Let’s pretend a minute, OK?
Pretend that you are the leader of a moderate sized church.
Pretend that you are well known in your fellowship of churches. In fact you were once the leader of said fellowship and are largely credited with being its founder.
Pretend that after many “urgent” conversations in recent weeks, sixty five well known leaders of of your fellowship from at least 11 countries and every continent, including many personal friends, publicize a 12 page rebuke (HTML version), listing your sins, documenting a lack of repentance and calling for change.
How would you respond? Indignation? Eager to see justice done? Alarm? In other words, godly sorrow? Perhaps there would be hurt, tears, fasting, prayer and much advice from Godly men as well. I think if it had gotten that serious that they had to go public, perhaps I should consider a career change.
Or maybe you’d fight back, defending your actions, avoiding addressing the specific charges, attacking your accusers, quoting misleading statistics (see today’s post at ICOCinfo) and generally obfuscate the issue.
This past week, that’s exactly what happened. Sixty Five men publicly addressed the sins of Kip McKean, calling for repentance. To put it bluntly, he refused, justifying his sins as God’s work. I’m not sure what happens next, but Kip seems determined to take the International Church of Christ name for himself and those with him, attacking churches for removing ‘International’ from their name. The irony here is that very few ICOC churches ever had ‘International’ in their name. Prior to Portland the only one I had ever heard of was the Indianapolis International Church of Christ. True to form, he is creating controversies rather than doing the hard work of loving people, respecting differences, honoring Godly diversity, binding the wounded and pointing people away from worldly diversions to their amazing God.
As far as I’m concerned, he can have the name and title, since it seems to be important to him. For many the ICOC will always be connected to the flawed doctrines of Kip McKean, which he refuses to let go of, and I want no part of it. What we call ourselves here in Columbus matters not at all. We can be “The Church of What’s Happening Now Baby!” for all I care as long as we’re doing the work of God.
(NOTE: What I’m not saying:
I’m leaving the ICOC. Maybe intellectually, but not physically. I think I left the ICOC intellectually a while ago, frankly.
My church is leaving the ICOC. Not my call, and not likely, as I see it now. That just fine with me because I don’t see any interest in following Kip’s lead either.
Just thought I should clarify.)

I know I said I would be rather quiet for a while, but I just spent my lunch hour reading an excellent article and thought I should share it with you. Douglas Jacoby has displayed on his web site a link to an article entitled Unity on Three Levels for a while now. It is highly appropriate for the current goings on in the ICOC, namely Kip’s calling out the remnant, the LA unity proposal and now the group charged with working out a new unity proposal. DJ covers the Biblical issues and church history lessons far better than I would have, please go read it.
To summarize my thoughts on this current move to a more unified brotherhood of churches, I am firmly against any agreement that attempts to regulate beliefs, practices or opinions. In the 2,000 plus years of Christianity there have been many of these documents and they have contributed more to division among God’s people than anything else. I want no part of such a document and hope that nothing like that results from these current discussions.
I am all for church cooperation, ‘interdependence’ as DJ puts it, and would be in favor of some sort of organizational agreement to allow us to better share the burden of supporting other churches, both ‘missions’ work and churches that simply need help, and serving the poor. It seems that HOPEworldwide is already in place and perfect for the latter, we simply need to figure out the former. Sorting that out, however, is simply organizational. There need be no regulation of belief or practice and adding in anything like it will actually hinder that work rather than help as it will discourage some from signing on to the effort.
Please go read DJ’s article. It’s an excellent piece which I think sums up where true unity starts (between you and God) and the levels that must be built if we intend to be a unified brotherhood.

FYI – Much of this is from the reports of the two men here that went to the Seattle Leadership Conference. I was not there, and most of this has not been published any where that I’ve seen. The list of 9 & the timeline is from ICOCinfo.
Well, it seems tht all the hoopla of the past couple of weeks is blowing over, at least for now. Kip was rebuked by many and several churches have distanced themselves from him. He was removed from his speaking role at last weekend’s International Leadership Conference (ILC). Only time will tell if this will bring repentance and change. I hope and pray so, but like many others I am skeptical. I hope we are all wrong.
The LA ICOC church has abandonded their propsal for unity. Several churches spoke out agianst it, though fewer than reacted to Kip. Ironically Kip was the only one I’ve been made aware of that responded to it with enthusiasm. LA had posted an explination of their reasons behind their ‘call’ prior to the ILC and they evidently explained it further at there. I guess there has been folks urging the LA church to initiate some sort of move to a more cohesive church structure. Much of this was driven by the somewhat disorganized and haphazard third world missions support.
The quick timing and ultimate release of the document seems to have been driven by Kips ‘calling of the remnant’. That seems to be what pushed the LA leadership over the edge to do something. It strikes me how much turmoil was begun over one man’s careless words. The LA leadership apologized for the rush and any pressure that put on anyone.
In the wake of the ICOC shake up of a couple of yeas ago, some third world ICOC churches have found themselves struggling for support. Here in my region, once known as the American Commonwealth Region (ACR) of the Brittish Comonwealth World sector (what a mouthfull, sheesh!), once there was no ACR structure, we divided our missions work between the churches. The churches in Ohio are responsible for the Indonesian churches. Eveidently most of the other regions and world sectors did not have such a plan and the ACR model was the exception. Understandably, the third wird would really like us to get our act together.
So, at the ILC, 32 leaders nominated a commitee of 9 men (Mike Taliaferro, Bruce Williams, Mike Fontenot, John Louis, Steve Staten, Scott Green, Philip Lam, Andy Fleming and Sam Powell) to solicit proposals to move forward until November 1st and then present their proposal in February. There’s no document of agreement, no dos and don’ts, nothing yet but the start of a prcoess. Again, time will tell where this leads, but it’s certainly a far better way to start.
But for me, I’m just glad it’s over for now. I’m glad to put this behind me. It was an unfortunate distraction from the important work of my own relationship with God and leading my wife, family and my church. More unfortunate was how I let myself get distracted by it, particularly Kip. Well, no more. Like my friends Paul and John, I plan on spending no more energy on him. I may keep up on his writings and teachings, but unless it directly effects myself, my family or my church I plan on spending no more blog space on him. I’m reminded of this scripture:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.

Ephesians 6:10-13

I consider myself an artist and a musician, of sorts. I inherited a love for music from my father who has been singing Barbershop Harmony for longer than I’ve been alive. I’ve always liked to draw and ended up in getting an Industrial Design degree in college, initially thinking I would get into Automotive Styling. That didn’t work out, but I’m still in the design field.
For folks who aren’t musical or artistic there’s certain awe for those who have those talents. It’s almost mysterious to them. “I could never draw/sing/paint/play like that!” they say. I disagree, having been through formal training in both. The mechanics of moving a pencil or mixing paint or producing sound or playing an instrument are not out of the reach of most. You could learn to do it. But what makes folks excel in these things is the most understood of all because it has nothing to do with the actual production of the art or music.
In order to be a good artist, the most important skill you need to hone is your vision. In order to be a good musician, you must hone your hearing. Sketching methods, painting techniques, proper fingerings and vocal production techniques are all required and can be fairly easily taught. But if you want to be good, you must go deeper and, in a way, in the opposite direction. To make pleasant music, you must hone your hearing to new levels and directions. To produce good art, you must fine tune your vision.
You see your eyes and ears will lie to you. You look at a picture of a building and know that the walls are vertical and the doors and window ledges are horizontal, so that’s how you interpret them. However, if you look again you might see that the lines on the picture are at all kinds of angles, none of which are truly horizontal or vertical. Note the picture at right the top of the garage door is tilted down and the line of the curb is tilted up. Yet we know that they are parallel and we read them that way. It’s the recognition of that process of converging lines and tricks of the eye that you need to appreciate. The same happens with color. Look at the picture of my black car at right. Your mind reads it as black, yet very little is actually black. There are shades of grey and reflections of blue sky and green leaves and even bright white reflections. All of these things are processed by your mind to tell it that the car is black and the highlights and reflections describe to our mind the shape of the car. A good artist understands all of this and is able to reproduce all these nuances on paper or canvas.
About 10 years ago I played in a Motown Band in Detroit with a bunch of folks from church called West Grand Boulevard. I did background vocals, tambourine and alto, tenor and baritone sax. After playing with them for a while, the band leader pulled me aside and asked me to leave the group. Why? I wasn’t able to hear what I was playing in relation to the rest of the group. We’d be in rehearsal (and recording it) and I was playing along doing fine. I knew the fingerings and was technically playing the right notes. But upon playing the tape back it was painfully clear that I was not playing the right notes. Frankly, I sounded awful, completely out of tune. During the song I hadn’t a clue, I though I was doing fine. It was embarrassing. I had played sax and clarinet for years in High School and college, but somewhere in the intervening years I had lost my ability to hear how in tune I was and adjust to it. I had no ill feelings toward the brother, he was clearly right, I stunk!
As I contemplated this recently, I wondered if there are spiritual parallels to this idea, and I think there is. Bear with me because I haven’t exactly fleshed this out completely myself.
On the surface, Christianity is about church services, tithing, Bible study, prayer and avoiding sin. Many folks look and say “I could never live like that.” But just as the real heart of art lies beyond the techniques of pencil and paint and the real heart of music lies beyond proper fingerings and vocal techniques the real heart of Christianity lies beyond the mundane day to day practices of faith. Beyond those surface things is the real heart of Christianity and only in getting to that heart to the surface things start having meaning. Jesus expressed it this way:

Jesus replied: ” ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

Matthew 22:37-40

Everything we area s Christians must spring from our love for God and for each other. That’s just the way it works. We can practice all the other things, hone them and fine tune them to perfection. In fact, it’s pretty easy to do and it’s easy to get caught up in the mechanics of religion and forget the heart.
In my opinion, folks that dabble at the mechanics of music and art aren’t truly artists and musicians. That is not to demean the enjoyment they get from it or to stand in judgment on them or their abilities, it’s just the difference between a hobby and true artistry. The same is true of religion. Some are content with Hobby Christianity, playing with the surface aspects of church services, traditions and sacrements. They feel good about themselves for ‘being good’ or ‘showing up’ or whatever, but it goes no deeper than that. Are these folks really practicing Christianity or are they playing some other game?
I can remember taking drawing classes in my freshman year of college. I thought I was an artist and to some degree I felt that this class was a waste of time. I already knew how to draw. I can remember however, when I went from a hobby to artistry. It was when I started seeing what was really there instead of what mind told me was there. It changed the way I was able to draw, transformed my abilities. In the same way, in recent years awareness of this perspective from Jesus on what’s important has transformed my faith. Evangelism? Yes, as a part of my love for God and his people. Tithing? How about giving generously to more than just my church, but to wherever the need arises.
Listen, I’m not here to stand in judgment on anyone and how they live out their faith. That’s not my job, it’s God’s. We all are capable of falling into a rut where our faith becomes about the schedule, the dos and the don’ts. All I’m saying is that we cannot stay there. We must get to where we are driven by our love for God and each other. When we do that, it will impact every aspect of who we are. It will transform our thinking, our worship, our prayer, our study habits and our actions.