Introduction
1. IT BEGAN IN SCOTLAND
   
2. THOMAS CAMPBELL WRITES HIS DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
   
3. THE SPIRIT OF THE "DECLARATION AND ADDRESS"
   
4. PRINCIPLES OF THE DOCUMENT
   
5. HISTORIC NOTES ON OUR FIRST CHURCH
   
6. "LET CHRISTIAN UNITY BE OUR POLAR STAR"
   
7. THE NOBLEST ACT IN BARTON STONE'S LIFE
   
8. LEARNING FROM A BACKWOODS PREACHER
   
9. CHRISTIANS IN BABYLON
   
10. WHAT IS THE GOSPEL?
    
11. THE ESSENCE OF THE CAMPBELL PLEA
    
12. THE DEATH OF A DREAM
    
13. THE SAND CREEK ADDRESS
    
14. A MUDDLED MOVEMENT
    
15. THE AUTHORITY TOTEM
    
16. THE PARTY SPIRIT
    
17. THE BED OF PROCRUSTES
    
18. OUR COSTLIEST SIN: EXCLUSIVISM
    
19. RESTORATION OR REFORMATION
    
20. A BOY LEARNS THE MEANING OF BROTHERHOOD
    
21. THE BUTTING BRETHREN
    
22. ANALYSIS OF LEGALISM
    
23. THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIAN FELLOWSHIP
    
24. THOUGHTS ON FELLOWSHIP
    
25. ON THE ROCKS
    
26. WITHDRAWING FROM THE DISORDERLY
    
27. CAUSING DIVISIONS
    
28. TWO GREAT ERRORS
    
29. UNION IN TRUTH
    
30. ONE BODY IN CHRIST
    
31. UNITY AND IDENTITY
    
32. UNITY IN DIVERSITY
    
33. IS DOCTRINE IMPORTANT?
    
34. THE WEIGHTIER MATTERS
    
35. MUST WE GIVE UP OUR OPINIONS?
    
36. WHAT DIFFERENCES DO DIFFERENCES MAKE?
    
37. THE "ONE BAPTISM" AND FELLOWSHIP
    
38. ARE WE TO FELLOWSHIP THE UNIMMERSED?
    
39. OUR FATHERS ON "WHO IS A CHRISTIAN?"
    
40. "OUR BROTHERS IN THE DENOMINATIONS"
    
41. WHAT IS "OUR FELLOWSHIP"?
    
42. ARE WE TO FELLOWSHIP THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH?
    
43. I WOULD ABDICATE
    
44. A BASIC FALLACY TO OVERCOME
    
45. CAN WE BE UNITED AND NOT KNOW IT?
    
46. SEPARATED BUT NOT DIVIDED
    
47. THE ONE CHURCH INDIVISIBLE
    
48. UNITY WILL COME, BUT
    
49. IF NOT BROTHERHOOD, THEN CO-EXISTENCE
    
50. THIS IS OUR GLORY!
    
51. THE UNIFYING POWER OF THE CROSS
    

OUR COSTLIEST SIN: EXCLUSIVISM

All sin is costly. It robs us of health, peace, and happiness. It destroys churches, homes, businesses by wrecking relationships. Above all it separates us from God, and so we are assured by scripture that the wages of sin is death. Many are "dead" even while they live, and this is because of sin.

The great power of sin is its deceitfulness. We are hooked by it before we realize what has happened. Satan has always used tricks and cunning to do us in, and so Eph. 6:11 teaches us how to arm ourselves against "the wiles of the devil." This means that Satan is fraudulent. We think we are getting gold but it turns out to be all alloy; he invites us to a banquet, but only to poison us. It is noteworthy that Heb. 3:13 urges us to exhort one another each day lest we be "hardened through the deceitfulness of sin."

We do not like to think of Christians becoming hardened, and most of us would insist that this has not happened to us, but this shows what sin, deceitful sin, can do. Sin can and does close our minds to new ideas and our hearts to new relationships and experiences. And Satan tricks us into supposing that our "hardness of heart" is loyalty to the old paths and our closed minds is soundness in the faith.

And so the sin of exclusivism has a halo of righteousness, and if anyone dares to remove the halo by questioning our separatist ways we brand him with some epithet, such as liberal. So this time around I thought it would be helpful to point out what this sin is costing us and not simply condemn it for the sin that it is. Once we see its high price tag we might be led to abandon it.

But let us make sure we agree on what we mean by exclusivism, and in this context I am referring especially to those of us in the Churches of Christ. When James DeForest Murch wrote his Christians Only, a history of the Restoration Movement, he gave descriptions of each of the three churches of the Movement. He called the Disciples of Christ, the left wing, "non­Biblical unionists." The Christian Churches, the centrists, he labeled "Biblical inclusivists." The Churches of Christ, whom he identified as the right wing, he called "Biblical exclusivists."

You may not like labels, but brother Murch (now deceased) was more right than wrong in his descriptions, at least in reference to Churches of Christ. We are biblicists and we are exclusivists. The first means we have an authoritative view towards the Bible and the second means that we suppose ourselves to be the church, excluding all others. If brother Murch missed it, it would be that there is a lot of overlapping in his categories. For instance, a lot of folk in the Christian Churches are exclusivists too, and some Disciples are biblicists, and they are not always unionists. But generally speaking we may have to allow for Murch's categories.

So the sin of exclusivism is the arrogant assumption that we are right and everybody else is wrong, that we are the only Christians. If we allow that there are "Christians among the sects," an admission that often comes hard, then they are to leave the sects and join us, for we are not a sect. We are the Church of Christ, the only church there is, and the answer to a divided church is for all others to become like us. This is exclusivism plainly stated. We often use veiled language, hiding the grosser aspects of our claim, such as the term "the Lord's people," which would ordinarily be understood to apply to the church universal, though we apply it to ourselves alone.

Here is the price we pay for this sin:

1. It gives us a distorted view of brotherhood and denies us joyous fellowship with other of God's children.

If the only sisters and brothers I have are those in Churches of Christ, then I am much poorer than I think. I rejoice that the great host of "the spirits of just men made perfect" in heaven and the family of God on earth are my blood brothers in the Lord, and that I can enjoy fellowship with them all, both in this world and in the world to come. Since I gave up the proud sin of separatism I have found beautiful brothers and sisters everywhere, and what a blessing that is. This ism that Satan would hang on us denies us of one of heaven's greatest gifts, community life with all those that bear the likeness of Jesus. While God sent Jesus to make us brothers, this vicious ism separates God's people and causes them to treat each other as strangers or enemies instead of blood kin. It causes us to accept a sister because she belongs to the right party rather than to the right Person.

2. It destroys the cooperative work of the church catholic.

Satan really sold us a bill of goods when we bought the old line that because we do not endorse all that people believe and practice we can therefore have nothing to do with them. We are not even to attend other churches, except perhaps for weddings and funerals, for we would be "fellowshipping" their error. But it does not work the other way, for we expect others to come to us. Being so right creates strange logic. We read translations prepared by the denominations, we sing their songs and study their commentaries, and even use their seminaries to train our college professors and ministers and their mission­language schools to prepare our missionaries. But still we cannot "fellowship" them!

This journal's theme for 1980 is With All Your Mind, one purpose of which is to free the mind of those crippling fallacies that rob us of so many rich blessings. Here is one of those fallacies, known as the fallacy of division: Because we cannot work with people in everything we therefore cannot work with them in anything. The first part may be true of us all, but the therefore does not follow, for there are some areas in which all believers can work together, such as distributing Bibles, feeding the hungry, and fighting injustices. But the sin of exclusivism cripples all such efforts, separating us from the church catholic.

3. It makes a mockery of our plea for unity.

Mark it well as a fact we must face: a church that preaches unity and yet separates itself from all other Christians is not truly a unity church. How do we expect anyone to take seriously anything we say about unity when we won't have anything to do with him? We cry Unity! to each other within our own churches, but we never reach out to others in any kind of unity effort. What kind of unity plea is that? We say we believe in unity, and yet we cannot even share with others in a Thanksgiving service. An exclusivist can no more be a unitist than a hermit can be a crusader. Let us face the bitter truth: we are not a unity people, and we are doing nothing for the sake of a united Church of God upon earth. Nothing! That will continue to be the case until we quit sinning, the sin of making all other of God's children untouchables.

4. It turns missions into petty sectarianism.

I visited recently with a brother who spent 20 years as a Church of Christ missionary in the Orient. He explained that his strategy was to "convert" those already reached by the Presbyterians and others. Now that he has a different view of the matter, he told me with tears in his eyes how he drove a wedge between humble Orientals and their missionary pastor, even to the building of a separate chapel across the road, dividing believers in Jesus in a pagan land. He broke as he cried out to me, "Leroy, that dear man had been laboring for 30 years among those people and I destroyed his work in a matter of months!" He had me in tears as well.

How tragic that we must export our Texas­Tennessee sectarianism into India and Thailand. We need to examine our ethics when we will draw upon others for missionary knowledge and language study, and then go where their missionaries go, not to work with them in reaching the heathen, but to work against them by proselyting their converts. Exclusivism makes for strange morality as well as strange logic. While our missionary situation continues to be this way generally, we can rejoice that we have a growing number of missionaries who are true ecumenists, and this without surrendering any truth.

I am presently reading the story of Archibald McLean, who was the guiding force in our Foreign Missionary Society, which was founded in 1875, well before the Churches of Christ became a separate church in the Restoration Movement. What a passion he had for souls! He recruited preachers, prepared them, and sent them all over the world. Then he visited all the mission stations, sending reports to the papers back home, which made fascinating reading. He always visited all the missionaries, of whatever denomination, praying with them and encouraging them. He lived a very simple, almost monastic, life in order to send as much money as possible to China or wherever, and he prayed for every missionary by name every day.

I was touched by his visit to Hawaii, where Congregational missionaries had taken the story of Jesus a century before our men were ever there, and with great hardship and sacrifice. McLean not only visited the mission station of these people, but went to the cemetery where the old missionaries of yesteryear lay sleeping, men who had invaded the strongholds of heathendom and turned thousands to the cross of Jesus, helping to make Hawaii what it is today. McLean stood in reverence at their grave, men who died away from home for Jesus' sake, and with hat in hand he thanked God for their sacrificial lives.

And yet McLean surrendered not one truth. A few pages later we find him in India, baptizing converts with his own hands and according to his own understanding. He was a magnanimous man made free by the blessed gospel of Jesus Christ.

Isn't that the way you want the Church of Christ to be today? We can overcome the sin of exclusivism by looking to Jesus rather than to the party. The way out is for you and me to take the lead. The old Chinese brother had something when he prayed, "Lord, reform your church-beginning with me!"

(Restoration Review: Vol. 22, No. 4; April 1980)