I’ve spent enough time here pointing out his faults and sins, it’s only fair that I do the same when I see him get it right. From the latest article from Kip McKean:

I am so sorry to everyone who is striving to be a dedicated disciple of Jesus. Please forgive my arrogance and disrespect in the Portland Bulletin articles and in my Sunday sermons, which are online. I do believe there are church leaderships around the world that are trying very hard to restore the lordship of Christ and discipling. Particularly encouraging are recent reports I have heard from around the globe about the great progress being made in: Florida, Maryland, Texas, Virginia, Mexico, Central America, Africa, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. I’m sure that there is even more good news, but these are just a few that have come to my attention recently.
I am deeply sorrowful to all my brothers and sisters in the mainline Churches of Christ who are striving to seek first God’s kingdom and His righteousness. Please forgive my lack of respect and recognition to your efforts for Christ.
Though we are supportive of new congregations of dedicated disciples, let me extend a heartfelt apology to the churches in Chicago, Phoenix and Kiev for giving the impression of a “blanket condemnation” that there were no disciples in them or that their congregations “were spiritually dead.” Please forgive me. I know that there are many “sold-out” disciples in these congregations. I am also aware that every church faces trials of many kinds, including Portland and these new congregations. These new congregations, the Portland leadership, and I would like to apologize for things that we have said or done that hurt you or discouraged you in your faith. Going forward, we will strive to avoid these mistakes and would like to work together as closely as possible to evangelize each city and the entire world.
… Please pray for me and my humility as well as my wisdom and boldness in preaching the Word.

From a person who has felt targeted, excluded and condemned, if not directly then by association (or lack of association with Portland), Kip, I forgive you. This is one of the most humble things I’ve seen you write, and for that I’m encouraged. I will and have prayed for you that you will be humble and you will find a way to use your God given and amazing ability to motivate people for his glory and not your own. Kip, your zeal, passion and charisma is amazing and can do amazing good or amazing hurt. Find others in addition to Doug Arthur who will mentor you and have the courage to tell you the truth. It shouldn’t be hard, I think some 84 of them sent you a letter a while back.
I will ask one thing, however. Please understand and bear with those of us who have been your critics in recent months. We’ve have seen apologies from you before along with declarations of the desire to be different. We may be ready to forgive, but hesitant to trust. Understand why and allow us room to find a way to trust. Most importantly, give us reasons to.

But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.

Mathew 3:7-10

This was inspired by a comment from our minister in his midweek lesson a couple of Wednesdays ago.
If you have small children, or any children (’cause they were small once), you are likely familiar with an establishment called Chuck E Cheese. If not, perhaps you know of similar establishments with cartoon characters, video games, a play gym and greasy pizza. Sugar, pizza and caffeine fueled chaos.
As adults, we look at the inside of a Chuck E Cheese and shake our heads a little. Sure, the kids love it, but they come to see a lame mechanical stage show with large shaking, plastic rodent, hug a strange teenager in a mouse suit, eat mediocre pizza and pay pointless games for tickets they can trade for worthless trinkets that will be broken or lost before they get home. It’s all pretty worthless, yet the kids run around in a zealous joy, loving every minute of it. They think it’s the best thing ever, and they will wail if they find themselves short of tickets to get the chrome plated whistle or the blow pop that we could buy at Wal-Mart for 50 cents.
We know, despite their passion now, it all means nothing and they’ll even forget about it in a little while.
I suspect that God looks down at us and our world and shakes his head too. Sure, we love life, but we run around in a silly kind of stage show with players in poor disguises, trying to hide who they are behind masks of contentment and satisfaction, we seek approval from men who are as fake and flawed as we are and power over others to puff ourselves up and convince ourselves that we’re not fake and flawed ourselves. We run in circles or on treadmills and lift heavy objects for no reason but to make our decaying physique last a few more short years. And we play silly games to acquire little pieces of paper that we can trade for trinkets like houses, cars and HDTV that begin to fall apart as soon as we acquire them. It’s all pretty worthless, yet we run around in a zealous joy, loving every minute of it, or at least we think we do. We think it’s the best thing ever, and we wail if we find ourselves short of little pieces of paper to get the 62″ wide screen that will be obsolete months after we get it home.
God knows, despite all of our passion for this life now, it all means nothing and we’ll even forget about it all in a little while.
Kids eventually grow up and see Chuck E Cheese for what it is. As Christians, we ought to be mature to see this life for what it is as well. Temporary, a shadow of eternity, a blip.
The question is, do we? We don’t act like it. We spend most of our energy chasing the things of the world rather than the things of heaven. If God would pull back the curtain to the spiritual reality of the world around us, how would things be different? Perhaps that’s why God allows things like cancer, AIDS, earthquakes, job losses, accidents, hurricanes, disease and tragedy. These shocks put this world in perspective, allowing us – forcing us – to peek under the curtain.
I’m convinced that Satan spends most of his time throwing the trinkets and concerns of the world in our face, keeping us busy acquiring them or maintaining them so we won’t notice God, quietly working in the shadows, waiting for us to leave the Chuck-E-Cheese games and join him in the work that matters.

Alan, on his blog Christian Unity, has just wrapped up an excellent series on the beginning of the division that now, unfortunately, characterizes the restoration movement. It was an education in where we come from that I am grateful for. From his last post:

Thomas Campbell would not recognize this movement as it exists today, if it can still be called a movement. Will Jesus recognize it when he returns? May God have mercy on us all.
What caused the great departure of the Restoration Movement from the original intent to unify believers? In a nutshell, it was the policy of purifying the doctrine of the church through division. That was the policy implemented by the Address and Declaration. And it was the policy that has driven every division in the churches of Christ since 1889.

The series was inspired by his post on Sola Scriptura that pointed out both how the Restoration Movement was founded on the principle of the Bible being enough and how many in modern day Restoration Movement churches don’t seem to think that the Bible is enough anymore. They add in unwritten creeds and tests of fellowship based on particular pet doctrines, beliefs and practices.
What started as a movement for unity is now one of the most fractured. What started the division? The desire to maintain what some saw as a purity of Christian doctrine, to speak out against supposed heresies. It began a little over one hundred years ago in Sand Creek IL. There, in 1889, a message was delivered that declared some as in and some as out. A few years later, the Illinois Supreme Court settled matters between the two, now separate, churches:

On February 21, 1906, the Supreme Court of the State of Illinois handed down a decision in the case titled “The Christian Church of Sand Creek, Shelby County, Illinois, versus The Church of Christ at Sand Creek.” That case decided the ownership of church property subsequent to a very public and ugly church split. What a tragedy that Christians went to court against other Christians, appealing all the way to the state Supreme Court, over some dirt, boards, and nails. One side got what they wanted–ownership of a little land and a small building. Meanwhile the Bride of Christ was humiliated as the world looked on. And a noble movement for unity was brought to a standstill.

From Alan’s opening post, Poison in Our Roots

One of the things that strikes me here is how we in the ICOC fell into the same trap that RM folk have fallen into for decades. We pulled ourselves out from the rest of the COC and called others away, for the so called purity of God’s church. ‘Sold out disciples’ and ‘fully committed disciples’ were the only ones welcome. How ironic that in our zeal to fix what we thought was ailing the COC, we did exactly what they had done for years. Not surprising, then, that we failed too.
Go read Alan’s series, it’s enlightening. Here are the links:

• Poison in Our Roots
• The Church Divided
• Sand Creek: Immediate Aftermath
• The Aftermath: Daniel Sommer
• W. Carl Ketcherside on Sand Creek
• The Legacy of Sand Creek