the bear and the Cheerios

[Lev]

One COC doctrine that we're all quite aware of is the belief that they're the One True Church. A correlate to this is that all the denominations are wrong and are not actually churches at all. I remember a fairly simple (yet clearly wrong) way that I used to explain this to my non-COC friends when I was younger. It was a pitiful attempt at logic with an awfully flawed premise. Here's how it went:

1. There are lots of organizations called "churches," including the COC.
2. We know the COC is right because we use CENI and proof-texts to determine exactly what the biblical pattern is and just do that.
3. Ephesians 4:4-6 says that there is only one church (body=church).
4. Therefore all the other so-called churches aren't churches at all since we know the COC is a true church and these others are different from the COC.

This unraveled for me one day quite accidentally when I decided, off the cuff, to soften my standard conclusion slightly since I was talking with a non-COC friend whom I really cared about. Instead of just coming out with my "conclusion," I substituted it with, what seemed to me at the time, an obvious choice. It went like this:

1-3. Same as above. Therefore, either:
4a. Same as 4 above, or (I threw him a bone here),
4b. There really isn't enough difference between the COC and all these denominations to count them as separate churches from God's perspective.

In the moment, 4b seemed like such a ludicrous option that of course it would only steer him toward 4a. It was so obvious that the denominations--what with their prayer books, creeds, and female "pastors" (who were really preachers)--were qualitatively different from the COC. I would compare this to asking your four-year-old, "What happened to all the Cheerios? Did you eat them? Or did a big grizzly bear come into the house and gobble them up?" Imagine my surprise when my friend calmly said, "Yeah, I don't think the denominations, including the COC, are really all that fundamentally different." It was only because I respected this friend so much that I actually stopped and considered what he had said. It took me a long while but I finally realized that a grizzly bear had eaten my Cheerios. I gradually began referring to the COC as a denomination and the others, not as "the denominations," but simply as "other denominations." It was a small shift in language but represented a huge change in my way of thinking. It was probably the first tentative step toward leaving the COC that I ever made.

Lev

[Opie]

A long time ago I came to the conclusion that there really is a true church of Christ, and that it happens to be made up of saved people from many, many different denominations.... including even some from what we all know as the "Church of Christ" denomination. Some of my old CoC friends don't like it when I point this out to them.

[Pitts S2C]

My wife always says, 'when people vehminantly say something they are not, it always means that they are what they preach against'. For the coC it's non-denomination. In fact, they are a denomination.

We are currently vacationing in Kona, Hawaii. The local coC website says the following:

"E komo mai ~ We are an independent, nondenominational, community Christian fellowship dedicated to loving and serving the people of Hawai’i Island. The Bible is our only authority; and we seek to walk in the counsel of God’s word in all that we believe and teach. We have no formal ties to any denominational groups or associations anywhere; but are bound in heart and faith to God’s people everywhere."

I rest my case.