Theology Thursday: Christians Only, but Not the Only Christians

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:
Part three in a series on MCC's Restoration Movement faith tradition.

Pastor Brady's thoughts:
Let’s continue our little series here on tenets of the Restoration Movement faith tradition, into which MCC - as an independent Christian church - was founded and is still associated. 

Last week we looked at the importance of the motto “In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. In all things, love.” 

We unite around the foundational, core beliefs and practices taught and modeled by the New Testament church, we commit to doing so with humility and graciousness, and we allow for disagreement even within our own church membership on the things that are not fundamental to the character of God, the path to salvation, and God-honoring church gatherings/Christian discipleship and living. 

That freedom to disagree means that we believe Restoration Movement Christians are not the only faithful followers of the Lord. I fully expect to be in heaven with people I think are really, really wrong on really, really important stuff. I very much hope so, actually. 

We are Christians only, but not the only Christians. There are two pieces here: the first is that we are Christians only. 

This is another step toward unity. Among other things, it means we aren’t hyphenated Christians, and our church isn’t named after anyone except Jesus Christ (and, if you wanna get persnickety about it, George Minier…but that’s because he founded the town, not because he established some theological tradition we adhere to!)

This slogan arose because many Restoration Movement leaders felt that allegiances to denominations were becoming stronger than allegiance to Christ. They believed that denominationalism was a strong dividing force in the family of God, and a source of the kind of discord and disunity that Jesus prayed in John 17 his followers would avoid. 

So we aren’t Baptist Christians or Methodist Christians or Lutheran Christians or [insert denomination here] Christians. We’re just Christians, united in the gospel of Christ Jesus, and committed to living in and out gospel grace and truth. We believe basic Christian doctrine and practice basic Christian commandments in the church and in our daily lives. 

This is true for how we think about ourselves and the name(s) we give ourselves, but it’s also true for how we approach requirements for church membership and worship. As I laid out last week, the idea is that we do faith and church like the apostles and the earliest Christians in the New Testament did faith and church. The founders of our movement called this “primitive” Christianity. The more we start adding stuff the Bible doesn’t strictly teach or require, the further we move away from the design for the body of Christ that Jesus, Paul, John, Peter, and James intended. Thus, we are Christians only. 

And then second, we aren’t the only Christians. This is hugely important. 

Because we seek to define the essential, core beliefs narrowly (again, read last week’s TT), we can paint the definition of Christianity with a pretty broad brush. Other churches and their people don’t have to look like ours or act like ours or - on a great many questions of theological significance - believe like ours in order for us to still consider them to be Jesus-following, eternal life-enjoying brothers and sisters in Christ. 

Remember, Stone and Campbell’s goal wasn’t to create a new, “better” denomination; it was to restore the church to its New Testament roots and welcome Christians from all faith traditions into the fold. 

With some exceptions and arguments about what indeed should be considered “essential,” if you’re with us on the general characteristics of God and that salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, we can worship with you and call you a brother or sister in the faith.  

Aside from all the rest of it, I also think this is just a really great way of approaching the faith. The best way, even. I don’t want to go around judging or condemning other Christians and their churches. I don’t think that’s spiritually or mentally healthy. I definitely have opinions (sometimes pretty strong ones!) about certain expressions of the faith that I think deviate from scriptural integrity, but I think it’s a good thing that a Restoration Movement attitude means those opinions generally don’t have to include believing so-and-so doesn’t know Jesus altogether. 

Consider what it would mean to think only your group of Christians/churches is the real Christians: it would require believing that millions upon millions of professing believers across history are/were actually unsaved and forever separated from God’s love and glory. That seems exceedingly unlikely. 

The Restoration Movement, for all its good intentions, has had limited success in terms of wide-spread church reform. The numbers get a little tricky, but we only make up approximately 1.5 million out of 99 million church-going Americans today. And most of that number is located in the American midwest. 

Our movement was started around 1800, and we think we get it most right (not all right, surely, but maybe closest to “right,” to the extent that “right” can be determined). But church division and sectarian faith groups have been around since about five minutes after Pentecost, and the formal denominational systems we’re most familiar with have been around for 500 years, and some of them longer than that. It is untenable - to me, at least - to believe that Christians and churches aligning themselves with Stone and Campbell’s vision for the past 225 years or so are the only true family of faithfulness. If that is the case, it would be devastating. 

I do not think it can be the case (and not because it would be devastating, but because I think it’s untrue). Jesus promised to build and protect and sustain his church, not our particular group within it, even though I think our particular group comes closest to what he wanted from and for his church. 

I’m just pretty doggone sure the pearly gates have welcomed a whole lot more sincere believers than just American members of independent Christian churches in the years since the John Adams presidential administration, ya know?

We won’t know until the new heaven and the new earth whether God agrees, but I sure hope we’re correct. I want to join a vast multitude in the heavenly choir, whether they align with us on a bunch of stuff or not. If they are saved and faithful, that’s good enough for me. 

We are Christians only, not the only Christians.

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.