THOSE GOSPEL MEETINGS!
Cecil Hook

If you were converted thirty-five or more years ago, chances are that you “responded to the invitation” during a gospel meeting. During my childhood and the greater part of my life in the Church of Christ, the gospel meeting was a tried and true method of evangelism. Most of the additions were in response to the convincing messages of an imported preacher and the arousing invitation songs at those exciting gatherings.

That eagerly awaited annual effort was the highlight of the year. Before the days of air conditioning and buildings large enough to accommodate the crowds, the services were conducted outdoors where I grew up in West Texas. Through the years the duration of those efforts has shrunken from two or three weeks to two or three days, or none at all.

Other churches had revival meetings; we had gospel meetings. You do not read of revivals in the Scriptures, but you read about the gospel. Never mind that gospel was never used to describe a meeting. Never mind that the very persons we hoped to attract understood what a revival meeting was but might be unclear about a gospel meeting. But we gained a satisfaction in splitting that hair.

In the preceding remarks, I wrote of gospel meetings with supposedly evangelistic purposes. As I think back now, I question our understanding then of what gospel preaching and evangelism were. The Good News of salvation through Jesus Christ was like the third stanza of the song which is often skipped. The gospel gave way to doctrinal disputes and hobby-riding in our effort to convert the Baptists and Methodists to a different set of doctrines of our exclusive brand.

One night of each series was always devoted toward convicting others that instrumental music in worship would sent them to hell.

It seemed of vast importance that the sinner be convinced that the church began on Pentecost, not before or after. Jesus was necessarily mentioned, but the emphasis was on the church. Sometimes to head off premillennial thinking, a sermon labored to show the identity of the church with the kingdom, both being started on Pentecost, and both being the Church of Christ rather than the Baptist Church, the Methodist Church, or any other. Most of the preachers denounced other churches by name, often in scorn and contempt and with arrogant challenges.

There always had to be a lesson on the identity of the church—its founder, origin, terms of entrance, worship, work, organization, name, etc. showing that those marks identified our segment of the Church of Christ as the true church. Jesus got passing mention in contrast to Joseph Smith, Martin Luther, John Calvin, and other such “false” teachers. Those lessons made it seem that salvation was dependent more in being in the rightly patterned organization than in a personal relationship with God in Christ.

I can still visualize those blackboard diagrams, which I also used for many years, depicting our concept of the original church, the foretold apostasy (obliteration of the church), the misguided efforts of the Reformation, and our restoration of the one true church. Of course, our segment of the splintered Restoration Movement was it!

No gospel meeting would have been complete without at least one effort to convince the sinner that faith was not enough to save but the declaration that works of obedience, primarily the five steps, was the gospel bringing salvation. The saving faith was made to be more a faith in right works than belief in Jesus as the Lord to whom one surrendered his life.

Our religious neighbors testified to having had saving experiences and the Pentecostals claimed gifts of the Spirit. This made it imperative that one lesson be given in ridicule of those claims and to convince all that the Holy Spirit completed his work 1900 years ago and left us the New Testament scriptures, and that through—that word alone he touches our lives and is in us, his temples.

Regardless of its subject, in each lesson baptism was emphasized. But that was not enough. One session had to be devoted to baptism to make sure that all listeners knew the purpose and mode of baptism and who were candidates for it, and to know their previous baptism was not to be trusted.

In most any discourse on any subject there were places where the insert key could be tapped to bring in points about baptism, faith only, instrumental music, or whatever the preacher was contentious about. He could inject these points selectively depending on who was in the audience.

Thinking back on the history of our rural congregation, I recall about a dozen men from it who became preachers or missionaries and half that number of women who married preachers or missionaries. I was among those who grew up under that sort of tutelage. We carried those unbalanced, misguided concepts in our various ministries. The lessons given in those meetings were the model for those delivered from the pulpit the rest of the time. We were all caught up in the reactionary preaching of our first decades of existence as a separate body. Fighting for our identity as a separatist group, we unwittingly turned the gospel of salvation into doctrinal disputes concerning the church.

It is with dismay that I recall having accepted that sort of format for my efforts. I had been taught it by the sincerest servants of God whose honorable names many of you would recognize, and its pattern had been imprinted in me almost indelibly. My painful review of these things here is not out of bitterness or to belittle God’s servants. I would have us to see more clearly how our wrong emphasis laid a foundation for an exclusive group which depends more on right forms, doctrines, patterns and procedures than upon a personal belief in Jesus and a living relationship with him by faith. Such preaching reinforced our convictions of exclusiveness from all other Christian groups including the various splinter groups of the Church of Christ.

Perhaps you are protesting that we cannot have Christ apart from his church. You are correct, but being in the church is a result of accepting salvation in Christ. Salvation does not come from finding the right church. God adds the saved to it without their search for it. The Lord does not add all the saved to an exclusive, organized group. We must not proclaim such a group as an element of the gospel of salvation!

Those gospel meetings were not entirely devoid of the gospel. They were unbalanced. That is my point here. It was, and continues to be, a matter of misplaced emphasis. I am pleased that many in this generation are recognizing that problem. The church in change is correcting that misdirection.—1350 Huisache, New Braunfels, Tx. 78130