Our weekend; The Christian Affirmation

For some months Becky and I and others in Mission Alive have been praying for Hispanic and African-American leaders to partner with us in church planting. We were privileged this weekend to have Eloy and Rebecca Garcia and with us as guests. They live in Austin where Eloy ministers at the Southside Church of Christ. Eloy previously worked at the University of Texas as the student adviser of the Masters of Business Administration Program and then as the director of the MBA program. Before working at UT, Eloy served as a church planter and trainer of leaders in Lubbock, El Paso, and Dallas. These impeccable credentials, however, are secondary to Eloy’s call from God to be a church planter and to nurture other church plantings. He is visionary yet gentle, passionate nevertheless patient. We pray that they will come into the September Discovery Lab.

We also met this weekend with the shepherds and evangelist of the New Heritage church in Allen. We found them to be a wonderful group of visionary leaders with an orientation toward church planting. This is not a typical church. They are only two years old, have approximately 180 members, and do not denominate themselves as a “Church of Christ” but still hold strong restoration beliefs on the centrality of Christ, the importance of scripture, and the nature of salvation. Many of their members, including their preaching minister, were once part of another area church and thus define themselves in contrast to their sectarian, sometimes authoritarian heritage. Can Mission Alive work with them in church planting while also working with more traditional Churches of Christ? We hope (but wonder if) that time has come.

Gabe Peterson, our apprentice, referred me to The Christian Affirmation at http://www.christianaffirmation.org/, which first appeared in the Christian Chronicle. It is interesting to note the categories discussed: focus on scripture, baptism, the Lord’s Supper, worship (with a specific statement about a cappella singing), and concern about legalism. The focus is on important, historical forms of the Christian faith rather than the Christian worldview which these rituals are to visually and tactilely reveal. The points reflect the distinct “litmus” test issues (with the exception of the gender issue) of Churches of Christ. I wonder if these issues can and should be discussed in a paper in isolation from the broader pictures and narratives of Christian theology. Will this statement “clarify . . . identity” or become another source of fragmentation (sides solidify and inadvertently people are either in or out, agree or disagree). Gabe incisively writes,

“My thought is that the document has the best intentions, possibly even trying to create tradition, define identity and possibly unify a fractured fellowship (form a creed that isn’t a test of fellowship with other Christians, but of unity within a fractured anti-creedal fellowship) in the midst of our anti-tradition and identity crisis (when historically the church has formed creeds in the midst of various crises). My fear is that it could be a watershed mark and defining point for a division, or fragmentation, that we are in midst of and have been in the midst of for the past ~25 years. Yet the great irony, if this is the case, is that the first real written creed (Nicea) comes after Constantine, when the church in various ways merged with culture, and if we truly believe we are living in post-Constantinian church, and in a post-denominational era – then why are we writing creeds?”

I appreciate the concerns of the writers of the affirmation and pray for the unity of our fellowship, who are on a journey defining identity. I pray that our identity may be found in Christ alone so that we might truly be the church of Christ.