See the Kingdom

Note: This essay was first posted in December of 2001.

Let’s Keep Moving!

Dear brothers and sisters and saints of God:

A hundred and more years ago, the pioneers of the Church of God movement were fiery evangelists who went from place to place preaching a twofold message. They really saw it as a single message, inseparable sides of the same coin: holiness and unity. They also preached, as they thought, the gospel of salvation and also of “full salvation” which meant that no one need settle for anything less than being fully rid of all sin. Now that was rather radical stuff, and they were often hounded out of the very places they had been invited to preach. Sometimes they would be invited to speak in a meeting house belonging to a particular denomination, and immediately preach a hard message which included all of the above, but which also had to touch on the necessary path to salvation and sanctification and unity, as they saw it. This was to “come out from among them, and touch not the unclean thing” etc.; and that specifically meant forsaking the sin of division in the form of loyalty to a particular denomination, hierarchy, sect, or creed.

Now in many ways, these years later, much of the purpose of those pioneers has been accomplished, at least as it relates to denominations. Broadly speaking, you don’t routinely see most Presbyterians assuming that you can’t get to heaven unless you are a Presbyterian, nor do you see Methodists refusing fellowship with Baptists. You get the idea. And here we are, once the forefront of that successful movement toward more general unity in the church, and the very success that we have seen in denominational walls coming down has made us feel kind of useless, because the church and the world has moved, has changed, and it has been God’s doing and only partly ours. The whole church has moved, and we, focused on our own memories of those heady days, see only dimly the truths our pioneers proclaimed with such fire. Thus we are at a standstill or a crossroads, as Gil Stafford puts it, wondering what we are supposed to be doing by now. Some are even asking if we should forget about all this heritage stuff and just dissolve organizationally, becoming “a loose association of vaguely evangelical congregations.”

But though denominationalism is not so much of a burning issue anymore, because more of God’s people are grappling with that sin and overcoming it, we have, as I see it, much more work ahead. There are many sins of division that were noticed by our pioneers. Some of these received less emphasis so that they could get to what seemed to them like the most immediate problem, something they could address directly, namely “sectism” and “creeds”. But these other issues they saw included such things as sexism, racism, and political partisanship. We’ve carried the banner, with very limited success, on fighting the first of these three; and have from time to time, especially recently, struggled with frustration on the second. Much more needs to be done on both, but for the moment I want to focus on the last one.