Growing up in a the Independent Church of Christ/Christian church has been a blessing and a curse. It has been a blessing because I am a part of the Restoration Movement. A movement which truly started out to restore the church to first century form. A movement which strives to drop man made creeds and get back to Jesus. It strives to simplify Christianity rather than complicate it with so many divisions. It tries to make it easy for people to follow Jesus rather than have a bunch of man made traditional hoops for people to jump through to become a member of a specific church or denomination.
The curse is that it is hard to explain to people that we are nondenominational. When people see a title like Church of Christ or Christian church they assume there is a loyalty to a bigger organization. It is the Restoration Movements fault though. When you read early documents written in the Restoration Movement they will refer to the church as: Christian church or church of Christ. Notice that the word "church" is not capitalized. Why is that? Because the goal of the Restoration Movement was to be a "church" that followed Christ. It was never meant to be a title. The goal was to just be a "church" that followed Jesus. When we started capitalizing the word "church" we started to give the perception we were a denomination.
The hope is that we get back to the basic intention of the Restoration Movement. It is the hope that we just get back to following Jesus rather than man made creeds whether they are written out or just understood.
Why can't we just be a church?
1 comment:
A good friend of mine recently was talking about the book of Job and how it could relate to this issue... remember Job's friends? They had all these specific ideas and thoughts about Job's situation, but they were all putting God in a box.
We might be putting Jesus in a box with all our denominations and the things that come with them. And just like Job's friends, we mean well at building these things but are missing the point. Jesus said to follow him. Not 'his group'. Him.
I've no real clue about denominations myself really; I don't even know about the Restoration movement. We go to a non-denominational church, and haven't called any church that is part of a 'main' denomination our home so some say I come from a different perspective... oh well.
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