Ed Harrell Demystifies the Baffling Churches of Christ

One of the real pleasures in my life is searching the AM radio dial for local preachers while driving through the countryside of the American South. (Given my family's fondness for contemporary music and their low tolerance for static, I generally do this when my wife and kids are asleep.)

I will listen to just about anyone who speaks with conviction, but after figuring out which variety of Baptist, Holiness, or Pentecostal tradition the speaker represents, I tend to pay less attention to the words than to the intoxicating rhythm of the sermon. There is one exception. When I encounter preachers from the churches of Christ, I find I must focus intently on the meaning of every sentence.

Speaking with an almost cold rationality, they typically assure the listener that God has made the Bible so simple that any honest seeker can find the true gospel of Christ through a "common sense" study of Scripture. Then they proceed to explain and combine familiar passages in ways that are often as baffling to me as they are self-evident to them. But this was before I read David Edwin Harrell's "The Churches of Christ in the Twentieth Century: Homer Hailey's Personal Journey of Faith.

For more than four decades, Harrell has written with clarity and sensitivity about the complex ideas and defining struggles of a variety of southern sectarian groups. Combining long experience as a preacher in the churches of Christ with his skills as a researcher and a fair-minded interpreter of religious history, Harrell now gives us perhaps his most valuable and richly textured work so far.

Insiders and outsiders alike should appreciate how this book brings definition to the in-house religious language of a movement that often appears amorphous in both belief and structure. The church of Christ's frequent call for "restoration" rises out of not a nostalgic longing for the intensity and commitment of the preceding generation. Rather it refers to the conviction that Christ's true churches will divest themselves of all "worldly" denominational traditions in a history-defying effort to recapture the "ancient order" of the "New Testament Church." Christian restorationists have therefore sought to create and maintain self-governing local churches where there is "no creed but the Bible" and in which each member stands equally free to discover and debate the plain intent of Scripture.

Beyond the congregational level, however, the churches of Christ see themselves united informally in an "undenominational brotherhood," charged to warn each other of creeping worldliness and dangerous false teachings. A dynamic tension lies at the core of this movement between a restorationist openness to the plain meaning of Scripture and a rationalist conviction that Scripture is plain enough about most things to provide a basis for restricting fellowship. This tension, aggravated by changing social conditions, accounts for what Harrell calls the "collective chaos" of the churches of Christ and their almost inexorable drift toward contention and schism.

Harrell reconstructs the acrimonious battles that mark the churches of Christ evolution since their break from the Disciples of Christ a century ago. Given his preference for open-minded and irenic truth-seekers over legalistic and divisive truth-finders, one might expect a rather predictable narrative of heroes and villains. But this happens only rarely. Instead, Harrell emphasizes the elements of nuance, surprise and common humanity in the movement by devoting more than half of his book the story of one committed preacher named Homer Hailey.

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