At the Blue Hole: Elegy for a Church on the Edge

By Jack R. Reese and Wesley Granberg-Michaelson

“Said plainly, churches are in trouble. All churches are, but certainly Churches of Christ. Whether or not they recognize the threats they are facing is a different matter. The future is fraught with dangers. Many won’t make it.” 

On New Year’s weekend, 1831–32, two churches came together in Lexington, Kentucky, in what is often known today as the Restoration Movement. Among the churches that emerged from this movement were Churches of Christ, which grew in the nineteenth century and then flourished in the twentieth. At their zenith, around 1990, there were over 13,000 Church of Christ congregations in the United States with nearly 1.3 million members. Especially in the southern states where Churches of Christ were concentrated, it seemed inconceivable that they would ever face their own death.

Like many communities of faith, these churches are now in rapid decline. The numbers are devastating. At the current trajectory, Churches of Christ in America, with a membership of just over a million, will be less than a quarter their current size in thirty years. As they awaken to their crisis, many of them are beginning to see themselves at the edge.

This book is an elegy for those churches. But it is also a story of hope and promise. As from the “Blue Hole”—the tiny, hidden spring from which flows the San Antonio River, near where Jack Reese ministers—there is still abundant life and grace to be found flowing into Churches of Christ, waiting to be uncovered. Anyone wondering how to stem the seemingly inevitable ebb of the fading Western church will find solace and help in Reese’s account of a once-thriving fellowship of churches that, God willing, may yet emerge from the grave into the light of resurrection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Oct 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781467463133

Jack R. Reese

 Jack R. Reese has served as a preacher and missional leader in a variety of churches, urban ministries, and mission points across five continents. He is currently an interfaith leader and executive minister at the Northside Church of Christ in San Antonio. The author of The Body Broken: Embracing the Peace of Christ in a Fragmented Church, he has served as a community organizer, ministry consultant, professor, and academic dean.

Book preview

PROLOGUE

The Blue Hole

Just north of downtown San Antonio, about a twenty-minute drive from my home, under a thick canopy of vines and trees, lies a spring of cold, clear water, framed by a circular wall of stones in what looks almost like a wishing well plucked from a storybook.

The rock walls surrounding the spring form a structure about the size and shape of a backyard hot tub. A small stream flows out one side, spilling through a chute beneath the stone wall.

Joined by the waters from nearby Olmos Creek and other springs in the area, the little brook quickly grows in width and volume, wending its way beneath a charming wood-and-steel footbridge, past the old Pearl Brewery where restaurants and stores now flourish, past archways and artwork, museums, concert halls, amphitheaters, and gardens, gliding quietly among five old Spanish missions—including Misión San Antonio de Valero, which for more than three hundred years has been referred to as the Alamo, the Spanish word for the cottonwood trees that used to grow nearby.

As it passes downtown, the river threads through city parks and neighborhoods and into the South Texas countryside, ambling for 240 miles before merging with the Guadalupe River and emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.

Locally, the spring is known as the Blue Hole. It is the soul of the city, the beginning of the river, the reason the Spanish priests three centuries ago chose to build a mission and a settlement downstream, out of which the city would arise.

In truth, the Blue Hole had brought life to the area long before the Europeans arrived. The Payaya people had lived near the spring for generations. The Payaya were a small Coahuiltecan tribe consisting of no more than sixty families by the time the Spanish settlers arrived. Their staple foods were pecans, which they gathered in abundance from the native trees growing near the river, and prickly pear, which sustained them during the hot, dry summers.

At the center of Payaya life and culture was the Blue Hole, which in their day was a gushing artesian fountain. They called it Yanaguana—the Spirit Waters. From this spring flow the headwaters of the San Antonio River, on which the missions and the city were built.

But the Blue Hole is not itself the source of the river. The origins are elsewhere, remote, hidden. They lie almost 700 feet beneath the Blue Hole, in the expansive underground lake called the Edwards Aquifer. This massive body of water is 160 miles long and 80 miles across. Its waters are used every day in homes, restaurants, irrigation systems, swimming pools, golf courses, military bases, hospitals, and industries, providing life for millions of people.

And it is virtually invisible. A person could drive for miles, eat, work, sleep, and play without any awareness of the immense lake just beneath them.

Unless the water ran out.

If the water level of the great underground reservoir drops below 672 feet, the spring water at the Blue Hole ceases to flow. At 660 feet, drought restrictions kick in throughout the city. If the water level runs too low, lives and livelihoods are disrupted. Plants and animals die. But unlike an above-ground lake or reservoir, you can’t tell what’s happening. You can’t see what’s going on beneath you.

When the city declares drought restrictions, you are allowed to water your grass only once a week, so you grumble—my yard will yellow, my beautiful garden will wither.

But it’s easy to complain when you are above ground and the lake is far below. You can’t see how close to disaster you are.

In truth, life’s most precious resources are often hidden. The river’s origin is unseen. It lies beneath us. We drink from it. We irrigate the fields and power the mills by it. We run boats and barges, carrying freight and people up and down the river. The population grows. Neighborhoods are carved out of the nearby hills and woods. Freeways are built. Industry thrives. And over time, we forget the source of it all. We don’t think about it until we need it or until it’s too late. Until the river runs dry. Until the resources play out.

A person with exceptional drive and energy could go a long time sustained simply by her hard work and cleverness. A business could bask in its success for years, propelled by its innovative strategies and programs. A church could flourish as membership grows, as new folks move to the area, as the economy booms, during years when conflicts are small and failures are rare. As if each entity were completely responsible for its own good fortune. As if their successes were due solely to their brilliance. As if their futures were up to them.

But the difficult days will come. They always do. Drought sets in. The spring stops flowing. Water wells stop producing. Lakes shrivel. Lawns die. Businesses suffer. The groundwater stagnates. The earth cracks. The river runs dry.

But, we say to ourselves, how could this have happened? We have taken care of the Blue Hole. We have tended the stones. We have repaired the chute. We have trimmed the vines and trees. We have painted the footbridge and promoted the businesses. We have walked the archways and supported the arts and funded the museums and cultivated the gardens. We have venerated the old missions. We have built the city. We have honored the Spirit Waters. We have loved the river.

But the source of our bounty is not in the stones. It is not in our handiwork, not in our missions or our gardens or our innovations or our accomplishments or our organization or our programs or our size or our competence or our dreams. The source lies elsewhere, underground, remote, hidden, deep beneath the Blue Hole.

CHAPTER 1

Peace, Death, Storm, and Fire: Churches of Christ on the Edge

History is not a random sequence of unrelated events. Everything affects and is affected by everything else. This is never clear in the present. Only time can sort out events. It is then, in perspective, that patterns emerge.

—William Manchester

Fieldnotes from the Blue Hole

We will begin our story in Lexington, Kentucky, with a handshake and a song, at an old cotton mill newly consecrated as a church house, on a cold New Year’s Eve.

We could have begun elsewhere, at other times or places, because any event has a prior story, or many stories, that led to that moment. These stories are like a great underground lake made up of pools and streams that fill the crevices of the earth, receding and rising until, in a place and a way not entirely predictable, the water pours from the earth as a great spring, the headwaters of the river.

The place was Lexington in 1831, at the church house on New Year’s Eve, when a handshake cracked open the earth.

Here is the Blue Hole. Here is where Churches of Christ began. At least Churches of Christ as we know them today, by that particular name and history and disposition.

It might be difficult for a people who have often been told that history is irrelevant to acknowledge an origin story more recent than the Pentecost of Acts 2. But claimed or unclaimed, the events of Lexington, the story of these people, still shapes them, directly and profoundly.

What happened at the old cotton mill is part of the identity of these churches. Or should be, because if they don’t know where their source spring is, it will be hard to understand where they came from, how the currents flow, how they might navigate the whitewater ahead, or where the river might lead. Because the currents are tricky. The rapids are treacherous. And the future is not guaranteed.

Said plainly, churches are in trouble. All churches are, but certainly Churches of Christ, for reasons we will soon see. Whether or not they recognize the threats they are facing is a different matter. The future is fraught with dangers. Many won’t make it.

Our task is to find the resources that can help us along the way. Turns out, most of what we require is already in our possession. We just need a clear sense of what they are and why they are so important. That will be our quest.

These fieldnotes that introduce each chapter are designed to provide perspective and direction for our journey. I will point out key landmarks along the way. We will notice where the river zags, how the land slopes, the ways the cliffs alter the course of the riverbed. We will need to consult our compass from time to time to remind ourselves which way is north.

Our journey will take us through a landscape that is large and varied. The river’s course is marked by stories both inspiring and troubling. We will see churches who believed peace and peacemaking was their most important virtue. There will be stories about death—funerals of beloved preachers and dirges for failed churches—and more than a few storms, where bitter disputes and shattering disappointments both scarred and empowered a people. And before all is said and done, there will be a story about fire, which may be our least-sought but greatest hope.

Our stories will converge around themes rather than chronologies. There will be some reflection pieces scattered among the stories, designed to cause us to stop and consider where we’ve been and where we might need to go. We will have some hills to walk around, streams to cross, a few wild beasts to avoid, and some interesting excursions to take. We will not be going in a straight line but, story by story, we will find our destination.

So, here are some of the directions we will be taking in chapter 1, the narrative paths that will shape the larger story that follows.

First, we will begin telling the story of the meetings at the Lexington church house. But I should prepare you. This story will take some time to tell. The story is too important to tell quickly. It will need to ripen, bit by bit, in its own time and way. Then we can come to see how that story has—or perhaps could—shape us in our time.

There will be a story about some farmers from Middle Tennessee who began to settle in western Arkansas just a few years after the Lexington meeting. They were looking for land and opportunity. But the first thing they did was start a church. This is my family’s story. My story. We will not dwell on it long. I share it because I am serving as the narrator of our tale, and my story is like many of yours. I am not a disinterested observer. I have skin in the game. I care about how it all turns out.

We will also need to consider what condition Churches of Christ are in today. They have been in sharp decline for more than thirty years. The forecast for the next thirty is ominous. It will be hard to face these facts, but we must. This is not a time for myths and fantasies. There is too much at stake.

For that reason, we will need to stop and observe a funeral. What kind and for whom is not yet clear. But words of remembrance, the heartrending sounds of an elegy for the dead, still linger in the air. Are they words of praise? Grief? Comfort? Is there much weeping? Did the death come unexpectedly? What will it mean? What will it matter?

Finally, we will spend some time under a streetlight. Or, better said, we will try to move away from the streetlight so that we might, ironically, actually see what we are looking for. Churches are broken. Churches have problems. Some of them are relatively easy to fix. Some are so complicated, so stubborn, there seems to be no way out. The answers are hidden—by their nature and by God’s design. Which is not to say they can’t be found. But we will need to know where to look.

Those are the matters we will consider in chapter 1.

I am asked every now and then—more lately than in the past—if I think Churches of Christ are going to die. I will tell you my answer up front. I don’t know. I really don’t. It’s possible. Some things are not looking good.

I don’t mean that the eternal body of Christ for whom Christ is head might die. God has made promises about that. I mean, rather, the Churches of Christ that can trace their origins, decade by decade, congregation by congregation, to the American frontier in the early nineteenth century. Those churches, like a lot of other groups, seem to be in trouble, though they may not know it.

And nothing can be done to help them until they do.

But there is hope. God’s Spirit still dwells among them, even when they don’t claim it. God is still gracious. Christ is still Lord. There are resources at the Blue Hole that could open up for them a new and vibrant future. If they knew it. If they listened. If they want it.

A Handshake and Tears

I finally arrived in Lexington late in the afternoon. My day had begun in the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, in Bethany, at a cemetery, where I had lingered longer than I had planned. But there were still a few hours of daylight.

I cut off I-75 to Newtown Pike, slogging my way through thick downtown traffic, shouting at my phone as the exasperatingly pleasant voice of my map app kept urging me to turn into oncoming traffic. I maneuvered up North Mill Street, past Goodfellas Pizzeria and the Buddha Lounge, to the crest of a little hill. I turned right at the light and slid into an empty parking space next to the curb.

For several minutes I sat quietly—thinking, listening, trying to get a feel for the place, trying to grasp the significance of what had happened here. For bustling Lexington at rush hour this was just a normal day. But for me it was like finding myself at a thin place in the spiritual universe, as if a presence or a people were nearby, perceptible but just beyond my grasp.

It’s not like I had never been to Lexington. I had come several times before. But those trips were different. I had been a visitor attending a conference or a guest speaking at a church. This time, I chose to come on my own. It was a personal quest, growing out of the longing of my heart.

I was looking for where my people came from, my spiritual family. More urgently, my soul was dry. I felt disconnected. Distant. Broken. I needed to be centered again. I needed to hope again. I needed fresh water. I was looking for my wellspring. Perhaps it was here, in Lexington of all places, a thousand miles away from my home, a couple of blocks south of Goodfellas Pizzeria, just off North Mill Street, at the crest of the little hill. I opened the car door and stepped into the sticky heat.

A few feet from where I stood, two churches had come together on a cold Kentucky night almost two centuries ago. Something astounding had taken place here, something that changed my life, indirectly but distinctly, miles away and decades later. They had met here, directly in front of me, at what had been, until a few months before their meeting, a cotton mill.

They had met at the newly consecrated Hill Street Church. They had come to sing and to pray. And to imagine a future.

It was New Year’s Eve 1831. The people gathered not just as two congregations. They came from two distinct streams of Christians, with different histories, different temperaments, different beliefs and values.

Each group faced a crossroads. They had decisions to make, questions to answer. Could they talk to one another peaceably? Could they find common ground? Could they disagree and still work together? Could each group distinguish what they wanted from what was best? Could they worship together, pray together, share the Lord’s table together? Could they, somehow, in the name of Jesus, become one?

For at least a year, some of them had begun to imagine the possibility of a union between the two groups. Several weeks before the meetings in Lexington, four men had met quietly in Georgetown, a small community just north of Lexington, to discuss what might be possible.

Two of the men belonged to the Georgetown congregation that Barton Stone had planted and where he still preached. The other two—one a leader of a congregation in west Georgetown, the other a popular Kentucky evangelist—were associated with Alexander Campbell from Virginia (now West Virginia).

All four men were named John. All four believed, in spite of the differences, that their churches had too much in common to remain separate. Whether the churches agreed with them was still an open question.

John Allen Gano was the grandson of George Washington’s chaplain and the son of a general who fought in the War of 1812. As a young man, Gano had been baptized in a Barton Stone revival. By 1831, just twenty-six years old, John Allen Gano was already a powerful presence in the community, working to persuade folks who disagreed on many matters to at least come together to talk.

John Rogers, like Gano, was a member of Stone’s Georgetown church. He had been an eighteen-year-old cabinetmaker’s apprentice when he first heard Stone preach. A few years later, Rogers was one of the first members of Stone’s churches to read articles written by Campbell. He became convinced that Campbell and Stone, in spite of significant differences in both doctrine and disposition, had more in common than what divided them.

John T. Johnson by 1831 had become a prominent figure in the state. He had served as an aide to General William Henry Harrison. He had been elected to the Kentucky state legislature and to two terms in the US Congress. After leaving politics, Johnson had become captivated by the writings of Campbell, whose rational explanation of the gospel especially appealed to him. He soon rose to leadership in one of Campbell’s churches on the west side of Georgetown.

John Smith, the only one of the four men who did not live in Georgetown, had been asked by Campbell to represent him in these conversations. Smith said he never liked the nickname by which he was known. According to legend, he acquired it while giving a sermon at Crab Orchard, Kentucky, telling the audience that he had grown up among the raccoons in Cumberland. It is often difficult to sort fact from fiction in the life of Raccoon John Smith. We do know, however, that he was an eloquent and persuasive preacher. We also know that perhaps no other sermon in Smith’s life was as important as the one he gave to a crowd of Christians in a church house in Lexington on New Year’s Eve 1831.

For weeks these men talked. And they prayed—for peace between their churches, peace among Christians. Their conversations and prayers began to bear fruit on Christmas weekend when the two Georgetown congregations—Gano’s and Rogers’s church where Stone preached and Johnson’s church, which was part of the Campbell movement—convened for the first time to see if it made sense for them to unite.

These four days of conversation in Georgetown were promising, so they decided to have a second set of meetings to begin the following Friday, December 30. Because they anticipated a larger gathering than either Georgetown church building could hold, they set the meeting at the Hill Street Church in Lexington, ten miles south.

Things went well on the opening day of the Lexington meetings. On the next day, New Year’s Eve, they agreed that two people, one from each group, would offer a speech stating what they believed was the basis for union. Raccoon John was chosen to speak for the Campbell churches. Barton Stone himself would speak on behalf of the congregation where he preached and the movement he had launched years before.

What Smith and Stone said at the meeting and what the two communities of faith chose to do are largely unknown by their spiritual heirs today. The story is rarely told. The astonishing climax of the gathering remains buried in obscurity, deemed to be trivial or irrelevant because of the distance of time and place.

But it should never have been forgotten. Not the words of the two humble men who sparked the moment. Not their trembling handshake nor their embrace. Not the sound of newfound brothers and sisters, standing arm in arm, full-voiced, singing. Not their prayers, nor their tears.

That this story and other defining stories have largely been forgotten by their descendants is tragic, like the early onset of a communal dementia where the long-term memory of an entire people has withered and died. In this case, however, the malady seems to have been self-inflicted, the stories having been lost to them either through willfulness or neglect. If the story were known, if the impulse that brought the two movements together was recovered and embraced, a lot of churches today might have a different future.

The spiritual heirs of those who gathered that weekend in Lexington number today in the millions—by some estimates as much as ten million worldwide, at least three million in the United States. Most still wear at least one of the names by which these churches were originally known—Christian Churches, Disciples of Christ, and Churches of Christ—names that for the first decades of the united movement were largely interchangeable. Over time, however, each of these designations came to signify a particular group, which, in turn, often splintered into others.

Of the spiritual descendants of the Lexington meetings, Churches of Christ are the least likely to know what happened there. Most everything that had occurred in their history prior to the turn of the twentieth century has been stripped from their memory. But even if these churches have largely forgotten it, the main plotline of the story remains clear. In the years after the American Civil War, these people began a long and painful separation from the others. By the early twentieth century, the division was complete.

In the process, these churches began to use just one of the names by which they had originally been known—Churches of Christ, or as some insist, churches of Christ. Over time, some distinguished themselves from the others through parenthetical markers that identified particular doctrinal concerns, like Churches of Christ (non-institutional) or Churches of Christ (non–Bible Class), or through other self-designations such as International Churches of Christ. Each group remains to this day largely isolated from the others.

In recent years, some congregations have dropped the name Church of Christ altogether. Others have kept the name but downgraded it to a subtitle, like the Such and Such Church (a church of Christ). And more than a few individuals who grew up in a Church of Christ have become part of other faith traditions, seeding the other groups with pieces of their own story, like modern-day Johnny Appleseeds planting Church of Christ values and instincts wherever they go.

But whatever name appears on their church marquee, whether or not they claim it, all of them are part of a larger diaspora, a worldwide scattering of churches and people whose spiritual roots go back to the early American frontier. They can hardly avoid carrying within them at least some of the characteristics of that ancestry. The traits are part of them, part of their essence, like a religious genetic code. What they inherited from Churches of Christ may be intermixed with characteristics from other Christian gene pools, but their past has still nurtured within them certain perspectives, a way of seeing God and Scripture and one another and the world, a shared story that has largely made them who they are.

A Trail Where They Cried

My own spiritual journey, as far back as I know it, began in the early nineteenth century, in Middle Tennessee, in a little town called Flat Creek. The story eventually traveled to West Texas where it lingered for a few generations before scattering to the winds. But in between, my family’s story was shaped and nurtured in a place called Corinth.

Not long ago, on an overcast summer afternoon, I drove the back roads of western Arkansas to the Old Corinth Cemetery near the town where my ancestors had settled. Until around 1840, that land had belonged mostly to Choctaw, Quapaw, and Creek as well as some Cherokee, Shawnee, and Delaware, before they were all forced out by the American government, resettling, at least for a time, in Indian Territory, now Oklahoma.

The first recorded White settlers in the area were my family, Jordan Reese and Davie D. Jones. They and their families benefited immensely from the involuntary removal of over 60,000 Native Americans and an unknown number of African slaves who were pushed out of Arkansas beginning in 1830. The Cherokees called this forced march nunahi-duna-dlo-hilu-i: the trail where they cried.

The thousands of people who were deported from western Arkansas traveled with their horses and meager possessions, often walking barefoot through some of the coldest winters and driest summers in Arkansas history. Many died from cholera, dysentery, and smallpox.

Jordan and Davie were surely aware of the Trail of Tears. They entered the land in 1845 shortly after the last of the indigenous Americans had been forced out. What they thought of this tragedy, whether they grieved or were even concerned about what happened, history does not tell us. But they found the land rich and their own futures promising, so they wrote to their families and friends back in Flat Creek and urged them to come to Arkansas.

About forty families arrived in 1847, including Jordan’s brother Sloman and his wife Eliza, who was Davie’s sister. Sloman and Eliza are my grandfather’s grandparents.

I walked among the gravestones in the old cemetery until I found a variegated gray obelisk about four feet high. Sloman’s name was on one side: Born Sept. 24, 1823. Died Dec. 6, 1917. Eliza’s was on the opposite: Born Apr. 1, 1827. Died Aug. 5, 1907. On one of the sides of the stone was the inscription, Charter Members of the Church at Corinth when Organized 1850.

I knelt and wept. The emotional tie was deeper than I had prepared myself for. It wasn’t just that they were family, distant ancestors, carriers of the family traits and name. They were spiritual forebears, the direct tie to my Christian roots, and largely the reason I grew up in Churches of Christ.

Sloman’s parents, Billie and Catherine Reese, had, in their words, joined the Campbell reformation sometime before 1847, less than fifteen years after the Stone and Campbell groups had come together at the old Hill Street Church in Lexington.

Beginning in 1847, my family plowed, traded, bought, and sold. And they established and grew a thriving church, calling it the Corinth Church of Christ. The town, which was established many years later, was named after the church. By the end of the century, a Christian college was begun there, because that’s what these people did, because they believed learning and reason mattered.

I am a child of this heritage unto the sixth generation. Within it, I was baptized. Through it, I felt God’s urging to preach. Because of it, I learned to love Scripture, to pray, to teach, to serve. And to sing. In fact, I was encouraged not just to sing but to sing in harmony. Which is not the same as being harmonious. I grew to understand that much later.

My personal sensibilities about Churches of Christ come from deep inside the story, which likely means that both my love for these churches and my aggravations are magnified. Whatever the case, I consciously bring my experiences and values to this narrative.

My perspective here is that of an ethnographer, one who tries to understand the culture of a people from the inside out, through their own stories and experiences. My task is to look for the instincts and passions that have largely made them who they are, to try to figure out what is important to them and what is not. My desire is to serve as a bridge—between past and present, between scholarship and the daily life of the church, between those who have remained in Churches of Christ and those who have not, between Churches of Christ and other communities of faith.

My purpose is not merely to tell some stories from the past but to examine these churches’ beliefs

Reviews for At the Blue Hole

[deusvitae · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An exploration into themes of the history of churches of Christ as the author peers into what he sees as the abyss of the future for the movement.The author uses "the Blue Hole", a source of water that is pure, as a metaphor for at least certain motivating purposes in the Restoration Movement. After reading I was not entirely clear exactly what the target of the metaphor was: it certainly did not seem to be the twin motivations of Christian unity and restoration of the ancient order; according to actual practice it might seem to be the emphasis on Christian unity which existed at the beginning of the movement, which primarily motivated Stone, could be seen in some like T.B. Larimore, but has been more lacking until recently; theologically, it would best be understood as the Holy Spirit, but since the work of the Spirit has been denigrated throughout wide swaths of the movement in its history, He would sit uneasily in that metaphor. The author, in elaborate and often frustrating prose, sets forth his own story and heritage in "mainstream" or "institutional" churches of Christ. He fixes upon the story of Foy Wallace, Jr., as one of the pallbearers at T.B. Larimore's funeral in 1929 as a "pivot point" in history, with the death of one who worked hard to avoid sectarianism, and the one who would be a major promoter of what became very sectarian, and all in terms of what the author sees as a major transition point in American history, out of the 1920s and into the 30s and beyond. He talks about the challenges churches are facing. I think he thinks he provides some ways forward, but substance on that front seems lacking. I very much appreciated the thesis of how the idea of restoration worked, at least for Campbell: by restoring the ancient order of things, Christians would become unified in the faith, and that is the Kingdom building work which would inaugurate the Millennium. The author's conclusion that restoration is a means to an end, and not an end unto itself, is very helpful and important, something those in churches of Christ must grapple with if there will be much of a future. Yet, at the same time, this thesis really means that the Movement as conceived by Campbell, at least, is a misadventure. Very few if any of Campbell's heirs maintain his postmillennial perspective. Likewise, the call to restore the ancient order of things did not lead to widespread unity of Christians in the faith. We now live in an era when the ecumenical spirit, requiring agreement on everything which was agreed upon regarding the nature of Christ and otherwise maintaining partisan and sectarian divisions, is currently in vogue and has been affirmed by the Disciples stream of the Restoration Movement. Churches of Christ have been known historically for a more ecumenically sectarian perspective, having made restoration its own end. Thus, if restoration is not its own end, then perhaps it is best to sing the elegy of the Restoration Movement and Churches of Christ as conceived of throughout most of the twentieth century. But does this mean that the restoration impulse does not have value? Should Churches of Christ become as the Donatists or the Waldenses?I fear that the author has remained a bit too siloed in his own stream. The reviewer maintains primary association among the groups the author identifies as "non-institutional," and throughout his narrative presumes that we have gone off in our own ways and have nothing to do with his stream in the movement. The author clearly sees great importance in the emphasis on Christian unity. And that certainly is a theme which has been neglected among churches of Christ and should absolutely be restored. We should be as diligent to preserve the unity of the faith as we are to present ourselves as workmen without need to be ashamed. But what does that unity look like? It is one thing at the level of joint participation in the local assembly, and I would be very interested to see if the author's commitment to unity would really survive the test of forsaking liberties regarding which lines were drawn 75 years ago in order to heal some of the divisions in our movement. Can we find ways to accommodate one another in matter of liberty? Can we really seek to build up our neighbor for his own good? Or will we lose ourselves in culture war or inter-tribal partisan bickering? Yet throughout the work he seems to address unity at levels beyond the local assembly. And there has already been great movement in that regard: the Internet. Gone are the days of the dominance of "brotherhood publications" and all of the quarantining, "writing up," and other forms of gate keeping that was a hallmark of churches of Christ throughout the 20th century. On social media I have various forms of association with members of churches of Christ who use one cup and do not have Bible classes, who have instruments in their assembly, and have elevated women to positions of authority in the church, and everywhere in between. If there is sectarianism brewing, it is the sectarianism that has come from various political commitments and the injection of the "culture war" into the life of the church. Likewise, members of churches of Christ are also engaging with those who profess Christ in Evangelical, Catholic, Protestant, and others on social media. They are reading books and staying abreast of happenings in these organizations like never before. And we live in a time when "the distinctives" have lost their salience in terms of witnessing to the faith. Very few seem to care about doctrine or what makes us not like the other groups. The questions seem to center much more on the life of faith and who Jesus is and how to follow Him in the twenty first century, and how to understand things well in a world awash with information. The author's perspective can be helpful, but I do not believe it is sufficient to help us understand the hour and the task at hand. In churches of Christ we absolutely need to ask the questions: who are we, that is, how have we been shaped by our legacy, for good and for ill? What is the gap between our pretense and the reality? How do we bear witness to the Gospel and seek restoration with God and His people in our particular contexts? How can we affirm what we still believe is important about reflecting God's purposes for Christ and His Kingdom as attested to in Scripture without being sectarian in the process? The way the author answers these questions give no real hope for Churches of Christ. If that is the end of the matter, so be it. But even he recognizes that drifting into greater Evangelicalism is not the answer. Thus the questions endure, and we do well to grapple with them and find better answers.