Archives: Articles

In less than two years from now, the 150th anniversary of the formal organization of the Mormon Church will be observed with carefully choreographed ceremonies telecast from the gigantic Tabernacle in Salt Lake City’s historic Temple Square. Distinctly separate ceremonies will be conducted in the 10,000-seat auditorium in Independence, Missouri, the center-place and headquarters of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS). And in a variety of less well-known places the members of an astonishing array of Mormon splinter sects will commemorate the beginning times of their faith. Though "Come, Come Ye Saints" will ring forth from the mountains and "The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning" will well up from the plains in sesquicentennial celebration in the spring of 1980, the birth of Mormonism actually preceded the April 6, 1830, date which marked the creation of the church. The first Latter-day Saints gathered around Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, as the Book of Mormon came into being; the Mormon field has, even now, been "white to the harvest" for a century and a half. For that reason, 1978 is as much a year of jubilee as 1980 will be. This is, therefore, a fit and proper time to make inquiry about the nature of modern Mormonism and then to ask, "Where from here?"

Amazing Growth

Although surveyors of the religious scene have been mentioning the Mormons for almost as long as Mormonism has been in existence, their reports have always placed the Saints outside the mainstream, treating them as a sort of aberrant footnote to the nation’s religious life. But if Mormonism continues to grow at its present 5 per cent per annum rate for a few more years, this situation is bound to change. Already there are more Mormons than Presbyterians; by conservative estimates, the LDS church, as the Utah body is often called, will alone have upward of 4.5 million members when its sesquicentennial Hosanna Shout rings out. Between 250,000 and 300,000 more Saints can be added when all the Mormon groups are counted in. The sum total suggests that while the Mormons are definitely not moving toward the American religious mainstream, that mainstream could well be moving toward them.

That Mormonism might ever become the national religion seems farfetched. Yet in view of its amazing growth in its first 150 years, it is not without interest to note that an LDS mathematician recently made a half-joking but statistically correct projection that "if Mormonism continues to grow in the United States at its present rate, and if the U.S. population continues to grow at its present rate, then in another 150 years when Mormonism celebrates its tricentennial, all the nation’s citizens will be Mormons."

The perils of ecclesiastical success and the difficulty of predicting the birth rate make questionable the accuracy of that extrapolation. Yet Mormonism has clearly arrived as a religious force -- and not just in the United States. Practically every Saturday the Mormon publication Church News reports the organization of new stakes, wards, branches or missions (the basic units of the LDS system) beyond the boundaries of this country. Significant Mormon populations exist in Mexico, in many Central and South American nations, in the South Seas and in Europe. LDS temples nowadays are almost as likely to be built outside as inside the United States. And ever-increasing numbers of converts made in foreign lands by that portion of the church’s 25,300-member full-time missionary staff stationed outside the U.S. seem to many Mormons to presage a time when their church will be the church universal.

The New Revelation

Whether such will ever be the case or not, a crucial obstacle which almost certainly would have prevented the LDS church from ever being a universal church was removed on June 9, 1978, when the Lord, it was reported, confirmed "by revelation" to church President Spencer W. Kimball and his counselors "that the long-promised day had come when every faithful worthy man in the church may receive the holy priesthood." Signaling the elimination of the barrier which had kept black men of African descent from holding the LDS priesthood, this revelation was an event of extraordinary importance to Latter-day Saints. It was widely and rapidly reported in the American press and electronic news media where many accounts, elaborating on the official announcement, suggested that the revelation was, in the words of the New York Times, "another example of the adaptation of Mormon beliefs to American culture.

Despite the seductive persuasiveness of this interpretation, the June 9 revelation will never be fully understood if it is regarded simply as a pragmatic doctrinal shift ultimately designed to bring Latter-day Saints into congruence with mainstream America. The timing and context, and even the wording of the revelation itself, indicate that the change has to do not with America so much as with the world.

A revelation in Mormondom rarely comes as a bolt from the blue; the process involves asking questions and getting answers. The occasion of questioning has to be considered, and it must be recalled that while questions about priesthood and the black man may have been asked, an answer was not forthcoming in the ‘60s when the church was under pressure about the matter from without, nor in the early ‘70s when liberal Latter-day Saints agitated the issue from within. The inspiration which led President Kimball and his counselors to spend many hours in the Upper Room of the Temple pleading long and earnestly for divine guidance did not stem from a messy situation with blacks picketing the church’s annual conference in Salt Lake City, but was "the expansion of the work of the Lord over the earth."

Most especially, the black man’s having been "cursed as to the priesthood" had made for difficulty as the church expanded in South America. In many cases there, determining who has African ancestry and who has not presents serious problems. If a pragmatic reason for the revelation must be found, it is better found in the fact that on October 30 an LDS temple will be dedicated in Sao Paulo, Brazil -- and making sufficient determination as to which Mormons were racially acceptable to enter the holy place could have proved a horrendous task. Since revelation now has established the doctrine that worthy men of any race can hold the priesthood "with power to exercise its divine authority, and enjoy with [their] loved ones every blessing that flows therefrom, including the blessings of the temple," such difficulty is avoided. At the same time the way is opened for stakes and wards to be organized where adequate local priesthood leadership might have proved a problem heretofore, and the path is cleared so that LDS temples may be built in any place in the world and universally used by all worthy Mormons in the area.

Predicting the impact of the June 9 revelation on the growth pattern of the church would be risky. But the fact that this revelation came in the context of worldwide evangelism rather than domestic politics or American social and cultural circumstances is yet another indication that Mormonism can no longer be regarded as a 19th century religiocultural artifact and dismissed as a footnote to the story of American religion. Mormonism is here to stay. Where did it come from? And more important, how and why is it growing at such a rapid pace?

Telling the Mormon Story

"How much do you know about the Mormon Church? Would you like to know more?" These are the "golden questions" asked every day by thousands of Mormon missionaries, mainly young male members of the Utah-based LDS church. Notwithstanding enough affirmative responses to lead to 167,939 convert baptisms in 1977, the missionary task is not always an easy one. Fresh-faced, clean-cut, neatly dressed, these young people often find a warm welcome in the homes of "golden" families already committed to investigating the Mormon gospel. But in straight-line tracting, the strategy of knocking on every door in a specific area, they are invited to come in only nine out of every 1,000 times. It is not difficult, therefore, to understand the discouragement recently revealed during an impromptu interview by a very young and obviously inexperienced LDS elder. He was homesick, lonely, and quite evidently dismayed at his lack of success. But his principal complaint was the somewhat unexpected lament that "everyone knows the Mormon story already."

Doubtless this pleasant young man soon found someone unacquainted with Joseph Smith’s Testimony, that ubiquitous missionary tract which contains the official account of the prophet’s visions and his discovery of the ancient record chronicling the lives and times, vicissitudes and final destruction of a Hebraic people whose patriarch immigrated to America with his family in 600 BC. But whether he found someone to hear his message or not, it is easy to appreciate the young missionary’s fear that everyone already knew the Mormon story. Mormons all together -- RLDS and LDS -- have some 28,000 missionaries in the field worldwide. In addition, the Utah church is actively engaged in spreading the LDS message via official and quasi-official publications, television and radio programs and spot announcements, visitors’ center activities, local ward open houses and genealogy classes, and even by using billboards, bumper stickers, and multipaged advertisements in the Reader’s Digest.

Certainly large numbers of Americans are familiar with the general, outlines of Joseph Smith’s story. They are not always sensitive to it, however, for knowing the story and comprehending its significance are two very different things. The tale of an unsophisticated farm boy who found some engraved metal plates and used "magic spectacles" to translate therefrom a thousand years of pre-Columbian American history appears so incredible to many non-Mormons that they simply dismiss the prophet’s visions as hallucinations, regard his "golden bible" as a worthless document, and wonder how any intelligent person could ever accept it as true. Serious critics look at the Book of Mormon more closely. Using as evidence its obvious parallels to their 19th century accounts tying the American Indian to Israel’s lost tribes, its descriptions of situations, incidents and characters suspiciously like those within Joseph Smith’s ken, its echoes of Masonic lore, its Isaiah passages and its bountiful supply of anachronisms, they conclude that the work is not only worthless but a fraud. In either case, efforts to explore the implications of the book’s content are missing.

A Usable Past

The book is cast in the form of a historical narrative. Having something of the style and flavor of the Old Testament, it claims to be the story of what happened when God’s people came to the Western Hemisphere. It is a history, and it has functioned -- as history tends to function -- as a binding agent, melding disparate individuals together into a single people by giving them a common past. The Book of Mormon provided the Saints with a usable past and a common set of expectations -- in much the same fashion as did the book that was pulled together by the Jews as they sat down by the rivers of Babylon and wept when they remembered Zion. An unorthodox reminder of their Judeo-Christian heritage, Smith’s book told them that the Lord’s song had been sung on this side of the Atlantic and explained how it might be sung again. Defined as truth by the prophet whose raising up was prophesied therein, the book became true for those who believed, in much the same way as the entire body of Christian Scripture has become true for biblical literalists.

Those persons who have considered Smith’s book simply as an ordinary historical account have found much to criticize. Yet critics find it well nigh impossible to discount the way the Book of Mormon, appearing as it did at a time when all America seemed set adrift in a bewildering new world, furnished Jacksonian believers with a reassuring sense of time and place. In that uprooted society it supplied a very real connection with the Ancient of Days, an extremely useful Abrahamic lineage, and a universe of story and metaphor so powerful that it continues to tie together a good portion of the human race, even in this era when alienation and anomie threaten to predominate. Without accepting the work at face value, it is nevertheless possible to regard the Book of Mormon as the product of an extraordinary and profound act of the religious imagination. It lent legitimacy to Joseph Smith’s prophetic career and, by tying America to Israel, gave credence to the claim that in these latter days America is the Promised Land and the Mormons are the Chosen People.

The book’s Hebraic influence was intensified in the lives of the Saints by the peculiar form of Christianity instituted with the organization of the LDS church. A primitivist of an unusual kind, Smith harked back to a form of Christianity which repudiated the outcome of the Jerusalem conference described in Acts 15. Adopting a position not unlike that of Saint Peter before a vision taught him not to despise the Gentiles, the prophet held that would-be Christians would first have to choose to be chosen. This meant that before they gained access to God’s grace they would have to repent and be baptized into the (Mormon) Church of Christ because old covenants had been done away with when God executed a new, perpetual and exclusive contract with the Latter-day Saints in 1830.

As Christianity was God’s gift to his own people, and as the Mormons were that people, so membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints became the new covenant sign. And the work rolled forth, carried forward by Christians completely convinced that they had taken possession of that special relationship to God which had once been the sole property of the Jews.

Asserting that God and Jesus are literally father and son, that Jesus and Jehovah are one and the same, and that even the Holy Spirit is somehow located in time and space, these new Saints clothed the mystical body of Christ with the real flesh of Mormonism and started out to build up Zion, drawing biblical parallels every step of the way. They had such a vivid perception of themselves as God’s people that the past and present were joined. Prosaic and matter-of-fact, they made the symbolic so tangible that a direct link was forged between their own day and the days described in Old Testament and New. Mormon theology’s emphasis on the family as the redemptive unit, its system of patriarchal blessing in which each individual’s membership in the household of Ephraim or Mannaseh or Judah is solemnly intoned; and its "restored" priesthood all worked to strengthen the Hebraic connection.

The process of cultural integration was accelerated as the 19th century progressed. Persecution and kingdom-building pushed and pulled the Saints together, giving them a firm LDS identity. Then shared memories of those early years plus present participation in Mormonism’s corporate life completed the transformation. Now Mormons are not simply members of an unusual ecclesiastical corporation. They are a neo-Judaic people so separate and distinct that new converts must undergo a process of assimilation roughly comparable to that which has to take place when immigrants adopt a new and dissimilar nationality.

Today the Mormon world intersects the larger one at a multiplicity of points, and when the two fail to converge the difference in direction is often very subtle. Still, there is no denying that the Mormons inhabit a radically different world from the one outside, and that -- for the most part -- theirs is an orderly world wherein questions have answers and people know who they are and where they stand.

Mormon Fundamentalists

If the 19th century was a time of cultural integration, it was also a time of internal division. The church split apart in the aftermath of the prophet’s murder in 1844, and it remains divided today. Sometimes the sheer size and visibility of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints cause it to be thought of as the "real" Mormon church. But close to 150 other LDS organizations are or have been in existence. While most of these can be described as splinter groups of small membership and minimal importance, there are presently two major exceptions, the new Mormon fundamentalists and the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

One of the more visible manifestations of early Mormonism’s identification with Old Testament times was the institution of plural marriage (polygamy), which was openly practiced in Utah from 1850 to 1890. In response to terrific outside pressure, the practice was banned by the church in 1890, but continued to be officially condoned until 1907, when it was banned absolutely and made a cause for excommunication. Plural marriage persisted on the underground nevertheless. In the past decade it has reappeared as the major tenet of an undetermined number of LDS fundamentalist sects with a total membership estimated at somewhere between 3,000 and 20,000.

In accounts of contemporary Mormonism, the new polygamists are often highlighted too much just because they make such good copy, especially when they try to kill each other off. Yet these modern Saints who have elected to live in plural marriage as the most dramatic and satisfying means of demonstrating total commitment to the fullness of the gospel are clearly a part of the picture. As today’s influential LDS leaders idealize the monogamous nuclear family and make it the center of the faith, plurality’s extended households are a necessary reminder of the enormous extent to which Mormonism deviated from the U.S. norm in the not-too-distant past.

The ‘Reorganization’

Much more important than the fundamentalists, the Reorganized Church stands at the opposite end of the Mormon spectrum. Rather than being "more Mormon" than the Utah Mormons, its members so closely resemble their mostly Protestant midwestern neighbors that some Salt Lake Saints claim that the RLDS church is Protestant in everything but name. In this they are mistaken. It is true that in 1972 the RLDS church formally recognized as revelation the basic principle that "there are those who are not of this fold to whom the saving grace of the gospel must go." But the acceptance of a position which much of Protestant Christianity regards as axiomatic does not make the Reorganization a Protestant church. The RLDS membership retains a distinctive Latter Day Saint identity, which should not be surprising since the roots of the RLDS form of Mormonism are to be found in the very beginnings of the Mormon movement.

Mormonism changed dramatically between 1830 and 1844. Starting out as a variant form of New Testament primitivism, it became increasingly Hebraic as time passed. The prophet’s charismatic authority kept the church together during his lifetime, but in the years after Smith’s death, Saints scattered in all directions. Although many of the Mormons -- perhaps a majority, but no one knows for sure -- accepted the leadership of Brigham Young and the Council of the Twelve and followed them to Utah, many others stayed behind. Remaining true to Mormonism despite a decade-long interruption in the continuity of the prophetic leadership line, many of the Saints who stayed away from Utah were reunited under the leadership of Joseph Smith III in 1860.

The "Reorganization" pulled together those Saints whose understanding of the Mormon message was more closely tied to traditional Christian primitivism than to the neo-Judaic Christianity of Mormonism’s last few years in Nauvoo, Illinois. They refused to accept plural marriage, the idea of the political kingdom, and temple worship, as well as the more esoteric LDS doctrines such as plurality of gods and baptism of the dead. So they re-established the church according to their own gospel interpretation, preserving in Mormonism that strain -- present from the beginning -- which saw the church first as the Church of Christ and after that as the Church of Latter Day Saints. Although the demise of polygamy and the political kingdom removed two of the most potent symbols of division between the RLDS group and the Utah Mormons, no ecclesiastical rapprochement has occurred. None is really expected since members of the two churches have apparently irreconcilable conceptions of what Mormonism means.

An ecumenical movement has arisen among LDS historians, however. During the past decade the Mormon History Association and the John Whitmer Historical Association have been established. Their meetings are occasions when professional historians from both traditions associate freely, sharing with each other information about the past. Despite an easy camaraderie and close fellowship which minimize faith commitments, it is nevertheless increasingly obvious that the two groups are taking separate approaches to their history-writing tasks. Whereas Utah Mormon scholars are making a close examination of the past in order to uncover and integrate every possible bit of existing information so that the official picture can be completed and clarified, RLDS scholars are looking at that same past with an eye to discovering not so much particular truths as universal ones.

Impelled by a need to find the roots of their form of Mormonism, leading historians of the Reorganization have embarked on an exercise in higher criticism, subjecting to close scrutiny Joseph Smith’s story and Mormon scripture as well as the two official versions of church history. While the long-range outcome of this activity is hard to predict, what seems to be happening for these Saints is a reversal of the 19th century process whereby the metaphorical was translated into literal terms. The RLDS church has always maintained the now clearly unrealistic position that the prophet was not involved in plural marriage and that the Mormon religion was somehow drastically changed after Smith’s death by Brigham Young and the Mormons who went to Utah. If the admittedly risky enterprise of taking the real stuff of the Mormon past and finding in it a meaningful body of symbolic truth is a success, a firmer foundation for the church could be the result.

Meanwhile, most RLDS activity goes on virtually oblivious of this intellectual and spiritual ferment. Plans are afoot to build a "temple school" for the training of new church leaders, but no major expansion of the church is presently contemplated even though, with a current membership of 213,399, the Reorganization is larger than it has ever been. The growth rate, the meaningful statistic in making future plans, is down now to slightly less than per cent per year, and it seems likely that the RLDS church will continue as a modest but important ecclesiastical establishment, providing Latter Day Saints with an alternative to Utah Mormonism.

Mainstream Mormonism

Conventional Christianity paid little attention to Mormonism as long as LDS proselytizing was done mainly by pairs of young missionaries sent out from Salt Lake City. But now that large numbers of local Mormons are joining the "happiness is Mormonism" chorus, the churches are beginning to show some concern. A few are reacting by underwriting the publication of slightly modernized versions of early anti-Mormon tracts, but most Christians are simply asking questions, trying to find out exactly what -- in the name of Jesus Christ -- is really going on.

Multiple and sometimes contradictory answers often confuse the questioners. More than anything else, it helps to know that the Latter-day Saints are journeying toward a destination totally different from that posited by more traditional Christian doctrines. It is also crucially important to recognize that their journey is going forward along a road which closely parallels the road not taken by Saint Paul and the first century Christians. As a result, Mormonism cannot be neatly placed in any one of the Catholic-Protestant-Reform categories or along the liberal-conservative-fundamentalist continuum developed to deal with the diversity of normative Christianity.

As its official name implies, the Mormon Church sees itself as a Christian body. At the same time, it is an elaborate priesthood organization which is similar in some respects to Masonic priesthood organizations. It is also an ecclesiastical domain with an administrative structure so intricate that a much-involved Latter-day Saint once predicted that, on the morrow of his death, he will have to confront a flow chart with arrows drawn in to indicate the lines of administrative authority in the celestial kingdom. But Mormonism is more than all that. It is a peculiar people with a distinctive mind-set and behavior pattern. And it is a collection of stakes being strengthened to support the tent of Zion.

A change in emphasis has occurred in Mormonism during the past few decades. Now the family unit rather than the priesthood quorum is the most important organization in the church, and support for families is the central thrust of today’s church program. The local ward (parish) is a community of families; ward activities, standardized throughout the nation, are planned to engender family solidarity. Home teaching and church welfare programs provide mutual support. Genealogy serves to tie in the family from past time, and stress on the eternal marriage covenant takes the family into the distant future. Temple ordinances then sanctify family relationships so that the entire Mormon experience can be said to uphold the integrity of the LDS family. Because the missionary message is also built on what the church can do for families, conversion is often a family affair, and every LDS ward seems to be filled with new families being "fellowshipped" into Mormonism.

Uneasiness and Confidence

Because Mormonism is dynamic and changing, it will never be possible to say with certainty that "in Zion all is well." Yet things seem to be going along with remarkable equanimity just now, even with the gospel being spread around the world and growth becoming the normal condition. Stretched to the limits of its capacity, the administrative machinery is constantly undergoing alteration in order to keep the general authorities close to the Saints. The president of the church is respected as a hard worker as well as prophet, seer and revelator, and his counselors manage to work together as an effective administration. All in all, the general situation of the church can be described as gratifying from the Mormon point of view.

Some Saints worry that individuals are being shunted aside or left out in the rush to idealize the Mormon family. Others worry that the church is encouraging early and/or ill-advised marriages and fear that the rigidity of LDS sex and age roles may inhibit the flexibility which life in the modern world demands. Supporters of ERA are upset by the church stand against ratification, while some who oppose ratification are nonetheless not happy to see the church acting as an adjunct to Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum in this matter. Although thrilled that the priesthood is no longer denied to black men, LDS liberals tend to feel uncomfortable as the leaders of the church articulate generally conservative positions. There is a current of uneasiness, especially among Mormon academics, about what will happen if and when Ezra Taft Benson becomes church president and carries his right-wing political views into office with him. Intellectuals in the church are bothered by the drift toward rigid orthodoxy in the spheres of both behavior and belief. For various reasons, a good many Saints feel constrained by the church’s standardized program. And practically all of them are weary with much attendance at Mormon meetings.

But the importance of these concerns for the future pales almost to insignificance beside the grave problems the church will have to face as it continues to grow and develop into a truly international body. Notwithstanding the rosy picture of a world filled with Mormons which is being projected by the Church News and the official Ensign, the power of the LDS gospel to sustain communities of Saints throughout the world without requiring them to adopt peculiarly American attitudes and stereotyped life styles has not yet been fully proven. The essence of Mormonism awaits distillation, and while that long and painful procedure is under way, the church will have to exercise enough control over its growth to allow time for each new LDS cohort to complete the acculturation process and to begin to establish what being a Latter-day Saint really means before the next cohort arrives. Otherwise the peculiar Mormon identity will dissipate, and, as have other Christian churches, this one will divide.

For all that, however, Utah’s form of Mormonism is anticipating the future with confidence as its 150th anniversary approaches; 1978 has been designated a special year of missions. Neither looking backward in the fundamentalist fashion, nor inward in the manner of the Reorganization, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is looking forward and outward with a view to telling all the people in the world about their opportunity to live out their lives inside the covenant beneath the tent of Zion.

In October 1976, I received a call from a regional executive of the American Baptists. If he were in a church, he would be a bishop’s coadjutor, but the Baptists have never determined whether they are a church, sect, denomination, association or convention. My friend was profoundly choked up over a proposal for the reorganization of the national and regional structures of the denomination.

Now every informant, even one in a friendly religious bureaucracy, must maintain anonymity, so he shall simply be identified as "Deep Choke." After the preliminaries, our conversation ran roughly as follows:

The Bureaucratese of Reorganization

A few days after Deep Choke called, I received some material from him. As I glanced through the newest 265-page reorganizational report (called "SCOW’ for "Study Commission on Relationships"), my eyes lit up at its gripping style. The following example may give the careful reader some useful information:

The fundamental purposes of the convention have not altered in 70 years. Its chartered intention is "to bear witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. . . .To seek the mind of Christ on moral, spiritual, political, economic, social, denominational and ecumenical matters. . . . To guide, unify, and assist American Baptist churches and. groups within the whole Body of Christ." The autonomy of the local church and the separation of church and state are still vaunted and familiar hallmarks of Baptist identity. But it has not always been that way.

Authority of Local Associations

Spiritual heirs of the Anabaptists -- the religious revolutionaries of 16th century Europe -- the Baptists we know today emerged from the Congregational and Presbyterian churches in the first decade of the 17th century. Baptist congregations in America were initially established in 1638-39 by Roger Williams in Providence and John Clarke in Newport. In 1707 the first (American) Baptist Association of Churches was organized in Philadelphia; by 1776 that association was composed of 42 churches in six colonies: Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, New Jersey. New York and Connecticut. Other associations were formed throughout the new nation: at an association meeting in Kentucky in 1796, it was decided that the authority of an association derived from the command of God’s word to assemble in his name for worship, counsel and union for mutual edification and assistance, and to cultivate uniformity of sentiment in principles and practice; most important, the association had power to regulate and govern itself as a body and to give advice to its several churches. Any church that agreed with the enunciated principles should be admitted, and those that opposed them should be rejected. Those principles were typical of the associations formed in America. They all possessed advisory and disciplinary authority in relation to the congregations. The idea of congregational autonomy was to appear much later.

The Massachusetts Mission Society, formed in 1802, was the first state convention. A foreign mission agency was organized in Philadelphia in 1813. The Home Mission Society was founded in New York city in 1832. The momentous schism between the "Southern" and "Northern" Baptists occurred in 1845 amid the growing debate over slavery and related issues. Missionary evangelism, educational work and publications continued in both denominations. In the north the various denominational boards and agencies increasingly found themselves in intensive competition for financial support from the churches. The Northern Baptist Convention (NBC) was formed in 1907, in great part to alleviate the fratricidal warfare for funds between the national mission agencies.

The Foreign and Home Mission Societies, the Boards of Education and Publication, the Women’s Home and Foreign Mission agencies, and the Baptist Historical Society were the primary national institutions. Each maintained and jealously guarded its own autonomy; that is, each possessed freedom to govern its own affairs with separate officers, boards and executive secretaries who administered agency affairs in the interim between board meetings and annual conventions.

When the Northern Baptist Convention was formed in 1907, the mission agencies relinquished their fund-raising activities to the officers and executives of the convention. This style of operation survived for about 60 years. During this period, functional cooperation between the agencies was not emphasized, either horizontally (between agencies at the same level) or vertically (between churches, associations and agencies at various levels). The principal force that held the American Baptists together was a commonly declared but variously defined evangelical view of world missions and a pragmatically organized convention designed to further the mission enterprise more efficiently.

Today Baptists consider themselves to be the most radical proponents of congregational polity. The clarion call for "the autonomy of the local church" became a byword in the 19th century. Then it was affirmed that no ecclesiastical officers or agencies would ever govern the affairs of the autonomous congregations. The ironic result is that when such governance and control do occur, Baptists seldom recognize it since, on traditional and ideological grounds, they believe it cannot happen. Another irony is that local associations have sacrificed their own powers to state and national agencies. The local associations appeared to exert the greatest power and threat to congregational autonomy, so the Baptists gradually nullified the power of these groups, and thereby eliminated the most effective instrument for balancing the powers of the state and national conventions in their relations with the congregations.

Among both American and Southern Baptists, congregational independence remains a revered aspect of the inheritance. The emphasis is somewhat muted outside the Sunbelt because today few people in the north believe that the switch to God’s light is found only in the local pew.

American Baptist Intentions and Realities

The broader mission of the Baptists, whether evangelizing the world for Christ or reaffirming the basic principles of human rights in every nation, remains firm and openly declared. Inside the conventions it is a different matter. The infighting is dose. The unspoken purpose is to gather together as many uninformed delegates as possible and persuade them with evangelical fervor that one’s causes are just, one’s explicit intentions are righteous and the strategy should be to create a unity of purpose out of a babel of competing interests. If they know anything about the proceedings, the people from local congregations are bewildered by this welter of forces; if they know nothing, they are impressed or overjoyed by the "spirit of the meetings."

At present the American Baptists are the victims of the invisible gulf that exists between their own national and state bureaucracies and the individual congregations. For example, in the Pennsylvania-Delaware Association the executive minister is responsible for 475 churches (rural-metropolitan-suburban). True, within Pennsylvania-Delaware there are "area representatives" in the regional associations. Roughly analogous to district managers in a corporate enterprise, they possess no policymaking powers and have no independent budget. They are troubleshooters, paid to assist churches that have lost a minister, or are experiencing financial difficulty, or are not contributing to the mission programs of the state and national conventions.

If significant crises occur, the executive minister may call for assistance from the Ministers Benefit or the National Missions Boards, the Baptist counterparts of HEW; but when this happens, Baptists have made the inevitable move from local problems to nationalized solutions, and the churches once again taste the bitter medicine of dependency. In certain critical matters, the small and average-size congregations, acting in sincere covenant with the ABC, are hardly more independent of the actions of the ABC "headquarters" at Valley Forge than the communities of our nation are free of the actions of the bureaus of the federal government. The local churches and denominations in this land are clearly analogous to their secular counterparts. They offer, therefore, modest and perhaps unique social laboratories for the testing of programs and solutions that might later be applied to broader social spheres. It is a wonder that some expert in Washington has not called attention to these possibilities. For relatively modest sums the federal government could pretest hundreds of programs.

Pressures for Reorganization

The carefully nurtured fiction that the locus of authority in the ABC resides in 6,300 "autonomous" congregations has become increasingly difficult to maintain. In 1959 it was suggested that "there remain three principles of democratic procedure to which free church polity must give serious thought" -- that is, free discussion, no exclusion from national office except on the basis of creed or ability, and legislation and policy-making executed in accord with methods of representative government (Authority and Power in the Free Church Tradition, by P. M. Harrison [Southern Illinois University Press, 1971], p. 162). These recommendations were acted upon with varying degrees of seriousness by the SCODS committee; but the primary pressure that triggered reorganization of the convention was the ferment of the 960s. Various caucuses, notably the "Black American Baptist Churchmen," were organized, and the grosser forms of discrimination were duly remedied. It was also admitted in the SCODS report that the annual meetings were not representative with respect to the whole body of delegates. The report said that the annual convention could not operate as a legislative body since the delegates "represent everyone and no one at the same time."

The convention has never been a legislative body with delegated lawmakers from the churches. There is a difference between delegates and legislators, but that fact did not become evident to Baptists for some decades. To this day, policy provides for 21,000 delegates from the 6,300 churches. But an average of only 3,249 delegates has attended recent conventions. In 1971 68 per cent of the congregations were not directly represented at all. It is not admitted that the constituency is uninformed concerning convention operations or that the subsidized Baptist publications offer only skimpy reports of denominational actions, well tempered by kudos concerning the beneficence of our leaders. That the bureaucratic leaders are benefic has never been questioned and is not the real issue; good and talented people can make disastrous errors, and the market on self-deception has not been cornered by intentional deceivers.

To remedy the situation at the annual conventions, the delegates in 1974 ruled that the annual American Baptist Convention would be called a "meeting" of "the American Baptist Churches" and the meetings would henceforth be biennial. The annual spring ceremony went the way of other religious rites in our time. The leaders could conduct the business of the churches through the improved instruments of the "General Board" and other agencies at the national level.

That was a good move but possibly in the wrong direction. The annual conventions were crudely conceived and dominated for the most part by a small parade of quasi-charismatic leaders. As a sideshow, each board, agency, commission and committee hawked its wares, like Tetzel selling indulgences at Wittenberg. Dominated by the politics of personality, the conventions had been a recipe for the impotency of the people. Finally, in the era of Watergate the Baptists recognized their condition, but in an era of untenable paradoxes they sought to remedy the past by building new structures of power on the shifting sands of independent churches.

The Mission of the Gathered Congregations

In-depth interviews at the San Diego meetings of the American Baptists in June 1977, conferences with executive ministers, discussions with a score of leading clergy and a few leading laypeople, and the study of a considerable body of official and unofficial materials uncovered an increasing discontent at the grass-roots level that most national leaders appear to ignore. Local clergy were disenfranchised by the reorganization of the American Baptist Convention into a biennial nonorganization called the "American Baptist Churches, USA."

The growing discontent is gradually giving rise to a variety of calls for reorganization at the local level, partially to offset the state and national powers, in part as a means to achieve more effective missions at every level. What follows is a compendium of tentative and prescriptive ideas expressed by several persons.

It is of critical importance to recognize that it is a perverse waste of time to blame the "bureaucrats" for this state of affairs. "We the people" have wittingly or unwittingly handed over the reins of authority, power and responsibility to others. We have done this for a variety of reasons, including ignorance, indifference, hypercompetitiveness at the local level, and a persistent romanticizing of the American version of the laissez-faire dream applied to religious organizations. It is clear that the secular and religious bureaucrats have often achieved their purposes as well as conditions have permitted. That executives and bureaucrats often act in a self-serving manner and with mixed motives needs no further empirical proof, but we in the grass-roots communities and churches do not have to continue to give our national officers the responsibility for solving everything and then condemn them for solving so little.

The prescriptions that follow are based on the assumption that missions, like everything else in the Baptist denominations, should be initiated and organized at the local level. In no other way are the congregations going to relearn what is involved in this aspect of the Christian endeavor. In no other way can the people in the local churches become actively reintegrated into the polity of the denomination. In a word, national and world missions should grow out of and extend the local mission efforts.

The local congregations should be engaged in cooperative missions which involve united efforts to learn about the "secular" and "religious" needs in their own areas. Second, the churches could pool their resources for evangelistic and social action. The principle of missions should never be conceived as "foreign," as it has been for generations in the American churches. "Foreign" connotes "alien" or "different from" and inevitably results in all the misconceptions of paternalism and philanthropy; i.e., aiding those who don’t have what we have and who need it. Missions should be conceived as Christian persons helping their neighbors and, in turn, learning from them and receiving aid from them. Mission work is then cooperative and indigenous and "missionaries" become "ministers," not Christian strangers from a superior culture bringing a message of "truth" to a people steeped in religious, social and moral ignorance. The concept of missions as serving one’s neighbor is particularly significant for the grounding of mission in the local churches and local associations.

So, etiologically perceived, the local churches may not exempt themselves from missions by engaging in them indirectly. When the denominational leaders fail to encourage local missions, they are leaving out the basic component and initiatory stimulus for all mission programs. When the local churches remain predominantly focused on missions as something that specialists do "out there," they are reneging on their basic responsibility to their immediate neighbors. The romanticism and moral irresponsibility of defining missions as service to people in far-away places needs to be critically re-examined by the American Baptists.

This romanticism is dramatically symbolized at the biennial meetings when gold emblems are pinned on the newly appointed foreign missionaries. These are the people perceived as truly going forth into the golden rays of the sun’s light. This is a particularly significant theological distortion in a denomination that emphasizes the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, wherein mediating priests are an anathema, except in mission activities.

Reorganizing the Local Associations

Assuming that reorganization at the national and regional levels through SCODS and SCOR is on the right track, it appears essential to look further -- that is, toward revitalizing and restructuring the local churches and associations. Assuming further that a vital mission program involves the same complex of activities and structures that are now present at the national level, what should the local associations of churches do? What follows are merely "bare bones" suggestions.

First, the local associations should develop liturgical and celebrative activities. These associations should meet at regular intervals as a "council of churches," break bread and drink the cup together as neighbors one to another.

Second, they should elect officers and special boards and appoint a part-time "executive minister" from among the local clergy. There is no reason in principle why local associations should be bereft of staff executives, but such persons should not be appointed by higher judicatories at the state or national level. The first task of the local executive minister should be to serve his or her association.

Third, to enable this to happen, the local churches should be free to allocate their money in its entirety to the local association, if they so desire. Money could then be allocated by the association to the national and for state conventions. Obviously, this would he local control "with a vengeance" and would involve risks of parochialism and the like. But many persons firmly believe that the majority of local congregations, though moribund, are constituted by mission-oriented Baptists; probably the only way to awaken them is to offer them new responsibilities, authorities and powers at the most immediate locus of need.

Fourth, delegates should be sent from each local church to the local association, following formulas that are now operative at the national level. It would be these people, numbering from 50 to 200, meeting quarterly or semiannually, who would determine the general policies and programs for the association. Their elected boards and appointed executives would refine and administer the policies and programs, as is now done at the state and national levels.

Fifth, the existing local associations should be geographically reorganized. In urban areas, the large associations of 100 or more churches should be divided into more manageable groups of about 25 churches. In sparsely settled regions where only a handful of Baptist churches are present, the mission should be ecumenically extended to include other denominations that share congregational practice and polity; e.g., the United Church of Christ, the Brethren, the Disciples, the Quakers. Ideally, these efforts would be applauded by the various denominational headquarters, even though no such programs are now on the drawing boards at Valley Forge.

Sixth, delegates from local associations would be elected to attend the state and national conventions. Thus a delegational process would be established which would enable persons to become familiar with every level of denominational organization and polity. Presumably, most of the state and national delegates, board members, and the higher-level executive officers as well, would be recruited from the ranks of those persons who had demonstrated most interest and competence at the local associational level. Since activity at that level is now insignificant throughout the denomination, recruitment for state and national office necessarily focuses on "successful" local pastors and active laypersons from the larger and more affluent churches.

Seventh, it has been suggested that no more than 400 delegates are necessary at the state and national conventions. With that number of persons, far greater participatory sophistication could be anticipated. The local congregations would no longer send delegates directly to the state and national meetings. The churches would be more effectively, although indirectly, represented by the delegates from their local associations. The 68 per cent of the churches presently represented only by their regional executive minister would gain more immediate representation by local delegates and executives.

Revitalizing the Middle

The 20,000 legally entitled delegates who can now, theoretically, be sent from local churches would then be eliminated. At present only about 3,000 uninformed delegates attend the biennial, ostensibly to represent 6,000 churches. The regional and national conventions would then be delegate-centered and business-focused. Visitors from the churches would be encouraged, but they would sit and participate from "the wings," as is true in every serious deliberative and legislative session in the world, except for meetings of the ABC. At the ABC meetings delegates and visitors may sit anywhere and everywhere, almost as though it were an intentional act of the executive leadership to render the policy-making and voting process as difficult as possible for the delegates, scattered as they are and mingled with the "visitors." who often outnumber them 5 to 1 in a business session.

Meanwhile, back at the local association of churches, the executive minister could cooperate fully with the local churches and their ministers to launch integrated mission programs for the area. There would be less need for regional or national administrators to decide on local budgets and to offer their guidance and program directives to areas they know almost nothing about. The national headquarters, however, could deploy functional specialists for various mission projects, such as building new churches, or organizing a local "war of the churches against poverty."

National and foreign mission programs would most likely be enhanced and strengthened by the new local activities. The local people would be more knowledgeable and perhaps more sympathetic to the problems and opportunities for the more extended missions; that is. to their neighbors in more distant areas of need.

Western technology and industry have had the effect of destroying or seriously wounding all of our primary and secondary institutions. This includes the family, the school, the neighborhood, the city, the local region and even the states and commonwealths. Few effective entities seem to exist between the individual person (who is often frantically reading books on self-help and personal integration) and the national or multinational forces. We need to revitalize the middle, the mediating institutions. The churches are no exception: They could become once again a beacon on the hill, a light to the nation and the world.

An Afterword

Upon reading the foregoing proposals, a person high in the councils of the ABC wrote to me as follows:

This topic opens a new can of worms. The election districts are a creation of SCODS, the intention being to create an instrument which would enable every area in the denomination to elect members to the General Board, 150 in all. Delegates to the biennial elect the remaining 50 members of the board.

People at the national level look to the election districts with fervent hopes, but there are problems. One issue is that in many states election-district members hold no office in local or state associations, so the associational workers are disenfranchised. The problem is that the election districts have gained authority before they have any power, and the associations have lost their power before they have lost their authority. The clear purpose seems to be to establish two centers of authority, the local churches and the national boards, with nothing in between.

As my friendly critic put it:

It is doubtful that the crux of the issue today is how to connect the local congregations directly to national sources of skill and power. The problem is to develop local or regional associations of churches with their own resources for policy and program. With the exception of a tiny minority of vital and mature congregations, the local church standing alone in relation only to national headquarters is a dependent rather than a viable and interdependent entity.

Let my correspondent have the last word, for I could not agree more: "The real issues facing us, as I tried to indicate, are how to keep necessary order from becoming tyranny, how to achieve a sense of unity without the stultifying overtones of sameness so that people are free to be and do what they really believe is important."

Despite common ancestry in an American religious movement which knew itself as the "Reformation of the 19th century," the Churches of Christ and the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) today exhibit only faint family resemblances. For a century the congregations of the Christian Church have moved steadily, if at times hesitantly, toward life as one of the "mainstream" Protestant denominations. From the Federal Council of Churches to the Consultation on Church Union (COCU), they have involved themselves in ecumenical relationships; with a restructure of polity during the past decade, they have amplified the connectional dimension of a traditionally congregational ecclesiology.

Meanwhile, the Churches of Christ (the article is important) have fiercely resisted identification as yet another denomination. Within a diverse and loosely associated "brotherhood" they have borne witness to their local congregations as whole and autonomous manifestations of the church. In the present decade, while the Christian Church has slowly declined to 1.3 million members, the Churches of Christ have achieved a membership of approximately 2.5 million; the two wings of the "Reformation" seem classic examples of the contrasting religious patterns assessed by Dean Kelley in Why Conservative Churches Are Growing (Harper & Row, 1972).

Shared History

This disparate development has insulated the groups from each other. For the person in the pew, commerce between the two communions, whether intellectual, religious or social, is rare. Yet members of both churches have maintained an abiding -- some might say excessive -- interest in their shared early history. The 41 volumes of founder Alexander Campbell’s religious periodical, The Millennial Harbinger, remain in print ($350.00 the set) more than a century after original publication ceased. Such pride of ancestry, if exercised critically, may prove singularly beneficial. The churches’ seemingly separate futures will in no small measure depend on evaluations of the vitality and limitations of their diverse legacies.

This concern for tradition is itself a matter worth noting, for the founders of the Disciples of Christ had slender regard for matters traditional. When, in the first decade of the 19th century, Thomas and Alexander Campbell immigrated from the north of Ireland to western Pennsylvania, the division and disarray within their own Presbyterian tradition as well as in the other Protestant churches of the frontier profoundly disturbed them. They were soon fired with zeal -- not to begin another church but to propagate a movement of purification and reunion within the existing churches. They called on church people from the denominations

The Campbells’ effort to unite Christians on the foundation of what they perceived to be the New Testament pattern of preaching and discipline thus included an iconoclastic attack on the historic traditions of the churches. The search for the "ancient order" was simultaneously a severe judgment on the present order.

The Campbellite Formula

The document that articulated this program was the Declaration and Address written by Thomas Campbell in 1809. Pleading for Christian union through a return to New Testament Christianity, Campbell celebrated the freedom and ability of the individual Christian to interpret Scripture untrammeled by the authority of creed or clergy. An honest look at the Bible, unbiased by preconceived theological notions or denominational ax-grinding, so Campbell argued, would lead the individual to the conclusion that it spoke clearly and with a single voice and that its pattern could be duplicated in the present day. "Where the Scriptures speak, we speak," Campbell announced; "where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent." This formula, so he and his son Alexander believed, could achieve public unity for the church while allowing liberty to the private opinions of its members.

The Declaration and Address was published, it should be observed, not as the constitution of a church but as the manifesto of a voluntary society of reformers, the Christian Association of Washington County. And although the society quickly evolved into a congregation and affiliated with the Baptists, the reformers continued to consider themselves a movement. They joined the Baptists not with the idea of being "merely" Baptist but rather on the assumption that they were the leaven by which the Baptist loaf would rise to true Christianity. Strife ensued and, taking a host of Baptist converts, the Disciples of Christ struck out on their own. By the early 1830s, through the persuasive evangelism of Walter Scott and through union with Barton Stone’s Christian movement, what had begun as a voluntary society became a rapidly expanding association of churches. Twenty years later the Disciples of Christ were the seventh largest religious group in America.

The remarkable growth of the churches was prompted by the clarity of their message and the ambiguity of their identity. They were not a denomination, it was regularly insisted; they were a movement, a brotherhood. In those optimistic early days, to join a Disciples congregation was to mesh one’s personal commitment with the new destiny of the Christian faith. The Campbellite formula was the hallmark of the fellowship: the restoration of primitive Christianity, freedom in Christ, and union among Christians.

But within this church of reformers that formula was asked to do double service. It was at once a challenge to American Protestantism and, increasingly, a platform for Disciples churchmanship. Despite its documented effectiveness in the former capacity, it was to prove increasingly unstable in the latter.

Division and Controversy

Rejection of churchly traditions in favor of Scripture, "the living oracles," had quickly established the distinctive features of Disciples worship and polity: weekly communion, believer’s baptism by immersion, a prominent role for the laity, and fervent regard for congregational autonomy. But when further issues of organization and discipline arose, factions within the church tended to argue their cases by elevating to pre-eminence a particular element of the formula: restoration, freedom or union.

By the end of the 19th century the brotherhood, finding the issues irresolvable, had split. The Churches of Christ, maintaining doctrinal conservatism and emphasizing the element of restoration, proclaimed the organization of missionary societies and the use of instrumental music in Worship to be abominations utterly lacking in scriptural warrant. The Christian Church, keeping cautiously open to the currents of critical biblical scholarship, adopted the element of unity as the distinctive Disciples contribution to the faith and proceeded to develop missionary societies and to listen to organs with an easy conscience.

Controversy was not laid to rest by division, however. Disagreement about the relation between baptism and church membership, about the relation between biblical criticism and biblical restorationism, and about the administration of missionary work split the Christian Church again in the 20th century. The Churches of Christ, too, seemed perennially rocked by controversies, ranging from matters of millenarian theology to the financial support of radio and television ministries. Today the Campbell-Scott-Stone tradition exists’ in three wings: the Churches of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and the nondenominational fellowship of Christian Churches and Churches of Christ.

An Unfinished Task

The inability of the traditional Disciples formula to address emerging ecclesiastical and social issues has continued to vex the churches. In 1963 Christian Church historian Ronald E. Osborn evaluated the situation for The Christian Century series "What’s Ahead for the Churches?" and found that "though various attempts have been made to combine the elements in differing proportions (RF₉U₄, RF₄U₇) or to concentrate on one or two of the elements, washing the others out, discomfiture has been the recent lot of Disciples as the tradition simmered in uneasy flux" ("Formula in Flux: Reformation for the Disciples of Christ," The Christian Century, September 25, 1963, p. 1163).

Earlier Disciples have thus presented both the Churches of Christ and the Christian Church with an ironic heritage -- a movement to restore the church, but one whose self-understanding has inhibited sustained theological reflection about the church’s nature and mission. The effort to frame the Disciples message within a comprehensive doctrine of the church still stands before these diverse communions as an unfinished task. Since the two have appropriated their history differently, the common problems will likely receive two quite different sets of answers. But events of the past decade seem to have placed each church further along the road toward a richer ecclesiology.

A Movement with a Message

One problem to be confronted could be characterized as the long-term effect of originating from a voluntary society. The Disciples have cherished the image of being a movement with a distinctive message to promulgate. But this message-centered understanding of the fellowship has all too often had as its corollary a contractual understanding of the church. The result has been that withholding funds and withdrawing from "the movement" have been used as tactics for voicing opposition to policies or trends of thinking.

One important reason for decline in Christian Church membership since the late ‘60s, for example, has been the withdrawal of congregations that objected to the restructure of the denomination’s polity. The hallowed designation "brotherhood" can be somewhat misleading, therefore, implying as it does that "the ties that bind" run deep in the blood and transcend issue-related disagreements. In fact, it is precisely this dimension of "brotherhood" which is most at stake for the churches in the immediate future.

The issues here are perhaps most apparent in the Churches of Christ, where emphasis on restoration of New Testament Christianity has placed ideological purity at a premium. The temptation has been to make loyalty to the message and uniform understanding of it tests of fellowship. The sense of being what Churches of Christ historian David E. Harrell has called "a peculiar people" has often lapsed into intolerant exclusivism. Reuel Lemmons, editor of the widely circulated journal Firm Foundation, shares the opinion of many church leaders when he laments "the disfellowshipping mania" which regularly threatens to erupt in the congregations. This excessive regard for uniformity, Lemmons declares, has made the churches more interested in "guarding the ramparts and ferreting out the heretics" than in mission.

In the past, the churches’ apprehensions about individual thinking occasioned the departure of many talented and well-educated members. In 1966 a group of such exiles published Voices of Concern as a public expression of regret that the Churches of Christ had not fostered an "atmosphere in which independent minds may feel at home." The editor, Robert Meyers, expressed hope that new currents of open-mindedness in the churches betokened "a more charitable tomorrow. Thousands are restless and dissatisfied with the aridity of exclusivism and authoritarianism. Bright young minds are refusing to be put off with answers that have no more to commend them than the hoary beard of antiquity" (Voices of Concern: Critical Studies in Church of Christism [Mission Messenger, 1966], pp. 2-3).

Has that "more charitable tomorrow" arrived? To a surprising degree the answer is Yes. The Churches of Christ are tolerating a significantly wider spectrum of theological opinion within the fellowship than would have been expected even a decade ago. It remains to be seen whether that tolerance for diversity will extend beyond strictly doctrinal issues to the points at which religious concerns clearly interact with social attitudes. Discussion of the place of women in the ministry, for example, has not yet fully developed in the churches. But, as made clear in a 1971 series by Leroy Garrett in the Restoration Review, "the Restoration mind" is concerned with more than whether or not to use a plurality of communion cups during the Lord’s Supper; it is also doing its homework on such matters as social justice and race relations. Whatever the exact outcome, those ministers and editors calling for "unity in diversity" may be expected to play an increasingly influential role in the Churches of Christ.

Beyond the Local Church

A second ecclesiological problem being confronted is the status of the churches’ mission beyond the local congregation. On this issue the most dramatic recent changes have been within the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).

Nineteenth century Disciples feared hierarchical authority to such degree that any organization beyond the local congregation was regarded with suspicion. The Churches of Christ have insisted on leaving missionary work to the initiative of the local church, and any joint efforts are typically coordinated by the elders of a large or particularly active congregation. Even for the "cooperative" Christian Church, missionary and benevolent societies were organized and maintained strictly as adjuncts to the actual church -- that is, the local congregations. Society officers were given such secular titles as general secretary or president, and annual conventions of the denominations were mass meetings, not representative deliberative gatherings.

During the late ‘50s, perspectives began to change in the Christian Church. A panel of scholars was commissioned to reassess the church’s heritage, and its three-volume report, published in 1963, gave theological impetus to the rethinking of polity. In 1968 the churches accepted a new "provisional design" for the denomination, which in a moderately revised form was approved as "the design" by the 1977 General Assembly. The restructured polity incorporates the old denominational boards and agencies into a more inclusive concept of the church existing in three basic manifestations: local, regional and general. Changes in names reflect the changes in thinking. The International Convention of Christian Churches is now the General Assembly of the Christian Church. The chief executive officer of the denomination, Kenneth L. Teegarden, is now the general minister, and the state secretaries are now regional ministers.

The broad effects of these significant revisions cannot yet be assessed, but one important feature is surely the expanded responsibility placed at the church’s regional level (corresponding roughly to states or clusters of states). Particularly notable is the region’s role in care for seminary students and in the oversight of ordination -- responsibilities formerly left to the local congregation. The regional ministers are playing a larger part in the denomination’s financial deliberations and as advisers in ministerial placement, and one of their number, James A. Moak of Kentucky, recently completed service as moderator of the church’s General Assembly. For a denomination not infrequently beleaguered by the distinction between local congregation and general agency, this mediating structure would seem an important addition to the church’s life.

Ecumenical Dialogue

A final ecclesiological problem confronting the Churches of Christ and the Christian Church concerns relations with those whom Alexander Campbell liked to refer to as "the parties" -- that is, the denominations of American Christianity. For a tradition which had Christian union as one of its founding principles, this at first seems an odd problem. But in fact the iconoclastic dimension of the Disciples message made it difficult for this movement-become-a-church to appreciate traditions lacking a "thus saith the Lord" from Scripture. Some of the earliest Disciples missionaries, for example, were sent to Europe to "restore" Christianity on the Continent.

This restorationist repudiation of denominational Christianity has served for decades to isolate the Churches of Christ from the concerns of many American Christians and, equally, has made their concerns nearly incomprehensible to the outsider. Here again, new perspectives are developing. Such scholarly journals as the Restoration Quarterly are publishing a number of articles whose historical and theological concerns extend far beyond the old rubrics of biblical exegesis and the history of the restoration movement. Similarly, Mission, which began publication in 1967, has received praise from such analysts of the current religious scene as Edwin Gaustad and Martin E. Marty for the skill with which it addresses broad concerns of the Christian faith from a restorationist perspective. Although the old exclusivism dies hard, it is clear that many members of the Churches of Christ are diligent in the effort to bring the tradition into clear dialogue with current issues in theology and ethics.

For the Christian Church, in which the restoration theme has long been deeply submerged, ecumenical discussion and studies of merger have been taking place throughout the 20th century. Currently, conversations toward a deeper understanding are proceeding with representatives of Roman Catholicism, and discussions toward possible union have begun with the United Church of Christ. The latter relationship is being pursued in ways compatible with the membership of both in the Consultation on Church Union, and it will be occurring at all levels of the life of the two churches.

In sum, internal diversity of thinking, more positive relations with the broad Christian tradition, and revisions of polity have set a demanding yet potentially fruitful theological agenda that addresses the whole spectrum of the Disciples of Christ tradition. The movement’s founders had hoped that their message would allow them "to ascend at once to the pure fountain of truth"; for their descendants in the Churches of Christ and the Christian Church the goal remains the same, but the route is more arduous.