It’s Never Going to Stop, Is It?

Warning: If you have no history with the churches of Christ or any other fellowship to come out of the Restoration Movement, this post may make no sense (or be of interest) to you whatsoever. However, if you are curious, read on; if you have something to share from a different perspective, by all means feel free to comment.

The c of C blogosphere has been all abuzzin over a story in the Christian Chronicle about the 2009 edition of Churches of Christ in the United States. This latest edition reports that our congregations are closing shop at record rates and our membership numbers are on an increasingly steep decline. To be exact: we have lost 526 churches and 78,436 members in the past six years. And we were never that big to begin with: 12,762 congregations with 1,601,661 adherents at our peak.

As the story points out, some of the reduced numbers can be attributed to the decision of the directory’s editors to remove congregations that have one or more services which use dat ol’ debbil instrumental music. Case in point: the directory excludes the Richland Hills church, which as it happens is the largest congregation in the fellowship.

Many c of C bloggers (mostly elders or ministers) have chimed in on the issue; and best as I can tell, there are six recurrent (and contradictory) themes:

Filed under: Faith and Religion, "Churches of Christ in the United States", 21st Century Christian, a cappella, Bible belt, church growth, churches of Christ, methodology, Restoration Movement, Richland Hills Church of Christ

Well, so much for that

I was saddened to learn that Cascade College, the only institution of higher learning in the Northwest affiliated with the churches of Christ, will shut down at the end of the spring 2009 semester.

Despite not having attended there (I was already a college graduate when Cascade first opened for business in August 1994) I have several memories of the place. The summer before my senior year of college I interned as a youth minister with the church of Christ in Richland, WA. I took the kids in the youth group to GNEW (Great Northwest Evangelism Workshop). Over the course of the week I got to meet a bunch of people who were going to be involved in the opening of Cascade. They seemed so excited about what they were engaged in. I was so envious of them. I remember thinking, “What a once-in-a-lifetime experience, to help build a college from the ground up.”

A few years later, during my tenure as a youth minister in Portland, OR (where Cascade is located) I got to know more faculty and staff from the school; people that I was pleased to count as friends. I am sorry for them and the students.

So this leaves our fellowship with Rochester College, Pepperdine University, and Ohio Valley University as our only schools outside of the Bible belt. I wonder how they are staying afloat. I suppose that Pepperdine’s approach is to be super-expensive, but what about the others?

I think that Christian colleges can be a good thing, a real boon to the kingdom. I do have my quibbles with how they do things, but that doesn’t mean that I would throw the baby out with the bath water. I don’t like the hypocrisy of the rules. I am more than a little uncomfortable with some of our schools’ readiness to hop in bed with a certain political party. And I detest the recruitment rhetoric that administrators and admissions counselors use to try and guilt our teenagers into attending these schools. I once heard a Christian college president say that “Every college student in the church should be attending a Christian college.” Screw you, state school campus ministries! Who needs you? [Ron Clark, a church-planter in Portland, has an interesting take on this]

I have often wondered why our fellowship is so provincial. Why can’t we get a meaningful foothold anywhere outside of Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas? What do you readers think?

Filed under: Faith and Religion, School, Bible belt, campus ministries, Cascade College, Christian education, churches of Christ, Ohio Valley College, Pepperdine University, Portland OR, provincialism, Rochester College