The Worldly Church: A Call for Biblical Renewal

by C. Leonard Allen

Book Overview

Table of Contents: Acknowledgments; Foreword, by Reuel Lemmons; 1: The Identity Crisis of Churches of Christ; 2: Secularized Religion in American Culture, 3: The Secular Church in the Restoration... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0891121501
• ISBN13: 9780891121503
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Abilene Christian University Press
• Length: 116 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The bomb that went off in Campbell's playing field?

This must be the bomb that exploded in the Stone-Campbell Restorationist playing field sounding off a siren that calls for a serious navigational check lest it goes off further down the sectarian, splintering precipice. For a movement that rallies the call to unity on the strictest interpretation of 'sola scriptura' ('speaks where the Bible speaks, be silent where the Bible is silent'), the Churches of Christ in America and worldwide have undergone innumerable splits, ecclesiastical quarrels and ugly contentions. From one of the fastest growing religious bodies at one time, it has become a scattering of mostly small-sized fossilized institutions that have a particularly strained way of reading the Bible and viewing other Christians. Leonard Allen, Michael Weed and Richard Hughes have written a sharp but compassionate book on the crisis and were among the first bold voices that put the finger on the problems that have plaqued the movement from the start. The Restoration Movement founded by Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell had grown out of a particular era in American history, tired of religious wars and 'human traditions' and spurred on by the Reformation plea to have each person studying the bible for himself, the commonsense Baconian approach to reading the bible and other humanistic agendas that have all but ruled out the place of mystery in religion. This era had shaped a people who began to view church tradition and communal reading of scripture with suspicion and have opted for the individual as the final arbiter of biblical truths. The one hundred plus years that followed have shown this to be a recipe for disaster. Allen et al and others that followed have done the RM a great service by steering the ship back to the original intents of her founders, who though fallible and wrong-headed in many ways, were basically right in calling God's people to stand united on the basis of our first allegiance to scripture and not allow sectarian bias or church traditions to trump it, the first step of which was to drop the various denominational labels and be 'Christians only' and to constitute the Church around the visible marks of baptism and the Lord's Supper. However, when their descendants began to dismiss the Church before them as apostate and took on the task of reinventing the whole wheel, they ended up throwing away the baby along with the bathwater and the mystery, the sense of communion with the larger Church, appreciation of the sacraments, the contemplative life and spiritual formation were lost. What is left is an impoverished tradition that is open to the worst secular winds that blow along - individualism, pragmatism, human self-reliance, rationalism, consumerism - in short, worldliness. Two decades have passed since the book's publication, I honor the authors' bold and timely clarion call. The churches that have heeded it in one way or another have begun to see better days in church life, worship and brotherhood ties. I wish that

Outstanding

One of the best books I have read in a while. Excellent, excellent work. It gives us a good understanding of how the world is influencing the church and what we need to do to restore the church. Just what the church needs to hear today.