The Restoration Movement has been characterized by the “Restoration Plea” for a return to first-century Christianity. I’d like to re-formulate that slightly to meet the current need for restoration in the churches of Christ’s present situation.

From Crux’s final chapter:

A historian and friend of the Stone-Campbell Movement recently questioned whether or not Churches of Christ will survive in a post-Enlightenment age. He recognizes that the age in which we have lived has deeply affected the questions we have asked, our approach to scripture and church, and our particular brand of Restorationism. For that reason, he rightly asks whether or not the church as we have known it will continue to exist in an era in which this worldview and many of its practices and understandings are dying away.

…if in fact our questions and conclusions are utterly time-bound and, therefore, irrelevant for a different day, then perhaps our Movement should die away.

…the call to restoration ought to bridge the times and transcend the particular methods and eccentricities of a certain era, even the modern one. This would mean, of course, a serious rethinking of positions and approaches, not to accomodate them to the culture but to approach the Scriptures again in each age, for each generation. It means being part of a church that is adaptive and flexible, allowing the changeless Word to find its voice and its relevance within a changing culture. p241

I wrote nearly the same thing several months ago. Restoration of biblical Christianity is only real restoration insofar as it happens each generation, incarnated faithfully into each new context. To import a church from another era or place is to impose our inventions on God’s organism, and, like a rootbound potted plant, restrict the growth of the movement He is growing. We need, in the words of Pete Ward, a more liquid church of Christ.

May the work begin in my generation.