Editor

     There are times when we can never meet the future with sufficient elasticity of mind, especially if we are locked in the contemporary systems of thought. We can do worse than remember a principle which gives us a firm Rock and leaves us the maximum elasticity for our minds: the principle: Hold to Christ, and for the rest be totally uncommitted.— Herbert Butterfield