Once Upon a Time

Once there was a good church in a small Texas town that was flourishing. Oh, it was not doubling each year in membership, but it was a happy, growing, and prospering church. The church had a good preacher who was faithful to the Word and who had been there for several years, a well-liked youth minister, a weekday preschool that served many children of the community, and all seemed to be going well.

Then some new men in leadership began to say some strange things not found in Scripture . . . And the church began to decline. First, the leadership let the youth minister go because of the declining contribution. Then they closed the school. Finally, they began to search for a new preacher  because their preacher was, they said, largely responsible for the decline in numbers.

The church was thus programmed for additional decline and would drift toward being a community church and would neither seek any longer to be the church of the New Testament nor to be Christians only. The church would be in “no man’s land” because it was too liberal to be in the mainstream of churches of Christ and too conservative to be acceptable to the denominational world. Having lost its focus upon seeking to be the New Testament church and having lost its balance between extremes, it would continue to decline and the leaders would puzzle over what had gone wrong.

The above story is true and to one degree or another similar stories are being played out all across this land. We can be assured of this fact; when churches are led away from biblical authority for what is believed, taught, and practiced; when churches think of themselves as a protestant denomination born in America in the 19th century; when churches accept the assumption that if the Bible doesn’t specifically say not to do something, then it may be done with Divine approval; when churches are more concerned about human thoughts, desires, and perceived needs than they are with what God thinks or says; then those churches will decline and the leaders will be slow to understand why.

We have no right, and should have no desire, to be anything religiously other than Christians, to belong to any religious organization except the church Jesus built, and to have any rule of faith and practice other than the Scriptures.  —Jay Lockhart