WHAT MUST THE CHURCH OF CHRIST
 DO TO BE SAVED?

Even if we do not hear it as much these days, What Must One Do To Be Saved? has long been a favorite “big meeting” sermon among our people, and rightly so, for it is a question right out of the Bible. In giving that title a twist and asking what the Church of Christ itself must do to be saved I am not of course referring to the personal salvation of its individual members. Surely many of the most faithful Christians in the world are in the Church of Christ, and I am not in this article questioning in the least the genuineness of their faith.

I am rather asking what the Church of Christ as a church or as a denomination, if that term is allowed, must do in order to be “saved” as a viable witness to the Christian faith in today’s world. What must it do to escape extinction in the decades ahead, or if not extinction, relegated to an insignificant southern or Tennessee-Texas sect? What must it do to save its own people from boredom, mediocrity, and irrelevance? What must it do to escape from its legalistic, sectarian, and isolationist past (if indeed this is a correct assessment) and become a meaningful part of the larger Christian world? What must it do to be true to the Bible and to its own heritage in the Stone-Campbell unity movement, and yet move out on the growing edge toward being truly ecumenical, truly catholic, truly holy, and truly apostolic?

I speak as part of the Church of Christ when I ask what we must do to be liberated from our depressing self-service to being joyous servants of others for Jesus’ sake?

Some will doubtless insist that there is nothing to do and that my question is both inappropriate and offensive. I would urge such ones to realize that when it comes to “being what the church ought to be” in the world we have not made much of an impact. Who pays any attention to us? Who listens to us? In what ways have we made any real difference in our world? Not only are we not growing but we have actually decreased in members by the tens of thousands in recent decades. Our typical service is sterile, routine, and boring. Many if not most go to church more out of duty than out of joyous expectation. Our young men are going into business rather than into the ministry. Foreign missions are on the decline. The most revealing sign of all is that too few of our people are joyous, fruit-bearing Christians. Some of our more candid leaders concede that we are dying on the vine.

Others may respond to this by saying that these things are true of other churches as well as of us. That may be true, and it might also be said that as far as the West is concerned we are now in the post-Christian era, that where Christianity was once strong it is now dying. A new Christian age may emerge again in Asia and Africa, but it is dead or dying in the West.

My answer to that is that each church must endeavor to save itself from decadence. I am concerned for Churches of Christ. There are others working for renewal among the Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and all the rest, and I wish them well. The best way for us to save each other and become the one Body of Christ together is for each to save itself. We can help all other churches to become more like what God wants them to be by becoming what God wants us to be. I like the prayer of the Chinese Christian who prayed, “Renew your church, O God, beginning with me.”

Moreover, I am persuaded that we in Churches of Christ have been guilty in ways that most other churches have not. We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, true, but some of our sins in Churches of Christ have been particularly grievous, and it is these that we must overcome if we are to be saved.

In this first installment I will mention one of the most important things that we must do without delay.

We must confess that we have been wrong about some things.

This should begin in our own assemblies and among our own people. From them it will reach out to others. We must first show some tough love among ourselves, including soul-searching repentance as a people. It will be wonderfully liberating when we can honestly say, “We have been wrong,” and in the long pull it will be encouraging to our people and will give them hope of our eventually becoming a more responsible and spiritual people. It will also gain us the respect of our neighbors. I know, for I have seen it work when in visiting other churches I have occasion to confess that we in the Church of Christ have often had a wrong attitude. It always impresses those that are at first critical, especially when one from the Church of Christ is in their service as a visitor, which itself is shock enough!

The sin that we must confess is our patent refusal to have anything to do with other churches and other Christians. In the old days we attacked other churches from the pulpit and mailed out tracts condemning “denominationalism,” implying of course that we were not a denomination. On the radio we “skinned the sects” and we debated anyone who had the nerve to take us on. We soon gained the reputation of believing that we were the only true church, the only faithful Christians, and the only ones going to heaven. We succeeded in causing other believers to resent us if not hate us. When they showed such resentment our response was that they didn’t really want the truth. In rejecting us they rejected God himself!

In recent years this “skin the sects” attitude has declined. We are now more mature, better educated, wealthier, and more responsible. Sociologists would say we are moving from sect-type church to a denomination-type, which is typical of religious bodies our age. But we are almost as sectarian and exclusivistic as we have ever been. We are now more subtle, more benign in our sectarianism. These days we may not talk about other churches and believers the way we once did, but we still have nothing to do with them. It is as if other churches did not even exist. If it is a joint Thanksgiving or Easter service, no matter how glorious a service it may be, you can count on the Church of Christ having nothing to do with it. Even if it is a joint community effort involving all the churches, such as a campaign to help the homeless, we will not be in on it. It is now common knowledge that if the Church of Christ does anything it does it alone. The Church of Christ has nothing to do with other churches and other Christians (period!)

I am thankful that I can tell people in other churches that this has begun to change. We have numerous churches that are breaking out of this debilitating sectarian syndrome, but they are still far too few, and they are often labeled as “liberal” by the others. About fifty of our congregations pull an “E” in our directory of churches, while many more are moving in that direction. The “E” stands for ecumenical, still a bad word among us even if it is eminently biblical. If we are to be saved these avant garde churches must greatly multiply.

The exclusivism I refer to is evident in our party lingo. Everyone understands that “the Lord’s people” or “the Lord’s church” refers only to Church of Christ folk. If one of our girls marries a Baptist she is supposed to understand that he is not “a member of the church” even when she considers him a faithful Christian.

We can be saved from such sectarian exclusivism without compromising any truth we hold. Our preachers can belong to the ministerial alliance and we can join “the denominations” in a Thanksgiving service without approving of any doctrine we consider false, just as we can read a commentary written by a Methodist (as we do) or sing hymns written by Roman Catholics (as we do) without approving of any error practiced by those churches.

How can we be the salt of the earth and the light of the world when we have nothing to do with anyone else? Our people spend all their lives in our congregations without ever having heard a minister from another church in one of our pulpits. Most of our people never attend any service of any other church unless it be a funeral or a wedding. We are supposed to be a people who believe in and work for the unity of all Christians—that is our heritage!—but how can we be a witness for the oneness of all believers when we isolate ourselves from all other believers?

There is only one answer to all this: We must change our ways and confess that we have been wrong. We are wrong when we imply that we are the only true church or that we are the only Christians. We are wrong when we suggest that people have to belong to what we call the “Church of Christ” to be saved and go to heaven. We are grievously wrong when we believe that if people are “not of us” they are going to hell.

In order to believe that we are right we do not have to believe that everyone else is wrong. Jesus warned his disciples against a self-righteousness that assumes that if others are “not of us” they cannot be doing the work of God (Mk. 9:38-39). Our own pioneers never thought of themselves as the only Christians and the only true church, forging the motto, “We are not the only Christians, but Christians only.”

Our preachers and elders need to say it before our assemblies, We have been wrong! I am positive it will have a revolutionary effect for good. There is nothing we could do that would be more liberating for our people. And our leadership would be surprised as to how many would say they never believed that way anyhow!

While we are at it we must confess that we have also been wrong about instrumental music. I concede that this will be hard for us to say, but it must be said if we are to be saved. In coming clean of our partyism we must strip off what we are so widely noted for—not so much our good works but that we believe it is a sin to use instrumental music.

And that is what we must confess, not that we sing acappella, which of course is all right, but in naming something a sin that the Bible does not name a sin, and for making the use of an instrument a test of Christian fellowship. We have something like 3,000,000 sisters and brothers in the Christian Churches/Disciples of Christ who share our heritage, who are “Christians only” and who have been baptized just as we have, but whom we reject because they use instrumental music.

This is our sin, and this we must correct if we are to be saved. We must make it plain that while we choose to sing acappella it is a matter for each church to decide for itself, and that we will no longer condemn others when they differ with us on this and we will no longer make it a test of fellowship. Some of our people can even say that for them it would be a sin to have an instrument in that it would violate their conscience. That too is OK so long as they do not impose their opinion on others, making a law where God has not made one.

But again our leaders will find when they at last announce that they will no longer condemn others because of instrumental music that most of our people never believed in doing that in the first place, especially our younger people. Only recently in a large Dallas area Church of Christ a class of sixty young marrieds were asked by the teacher for a show of hands of those who found instrumental music to be a problem. Only a few raised their hand. Several surveys in recent years reveal that among the rank and file of our people instrumental music is a non-issue. And yet it is one of the main reasons why we have been stereotyped as sectarian and antiquated in the eyes of the world.

We have been wrong about some things! It would be a glorious proclamation, and it would cause folk to pay more attention to the important things we are right about.—the Editor

(To be continued as a series)

_______________________

The unexamined life is not worth living.—Socrates