Deconstructing the Church

On Sunday morning I worshipped at the Rockledge church of Christ in Rockledge, Florida. We had ninety in attendance for worship. That is about average for us these days. Before the world stopped, we would have about 150 or so on a well-attended day. Now, we top out at around one hundred. We are an older congregation demographically. Rockledge has more than its fair share of retirees. Covid hit us hard. Understandably, many of our older members are hesitant to return. We had a few deaths attached to our family. The most notable one would be our preacher, Kerry Burkey. He had been with us for 28 years but lost his fight to the virus back in August. Rick, who is 88-years old, preached for us this week. He spoke from John 8 about how Jesus can make us truly free. He did a great job.

There is little unique about our family. We have four elders. They are all good men as you would expect. But they are just regular guys. They have no special training for eldering or shepherding. They are just faithful Christians. We have four deacons who serve the church. Again, they are not men the world would notice. Andy, our church administrator, keeps things running. He has no degree in ministry, just a lot of common sense and dedication. Kerry was our only “professional” staff member. He had graduated from one of our schools of preaching but held no advanced degrees. Rockledge was the only “pulpit” work he ever had in his career. In terms of structure, that is all we have. The complexity of organization you find at larger churches is absent. We do not need it.

Our worship is simple and predictable. The order is roughly the same each week. Our song leaders are more willing than talented (I am one of them so I can say that). Most of the hymns you can sing from memory. The Lord’s Supper is presided over by a rotation of the brothers. And our prayers are managed in the same way. If you have ever attended an assembly within a church of Christ, you could sit in our midst and feel right at home.

We are not exactly a country church. Rockledge is more of a bedroom community than it is rural. But what we are is what the church of Christ in the United States is. Depending on who you believe there are somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000 congregations affiliated with the church of Christ in our country. I have been told we average comfortably less than one hundred members per congregation. And post-pandemic, that number is likely closer to fifty in attendance each service.

But the truth is, that is what we have always been. Churches of Christ have never been large. Outside of Nashville, Dallas, and a few other cities, it has always been hard to find one of our congregations with more than 300-400 members. We thrive in rural, southern towns where there simply are not enough people to grow large congregations. We just do not do large.

Mega-Church, Here We Come!

I was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1971. My father preached at the Shades Mountain congregation. And guess what? It had right about one hundred members. In the mid-70’s the Homewood congregation began to grow in prominence in the city. Its numbers swelled. It was the first congregation I ever heard someone talk about as being “liberal.” I am guessing the “Overton Window” of what is perceived as liberal has moved some over the last 50 years. I do not remember exactly what they began to do or teach. What they were in the 70’s may not seem overly egregious today. I do remember their preacher, Wayne Kilpatrick, developed a reputation as an expert on church growth. Homewood set out to be the largest church of Christ in Alabama. And for many years their numbers did grow. My recollection is that, in that era, they peaked near 1,000 members.

In 1992, I went to a school of preaching. On my way to the school, I spent the night in the home of a man who had been an elder at Shades Mountain when my father preached there. He gave me a copy of a book entitled, Behold, the Pattern. It was the first time I had ever been introduced to the topic of the “New Hermeneutic.” It was also the same time my young, opening eyes ever read about places like Saddleback, Willow Creek, and the Crystal Cathedral. It was the golden age of ecumenicalism and mega-churches.

It was also the age when suburban and city churches of Christ began to copy the church growth concepts of the evangelical churches. Well, to be fair, we have always had some who have done that. Our Sunday Schools, bus programs, Vacation Bible Schools and many other things are all derivatives of denominational ideas. But this era was different. Our larger congregations began to experience structural changes.

As we moved into the 80’s and 90’s our own “golden age” of growth was ending. Baptisms were down. The two-week gospel meeting was not drawing large numbers anymore. The fear sounding forth from church and academic leaders among us was real. Yet, the answer was just across town at the new evangelical, non-denominational church that had just sprung up out of nowhere. But their Lead Pastor had just written a book on church growth – and, absolutely, we bought a copy for ourselves.

Well, some of us did. The Rockledge congregation did not. They just sang another verse of 728b and listened to a preacher without any letters after his name.

Professional Ministry

Quick Trivia Question: In churches of Christ, who was the first man officially to hold the title “Youth Minister?”

I have no idea. I asked my father. His guess was someone at Madison during Ira North’s time there. Sounds plausible. If any church historian knows the answer, let me know.

I do not know the answer, but I am confident about two things regarding that first youth minister’s position:

• The position was not created at a small congregation like Rockledge.

If for no other reason, it does not have the budget to pay an additional salary. Most churches of Christ still do not to this day. Our budgets are just not that big.

• The congregation that created that first position was more doctrinally progressive than most churches of Christ.

Innovations like creating previously unknown, paid ministry positions take place in progressive congregations first. See, conservative churches seek to conserve things and progressive churches seek to progress to new things. Profound, I know.

Well, the first new minister led to thousands more. Our universities hurried to add new degrees into their Bible programs. The arms race to staffing our congregations with university trained and degreed professionals was on. In the space of just a couple of decades, churches that had survived the preceding decades with a preacher and a secretary, added ministers identified with words like Youth, Involvement, Worship, Personal Evangelism, Children’s, Singles, Outreach, Connection and so on. While I was preaching in Texas in the early 2010’s, one of the larger congregations in our area kept no less than a dozen full-time “ministers” on staff.

Why not? It fit the church growth model our leaders had been ingesting since at least the 70’s. The church needed to serve every demographic of its membership and its community. To attract young families, we need a day-care or pre-school – that means we need a children’s minister. University nearby? We better get a college minister. And so on the reasoning went until our organizational chart could rival that of any denominational church in the city.

In my nearly 30 years of ministry and 50 years of life, I have not seen a more significant structural change in the church than what our larger congregations have accepted. Its impact has changed us – especially our preachers.

Meanwhile, at Rockledge, a young mother just finished teaching the days of the Creation to her babies and their friends. She knew the lesson well. She used the same felt board on which her mother had taught her in that same classroom 20 years ago.

Do You Want to Preach?

I graduated from the Memphis School of Preaching in 1994. The Summer before my graduation I started working with the Central Academy church in Batesville, Mississippi. It would become my first full-time work. In 1997, I decided to finish my undergraduate degree at Freed-Hardeman University. So, for almost two years, I drove the 122.5 miles to the campus to attend classes.

One of the classes I was privileged to take was “Seminar for Bible Majors.” It is a class in which you practiced debating various biblical topics. The professor was Dr. David Lipe. The first week of the class, he asked the room full of 18 Bible majors, “What do you want to do with your degree?” My answer was to preach. One other student gave the same answer. The other sixteen listed youth ministry, counseling, writing, teaching, and ministries that would fit in the list of staff members given above.

At the conclusion of this exercise, I knew I would forever love Dr. Lipe. With a healthy dose of his characteristic dry wit, he asked, “Whatever happened to being just a preacher?” He faced a room full of Junior and Senior Bible majors and almost none of them wanted to preach. That is a problem, and it is caused by chasing the mega-church style of staffing that permeates our larger congregations.

You Have to Pay Your Dues

My first work was with a 90-year-old congregation of about sixty people located roughly 8 miles outside of a town of about 6,000 people. It was in a county of about 20,000 people with ten churches of Christ in it. It was underfunded. I made next to nothing. As are most country churches, it was dominated by multiple generations of just a couple of families. They were among the best people you will ever meet. But they had all lived on the same plots of lands for those generations. The families knew everything about every person in the other family. There was history. They loved each other but such long lasting intimacy tends to strip away the veneer of social niceties. When they got to bickering, it was for real. On my part, I was a wound-too-tight, 23-year-old graduate determined to fix every problem I found. That is not a recipe for success.

Somehow, we made it work for five and a half years. They were not easy years. I had no mentoring older preacher on staff. There was no camaraderie from other staff members. This was before cell phones and free long-distance calls. Even calling my father for advice was a challenge. It was truly a fail or succeed entirely time for me. But it made me a better man, Christian, and a much better preacher.

For most of the history of churches of Christ, my beginnings were the norm. When you graduated from school (if you graduated from a school at all), you started preaching in a small, one-room church. Likely, you preached, led singing, served the Lord’s Supper, led a prayer or two, and mowed the church lawn on Monday morning. Maybe you drove a school bus or threw papers to help make ends meet. Some variant of that story was all of our stories.

But no longer. Instead of the Bible degree, get a degree in Youth Ministry or some other specialty. Then you can skip the small church. You start as the fifth staff member at the 500-member church in town. It pays better. It has health insurance. The leadership is stable. Big church problems rarely trickle down to you. Stay in your lane. Manage with a degree of aplomb the problems of the slice of the church’s programs under your direction and in a few years the Associate Minister position will open. You will get to preach some – get your feet wet. By the time you turn thirty-five, your first pulpit will be at a thriving 250-member congregation that is looking for someone with the experience of administering the organization of the 500-member congregation that it wants to grow into. You know, an organization just like the one you just left. You are perfect for the work.

In our quest to follow the mega-church style of church work, we have re-defined what it means to be a preacher. Too many of our young preachers have never preached. They are not preachers – they are professional ministers.

Checking in at Rockledge, Kerry just graduated from Sunset. This small church just hired a man for his first preaching job. For 28 years, he will preach.

Deconstructing the Church: From Mega to Simple

Fun fact about mega-churches: Each city can have only one.

For most of my time preaching, I have heard the refrain that if we could teach what was being taught in the mega-churches, we could grow like them. That is not true. It is not doctrine that causes mega-churches to become “mega.” It is not some secret sauce of organization or programs. It is certainly not God and the Holy Spirit – sorry, no. Look at the top of any mega-church and you will find a talented, driven, charismatic leader. People grow churches, not programs.

Several years ago, I opened a swimming pool company with my family. My son, son-in-law, and daughter help me run it now. We lived in Houston when we opened it. In my early days, I asked the Branch Manager of the local supplier we used, “How many pools companies serviced the part of Houston his branch covered?” He estimated around six hundred. Yes, that is a lot. Pool service trucks are like cockroaches in Houston. As we talked, he told me the largest company had somewhere between 1000-1500 accounts, but the average company was under one hundred accounts. In our industry, we call that kind of company a “truck and a pole” company. What we mean is some guy has a pickup truck and buys a pole and he is now a pool guy. Those companies never grow. That man just wants to pay his rent and make it to the bar on Friday night.

Why they do not grow is important. It has nothing to do with the basic components of the business. We all shop at the same suppliers. We incur the same expenses. We have a general idea of what other companies are charging and so our rates are all about the same. What makes the difference is the character of the business owner. Some believe that their company can grow and overcome the obstacles, many owners do not. Some owners have the talent and commitment to make it happen, most do not. It is that simple.

Churches are no different. Mega-churches become “mega” because of good leadership. You may not like Joel Osteen or Creflo Dollar but take them out of a church and let them run a McDonalds and it would succeed. They know how to lead. Most people just do not have that skill.

That is why the mega-church model fails for most churches. It fails in most evangelical churches. Yes, they follow that model and do not have the same doctrinal constraints we face. However, they still do not grow. They are missing the true secret sauce. To build Tesla, you need Elon. You just do. And there is only one of him. Most churches just do not have an Elon.

The reality of that truth, understood fully or not, is sinking in. The church growth gurus are singing a new song as of late. The change first appeared on my scope in 2011 when Thom S. Rainer and Eric Geiger released their book, Simple Church. In their 200-page dissection of the problems created by the complexities of the mega-church style of ministry, they argue that a more integrated and discipleship-focused plan of work is the best path to vitality in a church. Many churches over-simplified Simple Church and, missed the point. If you have ever seen a church with a three-word motto for their program of work (something like “Learn, Live, Love”), that church has probably been influenced by Simple Church.

The point is that at least for the last decade, evangelicals have been waking up to the fact that bigger is not always better. Having two dozen staff members and four layers of bureaucratic organization – none of which includes the biblically prescribed elders and deacons – may not be the panacea we were told that it was. Maybe simple is better.

Back in Rockledge, Andy just had a meeting with the five families with children in the youth group. It lasted about 15 minutes and all the teen activities for the next 3 months have been put on the calendar. Oh, and they served pizza. Cool.

If Simple is Better, Simplest Must be Best

Fast forward to 2021 and two themes dominate church growth discussions: Home churches and discipleship.

A new generation of ministry leaders has come of age. They are children of the times in which they were born. Here in Brevard County, every Subaru and Toyota Prius has a “LOCAL” sticker on the back window (FYI, the first “L” in local is depicted as an upside-down map of Florida with the panhandle pointed to the right. It, roughly, looks like an “L”) manifests the spirit of our current age. Late Millennials and Gen-Z’ers want small, non-commercialized shops. “Wal-Mart is dead, long live the local boutique.” The same is happening in churches. The mega-church is dead. Home churches and church plants are the new way to glorify God. In the intimacy of a small group, relationships can be sustained. There are no strangers. Discipleship is the path of spirituality. Mature Christians should invite a small number of people – another family or two – into their homes and create a home church where relationships can be nurtured, and the ministry skills of Christianity taught to a new generation of disciples.

The age of the Wal-Mart Supercenter is over. We were all wrong for centralizing all the creativity and production under the same rooftop. It caused us to become too corporate and process oriented. We became too focused on the bottom line instead of relationships and meaning. The new and improved answer is to get small, you know, like the early church – which met in homes after all.

Meanwhile back in Rockledge, this Sunday I sat on the pew with my wife, my son, my daughter, and her husband, and their three children. On the row in front of me, the Shepherd family had the same three generations. Just to my right, a small gathering of widows worshipped with each other. Did I mentioned that an untrained, 88-year-old brother, who spent decades of his life in prison ministry preached to his church family? I mean we are slightly too big to meet in one person’s home, but are you sure that the zoning category given by the city is really the point?

The Wheel of Time

Yes, I am a geek. I prefer “geek,” to “nerd,” but you may not know the difference. I do. My favorite fantasy series is the “Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien. I am confident that most of the readers of this missive know that series. However, a close second is Robert Jordan’s “The Wheel of Time.” It is fourteen novels long and has the best uninterrupted world-building story of any high fantasy series ever. Period, full-stop. If you disagree, your opinion is not valid.

As the name suggests, time is a wheel. In Jordan’s wheel, while the name of characters may change, the turning of the wheel spins out the same sequence of events millennium after millennium. Strangely, the specific turning of the wheel described in his books is the one that stops the wheel from turning. It is almost as if an author telling a fatalistic story with no end might not sell books.

I am thankful that I have lived long enough to see one turning of the wheel regarding church growth. As a child I grew up in an era that remembered the long-form gospel meeting and simplicity of small church worship and family life. As my ministerial life progressed, I moved from a church that mimicked the small church in which I grew up to leading the ministry staff of a congregation with about seven hundred people on the roll and now back to a small congregation of less than a hundred saints. My service time in the church very nearly coincides with the church growth and discipleship philosophies of our age.

FYI, this Thursday morning, a group of the retired members of the Rockledge church will meet for Java Thursday. Coffee and pastries will be available. Come as you are and enjoy getting to know some of God’s most wonderful people in the world.

Are You the Pot and the Kettle? That is not Cool.

Believe it or not, this article has a point of application. The application is that the people that are complaining the most about our problems are the same people that created the problems they have now identified. The corporatism and desire to have a professional staff with advanced degrees has never been at the heart of the congregations of churches of Christ. The little country church is happy to hire a preacher from one of our non-accredited schools of preaching. Non-instrumental congregations are not seeking to hire a degreed worship leader. You see, it was the progressive who created the very bureaucratic monolith they are now struggling to overturn. They are the ones that bought into the mega-church model and tried to replicate it inside churches of Christ.

The current generation of progressive preachers are arguing against their own fathers. The system they now see as too rigid, stable, and stale was created by the progressive preachers of my generation. In an age in which one of the most famous movie lines was “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” they complained that our congregations were too simplistic and short-sighted. They pushed us to evolve into something that matched the spirit of the age in our society. Now, a generation later, when “local,” “craft,” “micro,” and “sustainable” shape our psyche, the new progressives are pushing us to get smaller, simpler, and more intimate.

You know, like Rockledge has always been.

Reaping and Sowing

The result is that the problems facing young progressives do not come from conservatives. They come from old progressives. Those ministers that helped to create the thousands of jobs in our congregations are now the decision makers in our large suburban churches. They are in their fifties and sixties. They are enjoying the fruits of their labors. Strong incentive to change is simply not there. In politics, we are told that as people get older, they get more conservative. Happens in the church to. For the generation that came before today’s progressives, professional ministry was the goal. They grew up in churches of Christ but never truly loved what it was and that for which it stood. It was backwards and even embarrassing in its beliefs. They set out to make it more respectable and their own academic credentials were an integral part of that process. They accomplished their goal. The old progressive now has a nice office with a view. He leads a ministry staff schooled in all the latest ministry theory. It is not a bad life. The change that he once wanted this second can now wait until tomorrow.

That is not sitting too well with younger progressives. They are still activists. Change must come sooner and not later. The problem is that it cannot. The young progressives lack the influence and stature to overturn the structure of a congregation when they are only the fifth minister on staff. There are simply too many people in front of them in line.

The problem is that they are in spirit just like their fathers. They are still academics. Degrees matter. Advanced degrees are nearly required among them. And with those degrees, they apply for positions at the very churches they now criticize. They are part of a feedback loop that will not be ending any time soon.

If only there were another way. By the way, Rockledge is about to begin looking for a preacher. No Th.D. required.

Something About Fish in a Pond

This is my theory: Home church and discipleship movements exist to allow young progressives to have the opportunity to change churches.

Progressives are not happy if they cannot effect change. Today, everyone wants to be an influencer. And that is difficult to achieve when your new program idea must be approved by some collection of the church administrator, associate minister, pulpit minister, treasurer, and/or the elders. But when that structure is torn away, a young, idealistic, and energetic progressive can make his mark.

His message is appealing, “We will just meet in my home. We will not focus on processes. Relationships are the key. I will help to mentor you – I will disciple you. Practical skills and hands-on Christianity will come before education. That was the true pattern of the first-century church. They met in homes and were with each other daily. The church was a family – a community. It was nothing like our corporate imitation that we have today.”

You see, I believe that message has a lot of appeal to a young progressive whose voice is lost in an elder’s meeting in a church study. That youthful minister will find more authenticity in a small group of close companions among whom his voice, training, and energy are appreciated much more. Progressives want to be part of a movement, not institutions. Discipling is a movement. Home churches are too. The appeal makes a lot of sense.

Now that I think about it, Rockledge does not even have a “study” in the church building.

Flyover Churches

The term media members use to describe middle-America is “flyover country.” Their lives are lived on one coast or the other and they rarely see what life is like in rural areas of our nation. Occasionally corporate media will be shocked at the results in an election cycle. Their dismissive attitude toward flyover areas is usually near the top of the list of reasons why. A whole world exists outside of the one they know.

I believe the same thing is happening in the church of Christ. Our well-educated ministers head to university having grown up in middle class suburban congregations (Our tuition free schools of preaching tend to service the needs of our smaller more rural congregations.). They grew up in youth groups led by Youth Ministers and attended congregations with all the trappings of professional ministry. Once in school they received their specialized ministry degree and maybe lingered around long enough to secure a masters. Stop one in their working career was on staff for a congregation befitting their degreed status. For them this is normal. Their experience defines what the real experience of life in the church of Christ is. From their lofty height of accomplishment, they do not see the flyover churches.

For them, there are almost 10,000 flyover congregations. They are places they would never apply to. They want to lead teens or to minister to some other segment of the church. Their dream was never to be preachers. And that is all these small congregations are needing. They need someone to stand in the pulpit and preach – 104 sermons a year. It is amazing how hard it is to find men who want to do that these days. Our young progressive ministers have no idea what life is like in these congregations. They simply fly over them on their way to the next church growth conference.

For many of these ministers, the only impression they have of these small churches is negative. All their lives they have been told these congregations are legalistic. They are all non-instrumental. There are no women ministers in them. They are not very integrated, so they must be bigoted. Their last preacher was a KJV-only fanatic. And so on and so on . . . If they give any thought to these congregations, it is one of embarrassment that they are affiliated with them.

The New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

So, in the end, the young progressives are dis-illusioned with the corporatism that the mega-church mentality created in progressive congregations. They are embarrassed by the backwards, legalistic roots of their “Church of Christ tradition.” Their answer is to create a new paradigm for us to follow. The problem is that it is not new – they just do not know it.

Think about the home church concept for a moment. I am confident that at some point you have worshipped with a small group of people in a home or hotel room or some other gathering. What does that worship look and sound like?

• Does the sermon use elaborate staging and presentation aides?
• Do the hymns have complex musical accompaniment?
• Do you sing the songs with the most complex melodies?
• Are the prayers led by special ministers?
• Is their any pomp and circumstance to the Lord’s Supper?

No, to those questions and a host more, the answer is that those services are among the least produced services that exist. That genuineness is part of the appeal of the home church movement. For a generation, we have tried to make our services as polished as possible. There are very few large churches of Christ with ugly preachers. Smooth and dynamic has been the fashion for a long time. It is phony, plastic, imitation, and we know it.

“Throw it out. Get small. Home churches are the answer.”

Fine. Let us go with that. But please understand what you are creating.

• In your home church, can your group of eleven really sing the harmonies of modern praise hymns? Not unless you have a unique group. You who have ridiculed churches of Christ for holding on to our Stamps-Baxter hymns, welcome back to simple melodies and harmonies.
• Are you really bringing the musical instruments for the building into your home? Can a group of fourteen in your living room really implement a Praise Team? Be careful, you will arrive dangerously close to congregational acapella music.
• When you divide your 500-member congregation into twenty-five home churches of twenty people, are you going to have degreed Bible teachers in each of them? No, they will be taught by vocational ministers at best.
• Will you need to take attendance? Your group will be just two or three families anyway.

Again, that list of questions could be extended. What is it that you are creating? It is a church led by common people. It sings simple songs because its singers are not trained. It has acapella music because (beyond any textual argument), there are no musicians in the group. The responsibility for prayers and leading the Lord’s Supper falls upon, not staff, but members of the home church. Everyone in the group knows (and is likely related to) everyone else. Young people are not sent off to children’s worship. They learn to sing, pray, and even preach by standing or sitting beside their fathers and mothers.

I will give it you. Your home church is truly the family you say that it is. It will train – disciple – its people. I applaud you for it. I just have one issue. Do not act like this is a new concept. You have just successfully recreated what 10,000 churches of Christ are and always have been. We are small, intimate, sometimes familial gatherings with simple worship, home-grown ministries, and straightforward lessons. We are the very thing you say you want.

I have a prediction. Within 10 years’ time, a young progressive preacher will write an article or book the thrust of which will be his elation over how his home church life has led him to discover the joys and deepened spirituality he now sees in worship. He will extol the virtues of removing all the high-tech production qualities of worship. I would not even be surprised if he praises the idea of the whole group singing without instrumentation – just the collective beauty of the human voice. He will think he is on to something revolutionary.

When he does, the Rockledge congregation and thousands of other churches of Christ will say, “It is about time.” Every benefit that the home church movement seeks is present in our congregations. We are not a mega-church group. We are a small church people. The experience of most members of the church of Christ reflects that. The progressives rejected our simple roots and chased the illusion promised in evangelicalism. It failed. And now they are returning to the simplicity and intimacy of smaller churches. The truth is that we never moved. We never left.

Conclusion

There is nothing wrong with large congregations. Their size and resources allow for important, needful works to thrive inside the church. Yet, it does seem whenever the church gets large it tends to lose its way. It is as if power and riches tend to corrupt people.

The desire to decentralize the church is not the brainchild of modern church growth academics. Post-Jerusalem and Acts 8, most congregations in the Bible were on the smaller end of the spectrum. Wanting to turn away from so much of the corporatism of the mega-church movement has merits. Some of those merits have a strong biblical foundation. This style of “church” has been done before.

The friction point is the lack of awareness from those who are leading this return to simplicity. Two generations of progressive preachers have not been following textual mandates. They have been influenced by the turn of culture around them. Their message of growth at all costs echoed the sentiment of 1980’s America. The tune they sing now is in perfect harmony with the craft and cottage industry of our current age. Their ideas are not new. I do not think they see it.

As a result, their dire predictions for the collapse of the church of Christ is misplaced. The core of the church has remained true to the biblical expression of what the early church was. Thousands of congregations meet each week with families and neighbors side-by-side. They know each other’s stories. Families attend each other’s funerals. Their children grow up together and often marry each other. Yes, they bicker, but families do that. From time to time, a congregation here or there closes its doors. Small groups are always at risk. It is not a phenomenon for just churches of Christ. A lot of small towns are being consumed by larger interests. But the flame created by the sparks of thousands of dedicated, spiritual families is going to be a lot harder to extinguish than the experts think.

These small congregations which form the heart of churches of Christ in the United States are exactly the intimate, responsive groups that progressives now crave. Young ministers, you do not need to create some new group. It already exists. Right down the street from your office in the big church, there is a group of thirty saints of God. They could use someone with your training and talent. They need more than a minister – they could use a preacher. It is time to come home to the church of Christ – to the body you have long dismissed.

Hey, you never know, Rockledge is hiring.