We missed it, but who was watching?

Do you and I remember the same thing? I was just a junior high kid living in East Texas. Where were you? Seems like it wasn't that long ago.

Falling strongly under the church's influence and its preachers as my "mother" and "father," perhaps what was passed on to me was also passed on to you. The context was a school meeting at which our preacher spoke, and at which time we recited the pledge of allegiance and prayed the Lord's Prayer. Don't actually recall if this was before the assembly or afterwards, but the preacher, good man though he was, influenced by the times though he was and we were, still, he led me astray. He insisted that praying the Lord's Prayer was wrong since the "Kingdom had already come." The church had arrived, so it was wrong to pray a prayer that had already been answered.

That one curious sound bite in time captures the theology of the time, that the church had arrived and that the church and the Kingdom were synonymous. Mike Cope does a good job of capturing these ideas in a recent blog. What had led up to that, you and I might ask. Our church historians say that there was a collision between the worldview of Barton W. Stone and his apocalyptic vision and the worldview of Alexander Campbell and his rational view of scripture. In the life and times of David Lipscomb, this clash played its way out, and the influence upon salvation of the individual came to the forefront as the church engaged meaningfully in the world receded into the background.

Placed over against salvation was the "social gospel," something that I knew as a kid was terribly, terribly wrong, despite the fact that I was clueless as to what it was. We were doing the right thing by preaching truths of the gospel and encouraging people to become followers of Christ, although it was languaged perhaps more succinctly as "join this church, or this movement," but we missed out on injustices in the world, a serious omission.

We did not do much in terms of feeding the poor and finding the homeless places to stay, and this was long before we could even think about ministry to the addicts alongside the road of life, despite the fact that they were indeed there. We did not speak as to the injustices of racism, segregation, and the Jim Crow laws.

We did not march with Martin Luther King, Jr. Neither did our African American churches and our brothers and sisters in those churches. A lot of people were marching with him, just not those of us from restoration roots.

We were doing right things, but not all of the right things. Maybe this time around we can get the people right, our theology right, and our activism right, to use Landon Saunders' phraseology from the recent ACU lectures.

Maybe there are causes for which we can march these days. Maybe it's not too late to protest for righteous causes.