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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 150: How a church from the 1920s is still ahead of its time in the 2020s (Harold Shank)
How many Church of Christ congregations in the United States baptized 8,000 people in their first 20 years?
Central Church of Christ in Nashville, Tennessee, did.
Forming in 2025, the Central Church of Christ did not choose to assemble in the desirable, fast-growing, upwardly-mobile parts of Nashville. Rather, the congregation chose to put down roots in the highest-crime, highest-poverty part of town.
Backed by philanthropist A.M. Burton, Central Church of Christ activated a dazzling array of community services and ministries that would seem ahead of their time even today. Led by minister E.H. Ijams, the congregation operated from the belief that announcing the kingdom of God and practicing neighbor love are one and the same.
In this episode, Ijams's protege and student, Harold Shank, talks about the legacy of Central Church of Christ and what congregations around the world today can learn from it today.
Link to The Christian Chronicle's archive of coverage of the Central Church of Christ
Link to It's All About God, Harold Shank's book about E.H. Ijams and the Central Church of Christ
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Family and friends, neighbors, and most of all, strangers, welcome to the Christian Chronicle Podcast. We're bringing you voices that speak to ideas, issues, and stories that Church of Christ congregations and members encounter today as they seek to practice the life of Jesus Christ and the places where God plants them around the world. I'm B.T. Irwin. May what you are about to hear honor God and illuminate you. It's not that often that a Church of Christ congregation makes national news here in the United States. Indeed, it is rare for a Church of Christ congregation to not only make the national news, but to stay in the news for months, appearing as a major subject even in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, not to mention the Christian Chronicle. But what once was the central Church of Christ in Nashville, Tennessee, is such a story. If you follow the Christian Chronicle, or even if you don't, you likely know at least some of the basic facts of the story. In 1925, a group of Christians formed a new congregation in a part of Nashville that had a reputation for crime, poverty, and prostitution. With financial backing from A. M. Burton, a Church of Christ member and founder of the Life and Casualty Insurance Company, the new Central Church of Christ innovated the announcement of the kingdom of God and the practice of neighbor love in ways that would still seem innovative even today, 100 years later. You'll hear more about those innovations in a moment. Burton died in 1966, but Central Church of Christ carried on its fellowship around the table of the Lord in its mission in the neighborhood and the world for the next several decades. But circumstances changed, and this is key. We perhaps form congregations and put down roots in our communities and neighborhoods with the expectation that those places will stay the same forever. But anyone who lives long enough knows better. Congregations change and so do their surroundings. So it should not come as a surprise that Central Church of Christ and its neighborhood changed. That's just what happens. In this case, the neighborhood that was once the last place in Nashville that anyone would ever want to live or visit transformed into one of the hottest, highest rent parts of town. The big businesses and high-rise lofts and tourists pushed out the neighbors, Central Church of Christ formed to love in the first place. Meanwhile, the congregation itself aged and dwindled as congregations often do. Young people grow up, move away, as young people tend to do in our mobile American culture. If the community around the congregation and within the congregation is not producing new generations to replace the ones who leave, the congregation fades. And that's what happened to Central Church of Christ by the 21st century. And that's common these days. It's really not news. It seems to be the natural life cycle of many or most congregations in this part of the world. That's something, though, for another discussion and another time. What happened next at Central Church of Christ is an example of a new problem that began to emerge more and more across the United States in the last 10 or 20 years. And Church of Christ congregations may be the most vulnerable to this problem because each congregation is autonomous, as we say, and operates in what many outsiders might call a democratic system. That is, congregations that appoint elders to lead them often appoint them in a process that to outsiders resembles voting. And congregations that don't appoint elders often make important decisions based on congregational votes or what we call men's business meetings. On top of that, many Church of Christ congregations don't have formal systems of accounting and financial controls, human resources management, or record keeping. Elements of those things added up at Central Church of Christ until a crisis arose that made national news. Just before the global pandemic struck in 2020, the congregation appointed a new eldership that announced a new direction, including a name change to Nashville Church of Christ. Like many congregations, it paused in-person assemblies and went online during the pandemic. But unlike many congregations that began to meet again in person in 2021 and 2022, Nashville Church of Christ did not resume in-person worship. As far as we know at the Christian Chronicle, the congregation has not gathered for an in-person assembly at all since before the pandemic. Meanwhile, its building stood vacant and unused. Passers by could see decay and dilapidation setting in as time passed. And that's when the descendants of A. M. Burton stepped in, led by his famous great-granddaughter, Amy Grant, the queen of Christian pop. The family claimed that when Burton purchased and gifted the property to Central Church of Christ, he added a condition to the deed. The congregation could possess the property only as long as it is used for the purposes that motivated the formation of Central Church of Christ in the first place. That is, the congregation has to assemble for worship and carry on its benevolent work in order for it to retain ownership of the property. This led to a legal dispute between the Burton family and Nashville Church of Christ that made it all the way into the national news and stayed there for months. At the time of this recording, the two parties have reached a settlement. The Central Church of Christ building reverts to the Burton family, who agreed to sell it at fair market value. Family members pledged to donate the money from the sale to a new A.M. Burton Matthew 25 trust to fund efforts to come alongside the poor. They also expressed their intention to sell the building to a buyer who will commit to using it for the human services that were essential to A.M. Burton and Central Church of Christ in the beginning. Meanwhile, Nashville Church of Christ retains ownership of two adjacent parking lots and the revenue they generate. Nashville Church of Christ will also receive a portion of the proceeds of the building sale. So why is this story important? For one, because what happened at Central Church of Christ is becoming a common problem at more and more congregations in the United States. As some congregations are decreasing in membership, their assets, like property and even trusts, may be increasing in value. In the Church of Christ community, where a central government does not own local church buildings, each congregation has to handle its own affairs through local elderships or even votes among the members. And when these congregations contemplate liquidating assets and what to do with the money, they are vulnerable to opportunists who can move in and stack elderships or stuff the ballot box, so to speak. More Church of Christ congregations than you think don't even know where to find the deed to their buildings. But more important, this story brings up questions of essence. What is a congregation of the Lord's Church? What practices are essential if a congregation is to truly be a church of Christ? What is a congregation supposed to be and do among and with its neighbors? Over this episode and the next, we're going to explore this story from both angles, what we might call the business angle and the mission angle. In this episode, we're focusing on the latter, as in what can Church of Christ congregations in the 2020s learn from what the Central Church of Christ was doing in the 1920s. As I said at the top, a lot of what Central Church of Christ did back then would still be innovative today. And what Central Church of Christ did back then was not so much about doing. They did what they did because they had a vision for what the Lord called them to be. So to help us get to know that Central Church of Christ story, we brought in Dr. Harold Shank. Dr. Shank is about as well known in our Church of Christ community as anyone can be. He is an author of at least 11 books and a veteran of preaching the gospel for more than 50 years. He's studied and taught at several colleges in our Church of Christ family tree, including serving as president at Ohio Valley University. He is the national spokesperson for Network 127, a national Christian Child and Family Services Association, and he has researched and written on Central Church of Christ because of a close personal connection. That congregation's first minister, E. H. Imes, eventually became Dr. Schenk's personal mentor. So a great deal of what Dr. Schenck believes and practices derives from what he learned from Imes, who learned it while serving with Central Church of Christ. Dr. Schenk, we're so glad you're here with us today. Thank you.
Harold Shank:I'm glad to uh be part of this program.
BT Irwin:Very good. Okay, well, let's say there have been as many as, say, 12,000 Church of Christ congregations in the United States. I dare say very, very few of them ever got a historical treatment that made it into popular circulation among Christians. But the story of Central Church of Christ seems to come up in some form in almost every generation since its establishment. I remember reading about it when I was a teenager back in the 1990s. You saw fit to write about the congregation's history and publish it in Restoration Quarterly. What about the Central Church of Christ makes it worth studying its history and telling its story to Christians everywhere?
Harold Shank:That's a very good question. I do need to say that my interest in the Central Church began with E. H. Imes, that's I J A M S. He was on the staff of Highland Church in Memphis, and I was associated with that church for 32 years. In fact, when I was a young intern, I was interviewed by Imes and one of the elders, and the power went out. And I was interviewed in the dark by Imes. And so as a young minister, he sort of took an interest in me. And then when I became the preacher of that church, he had such a respect and admiration among the members that I had to find out, you know, where he was coming from. He was in his 70s at that point. And so that's how I found out about the Central Church of Christ. And so it was a remarkable congregation. Started October 1925. And it was known for its benevolent efforts. So they had medical and dental clinic in the building. They had a library. They had classes in hygiene and diet and exercise and music. They had pickup trucks where they delivered coal and groceries to people in the neighborhood. They had had free meals every day of the week for decades. They had a job service program where they helped people get jobs. And they averaged over the first 20 years, which has been the focus of my study, of keeping 110 women and 60 men every night after that 20 years. And those were people who were homeless or probably just new to the city of Nashville and trying to get acquainted. So that that was what they called the benevolent efforts. But equally, they had preaching and evangelism. And so they they preached every day. They had a noon service uh every day and Monday through Saturday and two services on Sunday. And then radio became popular. WDA uh W KDKA in Pittsburgh started radio in 1922. And so they they went on radio in 25, 26, and pretty soon they bought the radio station. They had an active visitation ministry. The wives of the elders and deacons uh organized it, and they visited every member in their home every year. They distributed literature one year and a half period, about 275,000 pieces of religious literature, including New Testaments and portions and that sort of thing. And uh they had missionaries that they supported around the world. So it was quite quite a congregation. And the bottom line is that in the first 20 years, they baptized 8,000 people.
BT Irwin:Wow.
Harold Shank:And so 20 20 years is just over 7,500 days, which meant that they baptized more than one person a day after 20 years at the noon service, almost always a baptism Sunday for sure. Baptisms in the middle of the night. So they they were extremely evangelistic, and so their benevolence and evangelism work together. So for that reason alone, I mean it's it's a remarkable congregation. But they had some theological perspectives that I thought I think are pretty unique. They they thought they believed that when you showed love through benevolence, that prompted people to come to Christ. And they they helped the poor, the down out, the vulnerable without any strings attached. There was no sense of being worthy or good enough or the right color, the right gender. And in everything they did, they verbalized the gospel. Every sack of grocery had a groceries had a track in it, and they they would talk to people about the gospel. I was talking to one of the women who lived in uh the women's house, which was uh the old Cumberland Hotel. It held about 110 women, and she said, We we were never told to go to church, but we understood that we should go. And so even in their housing program, people understood that uh this church was something special. And they always started with the basics of the Christian faith, you know, love, joy, grace, mercy. That was at the core. And and strikingly, evangelism and benevolence weren't separate ministries. You know, we in most of our budgets, we list them separately. And we even have different people in charge of those. Uh, but they they never did that. For them, it was hand in glove. It it just it just worked together. So, you know, for 1925, that's a pretty remarkable perspective.
BT Irwin:Was this highly unusual for a congregation to do the things that that they did, or were there examples of this happening in other parts of the of the country?
Harold Shank:Yeah, the the stone part of the Stone Campbell movement had always focused on this combination of evangelism and benevolence. And so, you know, David Lipscomb in 1873, when the yellow fever struck Nashville, he stayed. You know, most people left if they could, but he stayed and uh he drove uh the Catholic nuns to the homes where people had yellow fever. And then there was the Russell Street Church after that in Nashville, and they they had a hospital on their facility, and then along came the central church. So, so you know, going back even to Barton W. Stone and others, there was a heritage here, of course, back to the New Testament church where where that there's that same heritage. Perhaps there was a difference between this church and a lot of the more Campbell churches using Richard Hughes' division between the Campbell and Stone movement.
BT Irwin:My understanding is that when the congregation formed in 1925 in central Nashville, the the neighborhood in which the congregation chose to form was maybe kind of a down and out neighborhood, maybe not the best part of town. Is that is that correct?
Harold Shank:IMES once said that it was the ghetto.
BT Irwin:Okay.
Harold Shank:And I know that that has some negative connotations, but it it was it was a difficult neighborhood, yes. There were lots of poor people and lots of unseemly establishments. It was not the uh skyscraper and convention center downtown that now marks that corner. It was an earlier kind of city where the down and out lived. And it part of it was the Cumberland River flooded regularly. And you know, if you go down the hill from uh where the Central Church was, it gets real low. And so that's where the poor people lived. They couldn't afford to live in the higher ground.
BT Irwin:My papa uh built church buildings uh all over all over the south. And one of his philosophies that he passed on to me for the years was trying to help churches get out of bad neighborhoods. Uh, he talked about helping them get up on Main Street and build a real nice building out there on the, you know, on Main Street in town to attract, you know, respectable people to the church. And that was his philosophy of church growth that he he taught me. So when I hear the story of Central Church of Christ choosing to put down roots in what you know, what people then called the ghetto, that seems to be opposite of what a lot of congregations want to do. So what was the uh what was it that uh made the leaders of this congregation believe that going into a community that no one else wanted to be in was exactly where the Lord wanted them to be.
Harold Shank:E.H. Imes was teaching psychology at Lipscomb, and Ann Burton was president of the Life and Casualty Insurance Company that had offices downtown. And they became friends, started talking in 1923 and 24, and they were alarmed at the way in which many churches of Christ were doing ministry where benevolence was either not done or not done very much. And and so they intentionally decided to do something different. So they got 35 people together in uh 19 early 1925, and they started a Bible study, and and out of that Bible study came a document that they called Real Religion, Real Religion, R E A L Religion. 264 words. We would call it a mission statement today, although most of our mission statements tend to be more memorably written than this one. But it was a remarkable statement because it was it was in that they were intentional about what they were doing. They didn't do this by accident, and so they thought that for the restoration movement at that time, Stone Campbell now, to be fully implemented, it had to include evangelism and benevolence, and they had to be linked together. And they they they believed that the church needed to be meeting physical and spiritual needs. Well, they wanted to go where people had high spiritual and physical needs. They wanted to give glory to God, they didn't want any of the credit for themselves, wanted to serve all people. This was a time of a lot of racial discrimination in America, but that's not who they were. And they were motivated by love. And so it was, you might call it a biblical intentionality that prompted them to start a church in this neighborhood. So Burton was wealthy, and uh he bought two houses there just south of downtown Nashville, and uh On first Sunday in October, they met in the parlor, and Himes preached, and he preached about real religion.
BT Irwin:Nashville was segregated in 1925. It was segregated all the way up into the 1960s. And so are you saying that at Central Church of Christ, that you know black Christians and black neighbors were able to fully integrate in the life of the congregation, even from the beginning in the 1920s?
Harold Shank:It does seem a time of high racial discrimination that they took a different tact. But I don't know how far they went. The data I've looked at is just not complete. But their literature does say that they welcomed all people. One of the stories out of the move uh out of the Central Church of Christ was uh a family from Texas was in a touring car, which I understand is a car without a roof, and they were making their way to Nashville uh for work. It was an African-American family, and uh the car went off the road and turned over something, there was a crash, and a little boy was killed. And so people gathered round. I mean, it was a black family, it was nine miles outside of Nashville, everybody that gathered around was white, and no one knew what to do. I mean, you know, what do you do with this uh black family that obviously needs help? They need to go to the hospital. Yeah, and so the crowd gathered, police didn't know what to do, and the and someone said, someone in the crowd said, call the Central Church of Christ. And so the police put in the call. And the people at Central who answered the phone were well trained, they were at the front lines of this, and they said, Well, take the injured to the hospital, and we will guarantee uh paying for the services. And ask the family if they would honor us by allowing us to help them with the funeral and burial of their child. We we we'll we'll have a way of a plot that that we can let you have. And and so they they took care of it. It was an African-American family, they took care of it, and and after such uh uh deeds, people would start calling the central church a bit angry. Why are you helping these people? Don't you know that they're black? And the people, the secretaries, the uh receptionists, they they they were told what they had been trained, and they said, We believe that every person deserves to be treated with dignity.
BT Irwin:One of the things that I've talked about with a couple of other guests on this podcast is that sometimes our churches think of what we're calling benevolence. These days people may call it ministry or outreach or service or community service or something like that. We tend to think of it almost as a means to the end of evangelism. So we do benevolence in order to evangelize people, and therein is therein do we find the value of benevolence that it gets us to the evangelism. But what you're describing at Central Church of Christ doesn't seem to be that. It doesn't seem to be that we do this benevolent work, and you you named way more than I even knew existed. We don't do this in order to evangelize. It almost you said hand in glove, like benevolence and evangelism are almost one and the same or linked. So I wonder if you could talk more about how Central Church of Christ imagined benevolence and evangelism being that hand in glove, being fused together and in and integrated.
Harold Shank:Yeah, I'm just wrote that piece called Real Religion and ended up writing 11 books, and that's a theme in uh most of his writings, real R-E-A-L, Real Religion. And I did an article in RQ, Restoration Quarterly, about Imes and real religion. And real religion he would define as basically that prospectus, that mission statement that they wrote and what the church actually became. But but he would he would also say that real religion endures change. And that if you function, you know, in helping people and sharing the gospel, that it doesn't matter what's going on in the community at large, you may have to do some adaptation. And and I'm an example of that. Uh his ministry was 71 years long.
unknown:Wow.
Harold Shank:That's remarkable. He started at Highland Church at age 72, and and he was still there when he turned 96 and he passed away. Well, it I mean, for him, it was real religion from the beginning to the end. But they did believe that if you practice sharing the gospel and helping people, that that did produce remarkable results. And and their their story would be an example of that. And I think we tried to do that at Highland when I was there, and we had some remarkable results, grew from 850 to 1500, while at the same time doing a school store that helped 119,000 children. So, you know, they they they fit together. Or, you know, I think about Steve Clover's work down at the Southside Church in Fort Worth, you know, a stately southern building with a steeple, stand in the front yard, see the skyscrapers, downtown uh Fort Worth, but it was an at-risk neighborhood. It was uh, you know, there were prostitutes and alcoholics, and it was high crime. Steve moved his family into the neighborhood. Well, uh, you know, once they started helping people, that church just exploded, got up to about 600. And it's the only the only church Christ, uh the South Side now, the only church Christ I know that when they put on an addition, it was a remarkable addition to their church building, they did it for the vulnerable. And so they had a clothing closet and a cafeteria to feed people and and a place to store groceries, and they did it for folks who were poor. So it really goes back to that real religion, that if you're if you're biblically rooted and loving people, giving glory to God, sharing the gospel as people are willing to listen and then helping with needs without expecting them to hear the gospel. There was never any you listen to the sermon, then you get the soup. You know, that nothing like that ever occurred. They they would help people over a decade who never responded to the gospel. And so it it wasn't that they were serving people in order to get them saved, although that happened a great deal, but they were serving people because that's what Jesus did.
BT Irwin:I'm glad you brought up the the the church building that uh Dr. Clark was at uh Southwest, I believe. He said for quite some time the uh Central Church of Christ building has been the flashpoint in all the news about the congregation over the last year. A few months ago, I was sharing with some folks in Nashville the reporting that the Christian Chronicle is doing on the story, and I showed them a photograph of the building, and they said, Oh, I drive and walk by that all the time, but they never knew that it was built to be a church building. And I think that raises a really important point. That building, the Central Church of Christ building, doesn't look like any other Church of Christ building that I've seen in the Nashville area. So if form follows function, as architect Louis Sullivan said, what does the design of the Central Church of Christ building say about the functions its leaders hoped it would serve?
Harold Shank:It was a building that was focused on service. So, you know, they had a library, 12 uh 12 mil every day. And so they had to have a place right next to the sidewalk where people could come in. They added three stories on top of the building to keep those 60 men over a period of 20 years. Men who had just come to Nashville looked at work, so they added that three-story edition upstairs. They went across the street where the convention center is now, bought the Cumberland Hotel, renovated it, turned it into dormitory for women, average keeping 110 women. They had a medical clinic in the building, a dental clinic. They had to have a place for that equipment. They had a robust counseling ministry, they didn't call it counseling, they called it sharing. And so they had to have a place where people could come in and have some privacy. They had a pro a playground for children. And so their their building was meant to reflect what they were doing. And and they didn't have any interest in making it look like a church because they were interested in being the church.
BT Irwin:The the building itself has been the flashpoint for the conflict that's been all over the news for the last year. Uh, and that's because the land on which the building stands is worth uh a lot more money now than it used to be. And that's an important point because here in the United States, uh, we tend to build our church buildings, assuming that the neighborhood around those buildings is going to stay the same forever. Uh, but by now we ought to know that that is rarely the case. So, in the case of Central Church of Christ, the congregation built its building in an area that was poor. The members of the congregation did that on purpose because they wanted to fellowship with the Spirit of Christ, who is himself homeless and poor, and because they wanted to follow the Spirit of Christ into the practical love of neighbors who are poor. But the neighborhood around the Central Church of Christ building is no longer poor. You mentioned it yourself. You know, the convention center is there. It's a high-rent district. Rich people want to live and work all around there. So it raises a question that more and more congregations in the United States are trying to answer these days. When the neighborhood changes around the congregation, what should the congregation do? You know, some move out with their members to a new neighborhood, some, you know, they kind of build a fortress and try to stay the same. Others might try to change to reflect the new neighbors moving in. So for a congregation like Central, where the neighborhood now is very different than it was then, what should a congregation do when the neighborhood changes?
Harold Shank:E.H. I'm just told about sitting in his living room. He he and Mrs. Imes had a an apartment in the church building. It was originally two houses and they, you know, kept adding and changing. And so he was sitting in his apartment and looking out the window and he could see a uh a honky tonk, a dance hall, and and there were prostitutes on the street, and there was mud wrestling, and there was gambling, and it it was not it was not a nice neighborhood. And I'm said that you know, we never protested that. We never called the police, uh, we never went to city council to ask that they have some policies about this. We just uh showed love and helped people, shared the gospel. And he said i it it wasn't long before uh that Answers the street closed down, and other of those uh organizations either went out of business or moved out of the neighborhood. And I'm said they they just couldn't stand the competition of the gospel of Christ. Nashville Chamber of Commerce recognized that the Nashville Central Church of Christ did urban renewal. They they stayed and they changed the face of the neighborhood.
BT Irwin:I really wanted to have this conversation with you because there are Christians and congregational leaders all over the world who listen to this podcast. And uh I wonder if you could summarize for them uh what is the legacy of Central Church of Christ and what are the lessons that this generation of Christians and congregational leaders uh might take from the Central Church of Christ story?
Harold Shank:I I wrote a book called It's All About God, and 21st Century Christian published it, and it's the life of V. H. Imes, and has a lot about the Central Church of Christ in it. And inside the front cover, there's a quote from Imes. He says, Give God what he wants, our very best, in love, ability, and courage. And so it just strikes me that you know the ministry is all about being God's courageous, faithful, loving servants. And and and this this is a church that at least in the first 20 years that I studied it, you know, really really kept that uh that that that image, that that that that virtue. A second point I would make is uh everybody interviewed, everything I've read, it just the overwhelming issue is humility. Uh this wasn't about IMS, this wasn't about A. M. Burton or A. S. Ward or any of the other elders or the members. It wasn't about the Central Church Christ building. It was it was all about God. And and so there was uh there was a great humility. So you you would never in in their literature see some indication, well, I'm the senior minister there. You know, I'm I'm just a servant of God here. And you know, Imes was at Highland in Memphis from 58 till 62, and he never once mentioned uh the Nashville Central Church of Christ. And because it wasn't it wasn't about him, it was about God. So uh you know it strikes uh you know it strikes me that we we all could use a reminder about uh humility. And the third thing I might say is that visionary biblical leadership is is really important. And so here you have two men, one a businessman, one a psychology teacher, who had had a vision, had a dream. And it was it was visionary, and and they wrote it down in in the little prospectus called Real Religion. This is what we want to do, this is what we want to become. And uh and and they became they became that. That's and and so there was an intentionality, but there was also a vision there. And and so I I think that we do well, all of us who are in ministry and leadership in the churches, that that people are attracted to vision and and God has created a huge vision for us. And and that's a church that had a vision.
BT Irwin:Well, is there anything else you want to make sure you add to this conversation?
Harold Shank:Well, I I think I might add, and and and this is pretty remarkable for them, uh Deuteronomy six. Jesus, you know, knew Deuteronomy well when he was tempted by Satan. He quoted scripture three times every every time from Deuteronomy. When he was asked about the Great Commandment, he quoted Deuteronomy. And so Jesus, Jesus knew that book, and and chapter six is really the core in many ways of the book of Deuteronomy. Uh, and right after the Great Commandment and the teaching of children to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, and mind, there's there's a little section which says you're gonna move into houses you didn't build, and you're gonna drink from cisterns you didn't dig, and you're gonna eat uh fruit from trees you didn't plant, and olives from trees that that you didn't raise up. And what's gonna happen is you're gonna forget God. And and I think that our time of affluence, and I think churches of Christ, our members are among the more affluent people in America. And this is something I wrestle with living in the most affluent community in Oklahoma, is there's an amnesia that affluence causes, and and you forget what we're supposed to be doing and and what God has called us to do. And and so, you know, I I admire IMES and and that group for 20 years during time of upheaval in America, you know, they they kept their focus uh where God was. And and and I find myself forgetting that because I get more concerned about my affluence than about my influence for Christ.
BT Irwin:Well, Dr. Schenk, thank you so much. Since I read Up Close and Personal back in 2000 when I lived in Chicago, this has been an interview 26 years in the making, so I appreciate you for making the time to talk to us all today.
Harold Shank:Very good. It's been it's been a great pleasure.
BT Irwin:Thank you so much. Dr. Harold Schenk is an author, elder, preacher, and scholar who learned at the feet of E. H. Imes of Central Church of Christ in Nashville. We'll post links to some of the resources that Dr. Schenck mentioned in our conversation today. Dr. Schenck, thank you for sharing with us. Be sure to look for the second episode in this short series on Central Church of Christ. In that episode, we'll explore what happened in recent years and how congregations can better situate themselves to avoid similar problems. 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 podcast at ChristianCronicle.org. And don't forget, our ministry to inform and inspire Christians and congregations around the world is a not-for-profit ministry that relies on the generosity of people like you. 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 Cochrane, editor-in-chief Bobby Ross Jr., and President and CEO Eric Trigestaff. 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 Flamingan. Until next time, make grace and peace be yours in abundance.