Protestants: Worried Disciples

The Western frontier gave birth to many American dreams, but none so grand as the vision of uniting sectridden Protestantism into one great Church of Christ. That was the goal of Pennsylvania’s Thomas Campbell around the turn of the 19th century, and also of Barton Stone of Kentucky. Out of their evangelical preaching emerged a faith that tried to be not another denomination but a movement to restore the primitive church known by Jesus’ followers.

Ironically enough, the movement to end sectarian churches created just another sectarian church—but a uniquely American one: the Disciples of Christ. Last week, when 6,500 delegates gathered in Miami Beach for their annual assembly, the International Convention of Christian Churches, as the Disciples style themselves, could claim, with 1,800,000 members, to be one of the nation’s largest indigenous religious bodies. But the Disciples still try to live by Barton Stone’s belief that sects should “die, be dissolved, and sink into union with the body of Christ at large.” The Disciples are one of six faiths seriously discussing Presbyterian Eugene Carson Blake’s proposal to create a great new superchurch that would be both “catholic and Reformed.”

Preserving Freedom. The Disciples can easily talk union because they combine a maximum of spiritual freedom with a minimum of churchly trappings. Their congregations practice baptism by immersion, elect their own pastors, allow laymen (and women) to conduct the austere Sunday services, which may omit a sermon but never omit Communion. The Disciples have no confession or creed, and the divinity of Christ is their sole rule of faith. “Ever since the beginning, we’ve been scared to death that we’d arrive at a theology everyone would have to subscribe to,” says Industrialist J. Irwin Miller, a lay Disciple and president of the National Council of Churches. “The heart of the movement is this great concern to preserve the freedom to arrive at one’s own conclusions.”

Thinking individually, the Disciples at the convention arrived at the collective conclusion that their church is in considerable need of what they delicately call restructuring. The Disciples’ 8,000 congregations are autonomous, but they voluntarily cooperate to support more than 100 social agencies; some church leaders believe that the national leadership should have more power to coordinate the work of these agencies and the individual congregations.

Adding Souls. Another Disciple worry is membership. The nation’s fastest-growing churches are ones that emphasize their doctrinal individuality—including the conservative Churches of Christ (TIME, Feb. 15), which broke with the Disciples around 1900 over a number of ecclesiastical questions, such as whether the Bible authorized instrumental music in worship. But the ecumenical-minded Disciples have lost 50,000 members in the last decade, and outgoing President Dr. Robert W. Burns of Atlanta warned that the flames of a faith built on evangelism seemed to be dying into embers. “Our evangelism has lagged because many of us lack a deep concern for the salvation of our neighbor’s soul,” he said. “How long since you were the means through which God added a soul to the church? How long since you even tried?”