Theology Thursday: Where We Come From

Welcome to Theology Thursday! Theology is the study of God, his relation to the world, and our relation to him. I hope these newsletters help enhance your faith and deepen your love for God and his people, the church.

Today's topic:
Where does MCC come from?

Pastor Brady's thoughts:
In week three of our MCC Basics: Meaningful Membership class this past Sunday, we spent some time looking at MCC’s heritage in the Restoration Movement faith tradition. In today’s Theology Thursday, I want to introduce that faith tradition, and then we’ll spend the next few weeks examining some of its central tenets.

The first thing to understand is that the vast majority of churches come from a faith tradition. Obviously, this is true for denominational churches. Lutheran churches come from the tradition established by Martin Luther; Methodist churches from John Wesley; Reformed churches from John Calvin, and so on.

All of these have some distinct features of theological belief, church practice, and governance, and all of them have a lot of overlap. MCC has some differences and a lot of overlap with a lot of them.

But even most independent churches are rarely just started by a totally unaffiliated person with no ties to a group of churches or a particular tradition. There are some, but they’re rare.

MCC is an independent Christian Church, which means we are independent from any denominational system or governance hierarchy. But being independent doesn’t mean we aren’t part of a faith tradition. MCC was founded by a group - and still associates with (though with no formal arrangement, which is part of the point) - a faith tradition called the Restoration Movement.

The longer name for it is the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement, named after its founders: Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell.  

Stone was a Presbyterian minister from Maryland. Campbell was from Ireland, and he and his father Thomas - also Presbyterians - came to America to travel around and preach.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, Stone and Campbell got together and decided the big problem with the church/Christianity during that time was the denominational divisions created by church structures that added things to Scripture.

They thought that the various denominations were doing damage to a proper theological understanding of God and were doing damage to Christ’s body the church by elevating creeds to a similar place of truth and authority as the Bible, and by adding rules and expectations to church practice or membership that weren’t commanded in Scripture or modeled by the early church.

These two guys and their groups of followers developed a relationship and began thinking through what the body of Christ should actually look like if its primary goal was to honor God, rather than human traditions.

This relationship resulted in the start of a movement. And that word matters - it’s a “movement,” not another denomination, though there are some similarities. Their aim was to create a loose network of independent churches that believe in and maintain the infallible authority of Scripture and don’t add or subtract from the Bible in their teaching or their practice.  

The big moment came in 1801 in Kentucky at the Caine Ridge Revival. This was a worship service that lasted several days and saw 20,000 people attend and hundreds be baptized and a bunch of people be commissioned to go start churches. Nearly 75 years later, MCC was one of those churches. (We celebrated our 150th anniversary this past November, 2024!)

Eventually, the name Restoration Movement came to stick. But what were they trying to restore?

Stone, Campbell, and their growing base of followers wanted to restore the church to its roots, to the basic doctrine and faithful practice they believed - and I believe - was the apostles’ original vision and intention for the church.

Like Martin Luther and his efforts to reform the Catholic church 300-some years before, Stone and Campbell’s goal wasn’t to abandon the church or start something new, but to reform the church from within and restore the church to its most faithful form and its most God-honoring purpose.

Campbell said the goal of their movement was "the unification of all Christians in a single body patterned after the church of the New Testament.”

This is really the foundation for our faith tradition. We are a unity movement, and our churches - at least at their best, when they’re faithfully living out their heritage - are unity churches.

Unity doesn’t mean there aren’t firm lines to be drawn on doctrine (teaching) and values, or that we lower expectations for faithfulness or church membership to the point of meaninglessness. That would be poor discipleship and unfaithful to God’s desire for the church.

But unity does mean we focus on narrowly-defined essential, core beliefs and church practices - and not because it’s easier or it’s lazy, but because we believe that’s what Jesus wanted for the church he established and that it’s the best way to win lost souls to Christ.

One of the very last things Jesus did before he died was pray this prayer:

“My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you.

May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one— I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity.

Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17:20-23)

God the Son knew he’s about to die and that his earthly ministry is winding down, and he asked God the Father to help his followers be one, “just as you are in me and I am in you.” This is a statement about the Trinity. Because God is one the church can and should be one. The church’s oneness reflects God’s oneness. And the opposite is true: a divided church misrepresents God to the world.  

Stone and Campbell’s point was that all the extra stuff that church denominations and traditions had added onto church beliefs and practice - including things like elaborate religious attire for church leaders (robes, hats, etc.), incense and candles, and the insistence on alignment on widely disputed and non-essential matters (whether Jesus will return before or after the millennium, whether the Holy Spirit empowers believers today to do miraculous works like heal diseases or speak in tongues, etc.) - should be stripped away.

It’s not that they didn’t have opinions on those things, or even preferences on how church should look and feel, but they didn’t believe those things should be a source of division amongst Christians. They didn’t think, for example, that there should be a church on this side of the street that requires its members to abstain from alcohol and the church on the other side of the street insist its clergy wear a collar, when the Bible neither bans alcohol nor requires collars.

Does the New Testament command it or model it positively? Then we should too. If it doesn’t, then we shouldn’t either. That was the idea, and it still is.

At our best - us at MCC, and the 5,000 or so other independent Christian churches - focus on the basic beliefs (“unity in gospel truth” is one our core values!) and basic practices taught to us and modeled for us by the New Testament Christians; no more, no less. We believe this was Jesus’s intention when he created the church.

The desire for a unified family of God led to a few mottos from those early years that help define the Restoration Movement:

“In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, love.”

“We are Christians only, but not the only Christians.”

“Where Scripture speaks, we speak. Where Scripture is silent, we are silent.”

“No creed but Christ.”

Starting next week, we’ll dive into those four mottos.

That’s where we come from - a faith tradition that tries to lower walls between and build bridges to fellowship with believers from other traditions. I consider it an honor and a blessing to minister in an independent Christian church, and I hope you feel the same way about being (hopefully!) a member.

We aren’t trying to find ways we can further separate from brothers and sisters in other churches, we’re trying to find ways we can help the church be one, as God is one.    

TO KNOW GOD AND TO MAKE HIM KNOWN!
- Pastor Brady

Have a question for Theology Thursday? Send an email to office@minierchristian.org and we'll respond, or we'll include in a future Theology Thursday Buffet.