Do Black CoC's believe apostles are alive today

[longdistancerunner]

Does anyone know if most black CoC's currently believe there are apostles living today? I read this was the main difference in black and white CoC's.

[B.H.]

There are 4 Coc where I live. They all are racially mixed to some degree. The preacher of the one 75% black would not believe so . I do believe there is a difference in how the elders are perceived power and authority wise in regards to the preacher though

[longdistancerunner]

I live in Memphis TN and most of the formerly white CoC's have more than a token black membership. In general the hispanics have separate services in the buildings which are in Spanish. There are a number of CoC's in predominately black communities which appear to have almost no white representation (may have a few, I have driven by after services and never seen whites at any of them or hispanics, but of course that is not good sampling). I have heard some of the black CoC preachers on YouTube or their websites and they tend to be more dogmatic than current CoC preachers much like what we saw in the 50's.

[Shane R]

No.

My first gig was with a mixed race congregation in South Bend, IN. It no longer exists in the form it was back then (they moved to a better part of town). What I found was that the blacks didn't have particularly strong beliefs about much. It was more a social network for them. This observation was reinforced a few years later when I moved to SC and was again a member of a mixed church. The blacks did things that the whites would be scandalized by, like buying scratch-off lottery tickets. Both of these churches had a severe attendance gap: the blacks would make up a majority on Sunday morning but hardly came out for Sunday evening or Wednesday. This, in effect, made for 2 congregations meeting in the same building.

[Gauronaolo]

From what I've seen, beliefs about apostles can vary among different branches of the Church of Christ, so it's not necessarily a black-and-white (pun unintended!) difference between black and white congregations. Some may believe in modern-day apostles, while others may not.

[Shane R]

This is quite surprising to me. The thought that any CoC adherent would acknowledge a modern-day apostle does not seem plausible. The whole philosophy of cessationism, that the Holy Spirit doesn't really work in the present epoch, is pervasive in the CoC and antithetical to the idea of a continuing apostolate. "When all the apostles died, the gifts shortly died out too" was what I was taught in the CoC.