When Did the Restoration Movement Stop?

On the churches of Christ and our impact

200 years in, why do the churches of Christ have so little external fruit to show?

We have had times of growth, with many baptisms bringing people into the kingdom, and that is certainly something for which we should rejoice and be thankful. But it always seems to stop there.

Rather than entering the fray and engaging the world as the world, we seem to be content to set ourselves up outside the battle field and try to pull away those caught in the crossfire.

Thus, we have not moved the needle. We have our own bookstores, colleges, preaching schools, and lectureships, and those keep our broad-scale efforts entirely in-house. Where are our contributions to the culture in art, economics, politics, or otherwise?

Though they have numerous advantages over us including numbers, longevity, and finances, the Southern Baptists, some Presbyterian strains, and the Roman Catholics have made cultural impacts in ways we haven’t even attempted. I’m not even talking about strictly political means, either. Even the Mormons have brought their values outside of their church buildings via their entrepreneurship.

It seems we’ve only restored form, and not function.

In the last generation or two, the descendants of the Reformation have adopted the term semper reformanda, “always reforming.” It’s a bit of a strange concept, as reform usually indicates a move from one form to another rather than perpetual movement.

Restoration, on the other hand, can be an ongoing process. Acknowledging our shortcomings as humans means realizing the church will never be perfectly restored, which gives us reason to continue on in the work of restoring that was begun by men like Stone and the Campbells so long ago.

That doesn’t mean there will always be large-scale shifts to be made. Most of those come in the early years of such a movement.

But, from time to time, it’s only natural that we might find a more Biblical way of carrying out our duty, or realize we’ve become entrenched in a tradition that could be done in a better way, or acknowledging that we’ve backslidden in an area and need to “establish the things that remain,” or find new ways to impact the world around us.

I’m of the belief that the Restoration has done a fine job of restoring major church doctrines, but there is still restoring left to do in the work of the church and in the lives of Christians.

We largely restored orthodoxy and now need to turn our attention to orthopraxy, in a manner of speaking.

We are a football team who have huddled in the locker room and agreed that it’s 10 yards to a first down with 4 tries to get there, touchdowns are worth 6 points, and field goals are worth 3. That makes for a pretty shallow unity. We often don’t have a game plan, a playbook, or even a play style. The guys on the farthest right and left ends of the locker room don’t even have jerseys and helmets that match the rest of the team.

This is not what we see in the book of Acts. When they came together to debate doctrine and find a common foundation (Acts 15), it was for a short time and then they went back to work “upsetting the world” (17:6). They did not get stuck in a purity spiral and spend all of the church’s time and money to get the same preachers and missionaries together every month or two to reconfirm that they were all in the right.

So, we might have solid, Scriptural argumentation for our grasp of salvation and what we do inside the auditorium on Sunday—baptism, a capella worship, male leadership, and so forth—but it’s working outward from there that I believe there is work to be done.

This is where the charges of “you’re too negative” and “you don’t think the church does anything right” and, my personal favorite, “you’re just trying to tear down the coC to create your own church” come from.

Some might call me negative for saying this, but I believe a church that loses half of her youth, is struggling to replace her own leadership, has congregations boarding up the doors, is more impacted by the world than the other way around, and deals with constant internal purity spirals that regularly break unity might need more restoring.

Continuing to cry “peace, peace” while these things are going on will not fix anything. Assuring people that “the Lord’s church will never fail, see how great it’s doing in other countries” shows a stunning lack of care for our own communities’ salvation—not to mention the religious climate our children and grandchildren will grow up in.

We have to stop patting ourselves on the back for our rightness and trying to decide which 2nd- or 3rd-level issue will put someone beyond fellowship, and we need to start looking outward with a vision toward building something that will long outlive us. More on that in a future article.

Can we pick the mantle back up and keep the Restoration going? Or will we rest on our laurels while we continue to decline into irrelevance?

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Notes

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