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The Christian Chronicle Podcast
The Christian Chronicle Podcast explores the news and stories shaping Church of Christ congregations and members around the world.
The Christian Chronicle Podcast
Episode 147: Church of Christ history for the next generation (Luke Dockery and Jared Pack)
Kids and young adults growing up in congregations with "Church of Christ" signs on their buildings have honest questions: "Who are we? How did we become who we are? Why do we do what we do?"
These are important questions for young Christians trying to decide whether to remain with the church of their upbringing or strike out in search of something different.
And, if "restoration" truly is essential to Christians who identify with the Church of Christ, then it must be a fresh practice for each new generation.
These are the reasons why Church of Christ youth ministry veterans Luke Dockery and Jared Pack wrote Origin Story: Churches of Christ and the Restoration Movement.
The book, which uses comic book illustrations and fast-moving, punchy language, seeks to orient a new generation to Church of Christ history.
In this episode, the authors discuss why church history beyond the New Testament is still crucial for present-day Christians to learn and study. They also make their case that restoring the New Testament church is always a present and future pursuit and never a past-tense accomplishment. Thus, restoration demands both an awareness of history and an orientation toward emerging generations.
Link to Zack Martin's Christian Chronicle review of Origin Story
Link to Origin Story: Churches of Christ and the Restoration Movement
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Family and friends, neighbors, and most of all, strangers, welcome to the Christian Chronicle Podcast. We're bringing you the stories shaping Church of Christ congregations and members around the world. I'm BTRW. And what you are about to hear, bless you and honor God. I recently pulled out my old comic book collection from when I was growing up in the 1980s. It reminded me of how much I used to love going to the store and buying new issues of Amazing Spider-Man, Captain America, and G.I. Joe with the money I earned from delivering newspapers. Around the same time that I pulled out those old comic books, around the same time that I pulled out those old comic books, I came across a book review Zach Martin wrote in the Christian Chronicle. The book he reviewed was Origin Story, Churches of Christ and the Restoration Movement by Luke Dockery and Jared Pack. Dockery is the youth and family minister with the Coverdale Church of Christ in Cersei, Arkansas, and an adjunct professor at Harding University. Pack is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the History Department at York University in York, Nebraska. From the book review, I kind of got the wrong impression that Dockery and Pack had written a history of the Church of Christ in the United States in comic book or graphic novel form, mostly because they wrote the book for teens and young adults. And I thought, wow, what a fun way to learn about the history of the Church of Christ community and tradition. So I ordered it to add to my comic book collection. Well, it turns out that the book is not a comic book or graphic novel, though it does have those elements. But it is a rather serious and thoughtful study of what some of us call the Restoration Movement, and some of us call the Stone Campbell here in the United States. Dockery and Pack write the book in a clear, fast-moving, punchy way that covers about 2,000 years of church history and just over 100 pages, ideal for a teen or young adult audience. So Jared and Luke are with us today. You guys not only wrote a book about history that some of our folks may prefer that we ignore, you did it in partial comic book form. And for teens and young adults, sirs, you have a lot of explaining to do. Are you ready?
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely.
BT Irwin:Okay, well, let's go then. So uh you set out to write a history of the restoration movement, also called the Stone Campbell movement, for teens and young adults in a Church of Christ context. Did anyone ever say to you, Jared Luke, don't you have better things to do? That's never going to work. Why did you do it anyway?
SPEAKER_01:This project originally did not begin for teenagers. It originally began in a young adult Bible class at church. Uh, Luke and I worked for seven years alongside each other, doing education ministry and lots of other things, each of us respectively. But we worked together for seven years on education at a church in Northwest Arkansas. And in that process, Luke came in for a quarter, came out of the youth group to come teach our young adult class at the time, which kind of had a range of anywhere from probably what 25 to 35 year olds, kind of somewhere in that group, but a very short series. Then he and I got the bright idea, and I will still stand behind it, maybe not to have done it all together, that at the same time we were going to collectively overhaul every single bit of education from birth to death in our congregation. That was not our best decision to do it all in one fell swoop. We decided we would have Sunday morning classes where everyone was operating on the same subject in age-based classes. And these would be things that we thought were just really important for people who only maybe came to Bible class once a week to get. And so that kind of fleshed us out. Well, then from there, it was Luke's brainchild to figure out how do we do this for teenagers.
SPEAKER_02:That second time through that Jared's talking about, by then I had actually moved to another congregation. And so when we talked through it the first time, we knew that there were some holes, some things that we would want to cover better if we did it again, but we were kind of limited by the schedule, how many weeks we had and things like this. Well, mean meanwhile, I had gone come to a new congregation and I was working on kind of overhauling our youth group curriculum map. I'm a big believer in planning out what we're going to cover. And I had just become convicted that we were ignorant largely about our history. That's I think that's true for a lot of adults, but certainly true for teenagers. It's not something that we're passing on very well. And so for a while I had had it kind of earmarked on my map, like I'm going to teach restoration history, but there was nothing out there that I could find that was any way really geared towards teens. I mean, there were there's good adult class curriculum and resources available. History is not everybody's jam, which I think is sad. I think history is amazing, I love it, but it's not for everybody. Some people just tune out when they hear that. And but between the time when we first did this, which was, you know, 10, 12 years ago, to now, uh, we kind of had the explosion of the the MCU, the Marvel cinematic universe. So a lot of these things are just kind of on our minds. And so the idea of like an origin story became almost second nature. And this idea that you have these characters who you really don't understand who they are unless you know about their origin story. It's really hard to truly understand. This is an idea that's been around for a long time. Like, you don't really understand Darth Vader if you don't understand where he comes from, or Harry Potter, or Captain America, or whoever it is. In a real sense, that's that's true for us. You look at your average church of Christ, and we do some interesting things that would be hard to explain to a lot of people unless you know where we came from. Uh things that we care about, the things that maybe we don't care about as much as others do, or maybe as much as we should, some of the peculiarities, some of our great strengths, maybe some of our shortcomings. A lot of these things are explained if you know our history. And Jared and I both are deeply grateful for Churches of Christ. We love churches of Christ. We work and worship in the context of churches of Christ. We're both, in some sense, he more than I, but are affiliated with universities that are connected to this fellowship as well. And we so we love it enough that we think it's unfortunate if people don't understand and have some sort of appreciation for as well. I wanted to teach it to teens. The idea of origin story seemed really important to me, but also compelling. And then I kind of got the idea like, what if we had some comic book vibes to it?
BT Irwin:Yeah, I think, by the way, the introduction to the book, pages five to nine, in that introduction, you repeat the mantra, if we don't know our history, we don't know who we are, like you just said. And I imagine more than a few Church of Christ folks pushed back on that point because learning what I would call recent history for us, 1800s to 1900s, uh, is the wrong history. Uh, the only history that matters is the history in the New Testament. So, how do you respond to folks who say, hey, look, like maybe the elders at that church, if we're gonna teach a class, let's teach a class on Acts, right? Why, why teach a class on some people in the 1800s and 1900s? That's that's not our church history. Why why focus on this period of history rather than just the Bible?
SPEAKER_01:We studied the past to understand the present. And this is really one of my core beliefs as a historian. The book of Acts is important, the first century is important. Yes, we're tracing a story that starts at Pentecost. It's also true that it is not one linear progression, right? The story of Christianity on the whole is not a linear progression from Pentecost to present. I mean, boy, it would be great if we could just do that. But the whole story is full of ups and downs, right? And especially for people in churches of Christ who are very interested and often caught up in conversations about what other denominations are doing and kind of where they may go off whatever they believe to be the proverbial rails, right, of New Testament command. It's also true that while I believe the Church of the New Testament has endured since Pentecost, and I believe that with every fiber of my being, you would have been hard-pressed to travel back in time to 1260 and find a church labeled church of Christ.
SPEAKER_02:Can can you be can you know Jesus and and be saved, you know, without knowing about Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone, of course. Yes. But what I would say is if you attend, you know, if you worship with fellow Christians at a building in the United States that says Church of Christ on a sign outside, where you worship without instruments, you either have a plurality of elders or you don't have elders at all because you don't have enough people to have a plurality of elders. And you're aware of something called the plan of salvation. The reality is that simply doesn't exist. It it's not a reality without people like Alexander Campbell and Barton W. Stone as part of this historical movement. So it's like, do you have to study this? No. But the reality is there's not, as Jared said, a direct line from the New Testament to you. There is a pretty direct line from the Stone Campbell movement to you.
BT Irwin:You write that one reason we need to study our recent history, and again, when I say recent history, I mean 1800s, 1900s, up to the present. It helps us distinguish between biblical command and our own homegrown traditions. In other words, if we don't know our own history very well, we may mistake our own traditions for quote unquote sound doctrine. Could you give us an example or two?
SPEAKER_01:This is one, right, where we could kind of take it in any number of ways, however serious or not we might want to consider it. For instance, you know, on one hand, there are folks in our fellowship who are rather adamant that clapping is not authorized in scripture. There are others who are perfectly fine with that. And to which I would simply say, right, I think it becomes rather difficult for us to find explicit condemnations, right, of clapping. But also, right, there are you want to find out what people believe to be doctrinal matters or not, change how you do the Lord's Supper on Sunday morning, right? How many people got upset when we went to individual cups rather than passing trays? The church I worship at here in Nebraska, we have six stations around the room. And you come in family units and partake of the Lord's Supper together around the table as family units. I was at a church, we're interned at a church at one point where we moved the communion table to the back of our auditorium instead to try to reduce the distraction of the front. Still passing trays, still being served, right? But we just moved the table to the back, and our guys came from the back to the front and then worked back. And we had somebody upset because they could not read the words do this in remembrance of me on the front of the table. Right? Like these are not the kinds of things we should be getting upset about.
SPEAKER_02:Um, knowing knowing history well, knowing scripture well helps us to determine what things are actually biblical commands or maybe examples, and what things are just things that we have created out of expediency throughout the course of history.
BT Irwin:Yeah, I think we actually ran two stories this year at the Christian Chronicle. One was about one was about moving the table, a church moving its table, and the other one was about preachers not offering the invitation at the end of the sermon. And as you can predict uh on social media, those were two of the hottest, you know, most hotly debated stories that uh that we ran this year at the Christian Chronicle. As a child, I was taught that church history began with Acts of the Apostles and literally stopped for about 1800 years and picked up again, most likely in Nashville around the turn of the 20th century. And uh as the rightful heirs to that perfect New Testament church, we didn't ever get it wrong. We just didn't make mistakes. And some of us seem to take that as licensed to be as cruel and ugly as we wanted to be toward anyone who wasn't as quote unquote restored as we were. So let me just say this: I'm not dunking on any of our good faith efforts at being faithful and true to biblical command, but I'm pointing out that we could get all of those things absolutely right and yet wallow in the sin of pride, which leads to all kinds of other deadly sins, uh, which in my opinion cancels out the good that restoring the form of the New Testament church might do.
SPEAKER_01:And I look back at the 18-year-old kid who showed up at Fried Hardaman in the fall of 2008, who was convinced he knew everything there was to know about the Bible, that he had mastered all the commands that God had given, that we were right and everyone else was wrong, that our story was one of God's only true church, and that was such this point of pride, right? And then I went to college for four years, and then I went to graduate school for seven, and along that way, I you know, I went down my own kind of faith journey that led me more into these kinds of conversations, and I began to see the arrogance of my own beliefs.
SPEAKER_02:My own faith journey, studying church history beyond just the restoration movement, but more broadly, it makes you aware of people who are who have believed some different things than you have over time, but who are yet deeply committed in their faith and deeply committed to the truth and trying to discover it. Um, you also learn about people, for example, studying in our own history. I'm I'm a big fan of Alexander Campbell, and yet I'm not a big fan of everything Alex Campbell can did or believed, or some of the things that he said or the ways in which he said them. And it it kind of has to make you humble when you look at your own history and and see some of the dark parts of that, parts that you want to disavow and and not claim for your own. And this can be true, you know, this can be true in our family histories, it can be true in our own individual histories. A great gift of history is humility. There are all sorts of people who have thought that they had it figured out at times, and and we see that that was not actually the case. People who are far more brilliant than I am. And so it helps me to see the unlikelihood that I've got everything right, and yet it also gives me a broader perspective that maybe me having everything right is not actually what matters or what God calls for.
SPEAKER_01:One of the stories that was really important to expand into and ensure stayed in that expansion was the story of Churches of Christ and our checkered past with issues of race. As a as a fellowship who is heavily southern, we were not immune to many of the cultural issues of the Jim Crow South. Our churches were segregated, right? I was lecturing on churches of Christ in the 20th century, and this was the one right where you could hear a pin drop in that room, right? As I'm kind of walking through some of these things. And so uh I think this is another one of those examples, right, where we have been on the wrong side of scripture.
BT Irwin:You make the case that Church of Christ congregations and members these days are often either denominational or sectarian in their attitudes, beliefs, and practices. So, guys, I remind you that all publicity is good publicity when you're selling a book. Do you care to explain yourselves?
SPEAKER_02:In some sense, I don't think we are so much trying to say, like, well, churches of Christ fall into one of these two traps, but rather say that these are common tendencies or common pulls, if we're not careful. And that we are trying to suggest that maybe there's a better way, maybe it's possible to at the same time say we we don't have the the market on cornered on truth. We're not saying that we're the only believers out there, and at the same time, we're not saying that one church is just as good as another and that anything goes and nothing matters. Is there a third way? I don't necessarily want to say a middle ground. Is there a third way where they think, you know, we can honor the validity and certainly the intentions of other believers in Christ, and at some point say, by the way, it's actually not our point, our our place to judge those folks. But at the same time, to say we believe some things that we think are actually very important that are taught in scripture and that some maybe some other groups disagree with. And so we don't actually have to be exclusive and say we're the only ones, and we also don't have to just throw the doors wide open and say nothing matters. Is there another category where we can say things are important, but not so essential that we exclude everyone that disagrees with us about those things? So I think that's kind of the mindset that we were trying to suggest.
BT Irwin:I wonder if people can even imagine or picture church in a way that is not denominational or sectarian in its in its character. I think the difficulty now, as it was in the 1800s and 1900s and probably the first century, is that human beings just in general don't have a picture of a Christian community that doesn't have elements of a denomination or a sect? So when you talk about a third way, not not a happy medium, but a third way, I feel like people will have a hard time imagining that. Can you maybe help us paint that picture? What does it mean to be non-denominational and non-sectarian and yet have a cohesive community of Christian faith?
SPEAKER_01:We have to be clear about what it is that we believe, right? There has to be a clear basis, right, about what we stand on, right, because I think that's important. We're not talking about right just throwing anything out the window. I mean, I I want to echo Luke's point. Both of us are actively involved in worship and work and ministry in churches of Christ. Right. In a world where there are Lots of other options to be in the broad Christian umbrella, we continue to remain and be deeply committed because we believe there are things that are very important that we indeed have gotten right. But I think part of what it has to be, and this gets back to some earlier questions, it has to be a community. This third way has to be a community with the humility to believe we could be wrong, and with a commitment to be people of scripture, right? I think the third way between these has to come inherently from a place of humility that doesn't say we have it all figured out, but that says we are committed to being people who study the word, who take it seriously, who are in the text, who are using resources and listening to scholars and others write who might know more than we do, right, to really try to understand the teachings of scriptures best we can.
SPEAKER_02:Some of this I think sometimes can be a lack of imagination. I think one expression of this that has become kind of popular more recently is kind of the house church movement. I think sometimes escape from the trappings of having a building and what it looks like to have a kind of a very formalized Sunday morning gathering. There's actually lots of small church communities around the globe, actually, that would share a lot of essential beliefs that we have, including things like baptism and the Lord's Supper every Sunday that would not feel sectarian or very denominational. Because for one thing, they don't actually have a sign posted, you know, things like that. Sometimes we we inadvertently are denominational by doing things like denominating ourselves, putting names out and things like that.
BT Irwin:Do you believe that we, those who identify themselves with the Church of Christ, have a quote, sustainable identity worth passing on to the next generation, end quote. The key words there are identity and passing on to. Those words are markers of the things that make us Church of Christ folks distinct. Distinct from the world, yes, but also distinct from other Christ-believing, Christ-seeking groups. And that gets us back to the question of how much can Church of Christ congregations and members truly be non-denominational and non-sectarian? Do you believe there is a place and purpose for distinct Church of Christ traditions that may not be the cake of biblical command and example, but are icing that bring out the full flavor and texture of the cake? Traditions that are special to us and while not essential or necessary, are yet good and valuable and worth passing on, as you say.
SPEAKER_01:Some of the things that I think are most worth passing on are the cake themselves.
BT Irwin:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Like a lot of kind of tradition pieces, I think, could go one way or another. If we were to get 12 people in a room, we might get 12 different answers on exactly what are considered traditions and what are considered essentials. But in terms of some of the things right that I believe are sustainable and worth passing on, man, convictions about baptism and the Lord's Supper. Those are things to anchor right points of faith into. Those are things that are absolutely worth passing on that aren't going to be core components in other in other religious groups. I a firm believer in a cappella worship, right? I think it is beautiful and unique, and indeed one of the most participatory experiences of worship in any Christian community. That's a bedrock, right? And so maybe for me the pieces worth passing on in the identity are actually not the icing, but the cake.
SPEAKER_02:And getting away from specific issues, I think it's worth passing on kind of the twin guiding lights of unity and restoration, which were key objectives from the beginning of the movement. We could talk more about that and unpack it, but let me just say this. Generally speaking, over the last hundred years or so, churches of Christ have focused more on restoration, doing things like the Bible says, and less on unity. Let's seek to be connected and united with other believers. I think something that's worth passing on is for us to be consistently goaded by both of those things. And so if there's something that we're doing that seems to threaten unity, that should be so deeply embedded in our DNA that we resist that. And if there's something that we're doing we're doing that seems to be in opposition to the teaching of Scripture, that should be so deeply embedded into our DNA that we resist that. And so those twin ideas of unity and restoration, to where, for example, we wouldn't consider, well, maybe it's okay for me to go to this other church that doesn't actually consider the Lord's Supper to be a very important thing. Because we just know that that's deeply embedded in what Scripture teaches us. This is a sacrament, even a means of grace, a key identity ritual that even teaches core elements of the Christian faith. But at the same time, that we're not going to pursue something that causes division within the body or even between us and other believers of Jesus, because unity is also something we highly value. So I think unity and restoration is kind of guide rails or guardrails that keep us in place are things that are worth passing on.
BT Irwin:You state, quote, our goal is not to follow the restorationists, in quote. Yet something happens, I think, the more we embrace and study our own history and traditions. Just that act of reading your book helps me imagine myself on this family tree or in this stream. I don't know if it's possible to go very deep into our history and not see ourselves as heir to the restorationists and members of the restoration movement. So maybe you want to explain that goal is not to follow the restorationists and be Campbellites. That's your goal. And yet, in encouraging us to learn our history, you kind of set us up so that we will see ourselves in that in that stream. How do you how do you work through that tension?
SPEAKER_01:I don't think there's tension. Good. Because fundamentally, we are heirs of the restoration movement. We are heirs to them, but it doesn't mean they got everything right.
SPEAKER_02:We can choose what we hold on to and what we distance ourselves from, you know, in the same way I'm an error of my parents. My parents faithfully raised me in the faith and sought to pass that on to me. They modeled for me what it looks like to follow Jesus, and they did so imperfectly because they're humans, they're wonderful people, and I am greatly indebted to them. But it doesn't mean I'm going to do every single thing that they did because they're not perfect people. They're not the ones I'm trying to emulate. I'm trying to emulate Jesus. And so it's it's not about what we've always done in the restoration movement, but it's about what does scripture teach. And and so that that needs to be my guiding principle. But I want to point out that even that very impulse, what does scripture teach, is from the restoration movement.
BT Irwin:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:And so it's Alexander Campbell, I think, would would not say, Yeah, you should follow me blindly. I think he would say, like Paul does, you know, imitate me as I imitate Christ. And that's the goal, not for us to be like Campbell or Stone or whomever, but to use them as guides to help point us to following Jesus more faithfully.
BT Irwin:One of the more surprising statements you make in the book, and this comes from your study of our history, is that, quote, restoration and unity are fundamentally at odds with each other, in quote. This is a surprising statement, and to some I imagine it is a dreadfully depressing one. So, what do you mean by that, and what are good Church of Christ folks to do with it?
SPEAKER_01:On one hand, if we really want to go all in on unity, then the way to do that is to say what we believe doesn't matter. Right, pursuing unity being together means at some point you've got to compromise something somewhere if we're gonna all be united. On the other hand, restoration means there are some things that are right, some things that cannot be compromised on. And we have to draw lines if we're gonna actually restore. So there is fundamentally an inherent tension between them. Historically, we have privileged in churches of Christ, we have privileged restoration. Other branches of the restoration movement have privileged unity at the expense of restoration. Neither of these can stand alone, they have to be joint pillars. We need to be mindful that unity matters. We also need to be mindful that restoration matters. We tend to live in a world that likes to live in binaries, this or that. And it can't be this or that, it has to be both and.
BT Irwin:Okay, so here's the last question. Your book is not, in fact, a graphic novel or comic book. But if it were, if you were to make a comic book or graphic novel to tell one episode or one story from restoration movement history here in the United States, which one do you think would be the most compelling in a graphic medium?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I'm absolutely going with the Cane Ridge revival solely because I want to figure out how we are graphically illustrating people on the ground barking.
SPEAKER_02:Probably for me, it would be the the the separation and reunification of Alexander and Thomas Campbell. Thomas comes over to the to the new world earlier, his views develop on things, he gets kicked out of the church he's working with because he's more focused on unity than they are. Meanwhile, Alexander and his mom and siblings are in a shipwreck, and there's all this adventure that goes with that. He evolves on his own views because he gets exposed to the Haldanes and some others, and then there's this really dramatic moment where they cross the Atlantic and they reunite, and father and son are both really anxious about having to confess to one another that are that their views have changed. And then they do, and they discover that they believe the same stuff, which is just this remarkable moment. And to me, it's like one of the great providential moments of the entire movement. Um, I think I think that'd make a really great episode.
BT Irwin:Okay, get to work, y'all. We want to see those. Luke Dockery is the uh youth and family minister with the Cloverdale Church of Christ in Cersei, Arkansas, and an adjunct professor at Harding University. Dr. Jared Pack is associate professor of history and chair of the history department at York University in York, Nebraska. Together, they are authors of Origin Story, Churches of Christ and the Restoration Movement. We'll put a link to that in the show notes so you can make it a stocking stuffer for the teen or young person in your life, or you can read it yourself. Luke, Jared, thank you for a jam session that made this church history nerd giddy today.
SPEAKER_02:Thanks for having us. It was a lot of fun. We really enjoyed it. Thank you.
BT Irwin:We hope that something you heard in this episode encouraged, enlightened, or enriched you in some way. If it did, thanks be to God, and please pay it forward. Subscribe to this podcast and share it with a friend. Recommend and review it wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Your subscription, recommendation, and review help us reach more people. Please send your comments, ideas, and suggestions to podcasts at Christian Chronicle.org. And don't forget that our ministry to inform and inspire Christians and congregations around the world is a nonprofit ministry that relies on your generosity. So if you like the show and you want to keep it going and make it even better, please make a tax-deductible gift to the Christian Chronicle at Christian Chronicle.org/slash donate. The Christian Chronicle Podcast is a production of the Christian Chronicle Incorporated, informing and inspiring Church of Christ congregations, members, and ministries around the world since 1943. The Christian Chronicle's managing editor is Calvin Cockrel, editor-in-chief Bobby Ross Jr., and President and CEO Eric Trigestad. The Christian Chronicle Podcast is written, directed, and hosted by B.T. Irwin and recorded in Detroit, Michigan, USA. Editing show notes and transcript services by Kinsey James. Mastering, mixing, and sound quality by James Flanagan. Until next time, may grace and peace be yours in abundance.